D.E. Shaw & Co. more than doubled its stake in Rivian in the second quarter, buying 12,203,342 Class A shares as the stock rose 15.3%.
The New York-based investment firm held 20,832,777 Class A shares on June 30, up 141.4% from March 31, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission last Friday.
The stake was valued at $361.4 million, up from $129.9 million. The purchase carried D.E. Shaw into Rivian‘s ten largest institutional holders.
D.E. Shaw & Co. left its remaining $5,000,000 of Rivian convertible notes unchanged over the quarter, having dismantled a $134,026,000 bond position three months earlier.
The Q2 Purchase
Rivian issued about 82.4 million new Class A shares during the quarter, taking in $1.0 billion from Volkswagen AG on April 30 and about $300 million from an affiliate of Uber Technologies Inc. days later.
Measured against those enlarged share counts, D.E. Shaw’s stake rose to roughly 1.56% of the company from about 0.69%, an increase of about 127% in proportional terms.
The position is now the firm’s largest in Rivian in at least three quarters, standing 52.6% above where it was at the end of December.
The holding sits behind State Street Corp.’s 22,396,819 shares and ahead of Uber’s own 19,553,911 on Rivian‘s register.
Among managers that had filed second-quarter reports, Amazon is the largest at 158,363,834 shares, unchanged over the quarter, followed by BlackRock Inc. at 56,419,011 after a 4.5% increase and Baillie Gifford & Co. at 43,210,348 after a 1.4% reduction.
Vanguard Group reports through separate entities that each file their own holdings.
Citigroup cut its Rivian position 29.4% over the quarter, and IMC-Chicago exited the stock entirely while raising its Nio and XPeng bets.
Volkswagen holds more than any 13F filer at 209,769,645 shares, or 15.90% of the class, but reports on Schedule 13G rather than Form 13F and does not appear in the same table.
The Options
Calls referencing 5,137,800 shares at the end of March edged up 4.9% to 5,389,700 by June 30.
Puts were cut by two thirds over the same three months, to 50,000 shares from 150,000.
Against a common holding of more than 20 million shares, the put line now references 0.2% of the position.
The call line references about a quarter of it.
How The Position Got Here
The second-quarter buying followed a quarter in which D.E. Shaw sold almost everything it held in Rivian.
The common holding fell 36.8% between January and March, to 8,629,435 shares from 13,654,764, while calls dropped 40.3% and puts 94.2%.
The bonds went too. D.E. Shaw held $103,476,000 of Rivian’s 4.625% notes due 2029 and $30,550,000 of its 3.625% notes due 2030 at the end of December.
By March 31 the 2029 position was gone entirely and the 2030 position had been cut 83.6%, to $5,000,000.
That $5,000,000 was still there on June 30, unchanged.
The combined principal fell to $5,000,000 from $134,026,000 in a single quarter, a reduction of 96.3%.
Rivian priced the 2029 notes in March 2023 at $1.3 billion, with a conversion price of about $20.13 a share, and the 2030 notes in October 2023 at $1.5 billion, converting at about $23.29.
The bonds D.E. Shaw sold had been marked well above par.
The 2029 notes stood at 125.62 cents on the dollar at the end of December, when Rivian closed the year at $19.71.
The 2030 notes were marked at 112.27 cents at that point, fell to 95.92 cents by March 31 as the stock dropped 23.6%, and recovered to 107.12 cents by the end of June.
Rivian’s Quarter
Rivian began customer deliveries of the R2 on June 9, its first vehicle priced below $50,000.
The company produced 12,613 vehicles and delivered 12,194 in the quarter, against an outlook of 9,000 to 11,000, and raised its full-year delivery guidance to a range of 65,000 to 70,000 from 62,000 to 67,000.
Revenue reached $1.658 billion, a 27% increase from a year earlier, with gross profit of $179 million and a net loss of $837 million, narrowed from $1.115 billion.
The commercial van program built for Amazon passed one billion miles during the period, with more than 40,000 vans in service, and Rivian added a rare van customer outside Amazon in June.
Rivian ended the quarter with $5.310 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments.
The 2029 notes D.E. Shaw exited became redeemable at Rivian’s option from March 20, 2026, though only if the shares trade above 130% of the $20.13 conversion price for a set period, a level the stock has not approached.
The company sold a further 86.25 million Class A shares in a follow-on offering in July, raising net proceeds of about $1.317 billion and lifting pro forma liquidity to $7.163 billion.
That sale closed after June 30 and sits outside every second-quarter filing, including this one.
Rivian shares have since matched their longest winning streak since December 2025.
Investment managers overseeing more than $100 million had until August 14 to disclose the positions they held on June 30, and D.E. Shaw filed on the deadline.
