US investor Daniel Loeb, owner of the Third Point hedge fund, has earned a reputation as an activist investor who is not afraid to share his opinion on his investments, even when they’re unpleasant to hear. Whether in letters to investors or in media interviews, he doesn’t spare those companies that made mistakes and lost his trust, but at the same time, explains how mistakes or failures have turned into investment opportunities. He also hasn’t shied away from organizational changes, changing management and in extreme cases, even waging legal warfare.
Recently, however, it seems like something has changed for this New York shark. Loeb, who has been on a journey to rediscover his Judaism , engages in philanthropy and has set up a fund to invest in startups. Consequently, he’s spent less time on fighting, softened his tone toward portfolio companies, and devoted more time to spiritual activity. It seems, too, that the criticism he received for selling tech stocks too early has been replaced by a significant AI acquisition strategy with Nvidia in the starring role.
Above all, the 2025 model Loeb is a man of contrasts: He grew up in a secular home in California, but now leads Torah study groups in New York, invests in alumni of IDF elite intelligence units, and cultivates ties with rabbis, even those calling for draft exemption for haredi Jews. And now, as someone who was concerned about global antisemitism even before October 7, he intends to play a pivotal and influential role in the Jewish world, both in the US and in Israel. During a recent visit to Tel Aviv to attend institutional investor technology conference Jefferies TechTrek 2025, Loeb gave this exclusive interview to "Globes."
Nvidia back in the portfolio
The headlines generated by Loeb over the past two years dealt mainly with his investment strategy, particularly in AI and technology. He was criticized for selling all Nvidia holdings in 2023 and for believing that rising interest rates in the US in 2022-2023 would hurt tech companies.
Today, it appears that Loeb is a passionate believer in AI, especially Nvidia. After only holding shares last year, since the beginning of this year, Third Point has purchased $442 million in Nvidia shares, constituting 6% of the fund's total holdings - the third largest holding in its portfolio.
"We bought Nvidia in the past, and we sold it at a good return," Loeb tells "Globes." "This year, we bought again below our selling price, around the same time that the tariff effect lowered the price to between $90 and $130. I think it was a good deal."
Two basic assumptions led to the repurchase, Loeb says. "The first is that the world is short on available computing power, and the second is the perception of how Nvidia operates in its market [which] needs to change from end to end. If we once thought it operated in a cyclical market where a company launches products, and demand for them is met until new competitors enter and profitability decreases, until the company launches more innovative products, then in the case of Nvidia, the disk has switched."
Please explain?
"The behavior of the AI market is different from anything we’ve known in the past. It now turns out that the increase in demand for computing exists not only for training models, but also for their next stage of operation, the "inference" stage. The use of tokens - the processing units of language models - is absolutely exploding while the demand for AI-powered data centers is growing. All this time, Nvidia has been releasing more and more chips and entering new fields and industries like robotics, placing heavy barriers to entry for future competitors. I'd say this could go on indefinitely, but even if it doesn't, it can continue for at least another extended period. So, instead of profits reaching a certain peak and then going down, they can only go up. Even if the market share falls slightly, growing demand will still overshadow all of this."
You're a big believer in the AI market, and you've also increased your holdings in Amazon shares, but you've actually sold shares in Microsoft, Meta and Google.
"We sold off a lot of things, all of which were sales held in advance of ‘Liberation Day' [the terms coined by US President Donald J. Trump upon presenting his tariff plan in April - A.G.]. Since then, we've repurchased a large position in Microsoft and a smaller one in Meta. These were actually trades we made because we thought the stocks were performing ahead of their time - so we avoided some of the volatility."
In the past, after holding Google shares, you became a harsh critic of the company. In 2022, you wrote, "The mistakes it made in launching Gemini further contributed to the narrative that it would eventually become the loser of the AI world." Do you still stand by those words?
"We're years after this event, and three years in the AI sector is like an eternity. In any case, we’re not currently investing in Google. I think they're doing a great job and that they have one of the best AI teams in the world, run by someone who is now a Nobel laureate, Demis Hassabis. Our decision to invest in the stock has more to do with risk analysis and valuations; we just saw good risk-reward prospects at a few other companies - it has nothing to do with Google."
"A weak dollar is not necessarily a negative phenomenon"
Loeb studied at University of California at Berkeley and then moved to New York and Columbia University, where he studied alongside Barack Obama. That same year, he made one of his largest and riskiest investments - $120,000 in a medical products company - and lost the entire investment. After completing his studies, he worked at several investment houses and funds: Warburg-Pincus, Jefferies and Citi.
Third Point, which now manages $21 billion - of which $9.4 billion is in its main hedge fund - was founded exactly 30 years ago, in 1995, with just $3.3 million in capital raised from family and friends. Since then, it has generated an average annual return of about 13%, beating the S&P 500, which posted an average annual return of 9.7% in the same period. Since the beginning of the year, the fund's return has been 6.8%, lower than the S&P 500 (10.8%), due to its large exposure to the credit market.
