Billionaire With 30 Years of 30% CAGR Gains Dumped Nvidia, Palantir, and Eli Lilly

• Stanley Druckenmiller averaged annual returns of more than 30% during his three decades at Duquesne Capital, without a loss in a single year.

• Druckenmiller sold all of his Nvidia (NVDA) stock ahead of the third quarter of 2024. Since then, his top 3 holdings have outperformed Nvidia.

• Druckenmiller exited Palantir in the first quarter of 2025 and sold all Eli Lilly stock in the third quarter of 2025.

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Few investors can rival Stanley Druckenmiller. During his thirty years at Duquesne Capital, he achieved an average annual return of more than 30%, with no losses in a single year, but he did not own NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR)and Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) today. We’ll look at why later.

Druckenmiller is a timeless icon who has been on a roll lately, with his portfolio up 9.07% in the third quarter of 2025 alone.

His current portfolio contains 62 stocks.

You might think that his top holdings would be the usual Mag 7, plus a few AI stocks. After all, how can you do well if you don’t invest in these stocks? Nearly every hedge fund and ETF that tried to avoid these stocks ended up lagging the market.

Remember, Druckenmiller wasn’t just any Hedge fund manager. His top holdings have barely any AI software companies and he’s doing well, with his only AI bets being TSMC (NYSE: TSM ).

Let’s take a look at his moves on these top AI companies that he doesn’t own.

Stanley Druckenmiller began accumulating Nvidia stock in late 2022, shortly after ChatGPT was released. He purchased properties in the fourth quarter of 2022, the first quarter of 2023, and the second quarter of 2023.

But starting in the third quarter of 2023, he began to sell off NVDA shares. He sold for 5 consecutive quarters as NVDA’s stock price continued to climb. He sold his last batch of NVDA shares in the third quarter of 2024, when NVDA shares were near $135.

The stock is trading at $178 today, so did Druckenmiller make a huge mistake? Probably not.

His top three holdings today are performing much better than Nvidia, and taking profits and moving into these stocks in 2024 is no miscalculation. Druckenmiller may have found that NVDA stock had become too expensive for his liking and had no comparable upside potential to the stocks he bought.

Druckenmiller has had an on-again, off-again relationship with Palantir. He sold more than half of his shares in the third quarter of 2021, then bought in the first quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2022. Likewise, he sold shares continuously for more than a year from the third quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2023.

He briefly bought 770,000 shares in the first quarter of 2024 before selling 94.6% of the stock (728,000 shares) in the third quarter of 2024. He sold his remaining PLTR shares in the first quarter of 2025, presumably close to the peak price of $120, as Palantir’s rally accelerated significantly.

PLTR stock has climbed to $187.75 today.

While he did miss out on Palantir’s gains since the first quarter, he profited handsomely from Palantir and bought into what he considered “safer” stocks with greater upside. For investors like Druckenmiller, paying a triple-digit P/E ratio to buy PLTR stock doesn’t make sense.

It paid off.

The top three stocks in his portfolio have all performed better than or equal to PLTR stock over the past six months. His largest holding outperformed PLTR by more than 2x, and his second largest holding outperformed PLTR by nearly 3x (up 100% in the past 6 months). The third holding is essentially tied with Palantir’s 35.8% performance.

Druckenmiller has quite a history with Eli Lilly and Company, but we’ll be looking at transactions over the past 5 years. He bought for 3 consecutive quarters in 2022 Q2, 2022 Q3 and 2022 Q4. Then, from Q1 2023 to Q2 2024, Druckenmiller took profits for 6 consecutive quarters as he sold off all LLY stock because the company was doing so well.

He made huge profits by doing so, but in the fourth quarter of 2024, he reentered the market as LLY stock fell from the $900 range to the $700 range. Druckenmiller was a buy for 3 quarters in a row, but finally sold out in the third quarter of 2025, selling a total of 101,000 shares.

The average closing price in the third quarter was $744.53. LLY stock has since recovered and is trading at $1,054 as of this writing.

Druckenmiller may be impatient with this drawn-out recovery and doesn’t want to stay in the company’s loop, especially with the uncertainty surrounding drug prices as the government steps in.

Again, while he missed out on LLY’s gains, his top holdings delivered more gains.

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