What is your outlook for the US economy after six months of turmoil due to Trump's tariffs, the decline in the dollar's status, and the weakening job market? This also hurt the performance of your hedge fund in the first half of 2025.
"In the first half of the year, our yield was lower than the S&P 500, but today we are rising almost as much. I think we're doing well overall. We don't measure ourselves in weeks or months or how many winning assets there are in this year's portfolio. It should be noted that the market as a whole is very strong this year, and that a weak dollar is not necessarily a negative phenomenon, in fact, for global companies, it’s an advantage."
And what will interest rate cuts do to the US market and your investments?
"It's a balancing act. The ljob market has been revised downwards, but less than expectations from the outset and in any case, we haven’t reached the low we were in the Biden days, so the economy is stronger than we thought. True, we may expect to see cuts and a residual effect of tariffs, but I think starting next year, and especially from March, we'll start to see fiscal stimulus, capital goods incentives , and tax cuts and the return we get from AI and its contribution to productivity will also be clear, so the economy will pick up at the end of that quarter. At the same time, we may see interest rates rise again at the long end of the curve."
"I saw how entrepreneurship was life-changing"
Loeb grew up in the coastal city of Santa Monica, in the 1960s and 1970s, to a secular Jewish family. His father was a lawyer - "not a great investor," he says - and his mother was a homemaker. "We were secular Jews in a secular environment. Maybe the food in the house was Jewish-European, with kreplach and kneidelach, - they spoke Yiddish - but we didn't go to synagogue and we went to school on Yom Kippur. Very few kids had a Bar Mitzvah and I don't think anyone around us observed Shabbat," he recalls. "I never encountered antisemitism there because everyone was so assimilated, there was nothing to be against anymore. It was never an issue, and at the time it felt like this was where Judaism went to die."
One person who influenced Loeb as a child was his aunt Ruth Handler, one of the founders of the Mattel toy empire and the inventor of the iconic Barbie doll. "Ruth was my father's younger sister. She and her husband Elliot founded Mattel with his partner Dave Mattson, and the company's name is actually a combination of their names. Mattel was founded as a jewelry company based on a crazy idea they had, using a technology they developed to melt plastic scrap into molded jewelry. After World War II, they made the decision to focus on making toys using the same technology, and Mattson said, 'That's a stupid idea, buy my share and I’m out' - and the rest is history."
Handler, noticing that in the US, dolls were considered only for babies, understood from her daughter Barbara that older girls wanted dolls that looked more like real people. She persuaded the company to create a production line for a more mature-looking doll, which she named after Barbara. Beginning in the late 1950s, Mattel became a huge success, with Handler serving as the company's president until the mid-1970s, most of Loeb's childhood and adulthood.
"I can't say that I necessarily learned lessons from her that I apply to my business today, but she gave me something to aspire to," he says. "They lived in a beautiful penthouse. They had a beach house that we would go to. They drove in a nice car - a Rolls Royce with a phone in the back seat - in the 1960s one call would have cost a fortune. I thought it was really cool. She was the axis that connected us all, the family and the community. She was kind of our matriarchal mother. I saw how entrepreneurship was life-changing and a way to achieve great wealth."
"We’d make 100 investments in Israel if we could"
In recent months, troubling signs have emerged that future funding for Israeli startups is shrinking, with investments in Israeli funds down 80% and a decline in the share of foreign investors contributing to local investment leverage.
In the past four years, the part of foreigner investors in the Israeli investment pie has dropped from 61% to 51%. Does this worry you?
"It doesn't really matter where it comes from, but we see more money chasing deals here than when we started investing here. We made our first investment in Israel in 2015 with SentinelOne, when there were a relatively small number of foreign investors in Israel. I think these statistics are misleading, and you can see this increase in the capital market as well. We started to see a trend like this already in 2021 with capital that overheated the market, and then we took a step back from deals. Ultimately, we saw the tech bubble burst at the end of that year.
"I visited Israel a year ago. People were deeply depressed at the time, most of the hostages were still being held in Gaza and the war was at its peak. Even then I said that if Israel were a share, I would buy it. And since then, we’ve seen a massive influx of investors coming here, certainly on the venture capital side. There is a community of investors and entrepreneurs here who are doing well, despite the worst public relations campaign ever against Israel, and despite the fact that many of them serve in the reserves. Somehow, they manage to create some of the most innovative companies that attract the most early-stage capital we've ever seen."
Still, in all of 2025, you made only one investment in Israel, a small number compared to the investments made here by foreign venture capital funds such as Lightspeed, Bessemer or Sequoia.
We’re not cutting back on investments. In fact, we’re more active than ever in evaluating Israeli companies for investment. We submitted three or four proposals even before talking about price expectations, expanded our team in Israel, and we have dedicated capital earmarked for local firms. The challenge is that so much money is chasing Israeli startups that prices have skyrocketed, and we’ve remained disciplined investors. We won’t make an offer to entrepreneurs who expect a $250 million valuation when their revenues are close to zero. But that just shows you how strong the Israeli market is right now. We’d be happy to make 100 investments a year here if we could but we’re disciplined."
It sounds like we're back to the merry bubble days of 2021-2022.
"The pricing is even higher, but the quality of the companies has improved and the concentration of talent here has also increased. The expertise here in AI and cybersecurity has reached a peak at an important point in the development of technology, and for us, as investors, it’s an advantage, so we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to allocate more capital here down the road."
The industry is red hot and the companies are at record valuations because the big funds are ready to pay exorbitant prices and gamble on companies with no revenue.
"Their strategy is different from ours. Some of the large funds have a very, very early entry strategy for companies at their earliest [seed] stage, and they are less sensitive to the company valuation in the next funding round - the one where we would be able to enter - because they already have a significant stake in the company. That's why I wouldn't call them gamblers. We invest in later stages."
Childhood friend becomes VC fund strongman
In addition to the hedge fund, Loeb also invests in startups through his venture capital fund, Third Point Ventures. He raised funds from outside investors, separate from the hedge fund, and its investments are managed by Robert Schwartz , a friend from high school. Their friendship began in karate class, and then Schwartz, who was a few heads taller than Loeb, became his unofficial schoolyard bodyguard. Schwartz was born in the US to a Jewish family with Israeli connections: his great-grandfather was one of the first settlers of Ra'anana. Today, Rob Schwartz is the strongman at Third Point Ventures, which manages about 130 investments in companies, most in the US.
His investments in Israel are described as "Zionist activity in part, but not philanthropy." Yet, despite his activist image, Schwartz is not seen as someone who takes a leading role on the boards of Israeli companies. One of the investments was in Verbit, where, despite the need for changes due to company management and the development of competing technologies, the restructuring process moved at a sluggish pace - some say a little too late.
"I think things could have been worse, and the fact that we acted decisively-changing management, shifting strategy, and cutting costs helped the company," Loeb says. "Today, Verbit has a strong renewed chance of success and is close to breaking even. Every investment portfolio has a 'problem child,' but do you always know exactly how to handle it? That’s part of the job of a venture capital fund: how you work with companies that don’t necessarily go your way. Where we can preserve our investment, even if the company’s strategy has shifted from what we originally backed, we will."
Despite his regard for Israel, Loeb was not historically known as an investor in Israeli companies or stocks. It was an early investment that Schwartz led in the cybersecurity company SentinelOne, developed in the US by Israeli entrepreneur Tomer Weingarten, and which became one of the great successes that eventually led Loeb to open an office in Israel.
Along with other investors, Schwartz led a $25 million investment round in SentinelOne in 2015 at a $100 million valuation, according to PitchBook, and benefitted greatly from the IPO when it raised $1.2 billion at nearly $9 billion company value. The company is currently trading at of $6.1 billion market cap, which is lower than the IPO, but still represents an increase in value relative to the initial investment. Third Point exercised hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stocks, and gained a more than 100x return on its investment. The fund has also recorded handsome exits on the Palantir, Lyft and SoFi IPOs.
Not all of Third Point Ventures investments have been successful, and unlike the hedge fund that Loeb manages directly, it can't enter and exit its investments at a moment’s notice. Capital investments in private companies require years of sitting on the board of directors, and selling shares in such companies is a long and lengthy process, especially if the company encounters difficulties. For example, it invested in DiDi, the Chinese ride-hailing, taxi service and delivery company which clashed with the Chinese government and declined in value, and in crypto company FTX, which collapsed after widely reported revelations of massive fraud.
In early 2022, Loeb and Schwartz recruited Sapir Harosh , then an investment manager at Pitango and active in the 8200 alumni organization, where Loeb is a donor, to establish Third Point’s first representative office in Israel. The Israeli VC investments include NextSilicon, an AI chip startup founded by Elad Raz that competes with Nvidia. "If we’re lucky enough to get a slice of Nvidia's share in the AI market, we’ll create tremendous value," says Schwartz; Trulion, an AI-powered accounting platform that automates financial workflows; Grip Security, a cybersecurity company that became Harosh's first investment for the fund; and Zenity, a cybersecurity company for AI agents that was ranked on this year’s Globes ten most promising startups list. This year, Third Point’s only investment so far is in Unframe, cofounded by Shay Levi , of Noname Security, developer of a user-friendly API security platform that was sold to Akamai for $500 million.
Everyone claims to do AI, but few companies truly deal in it. As an investor, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
"That’s a great question, because many times, behind companies in this field lie nothing more than matters related to data analysis or business processes, and not machine learning, for example. If you're processing data using OpenAI or Anthropic and reselling it, you're probably in a market that doesn't have significant barriers to entry and you won't be able to protect your business from competition that will hurt profitability and the unique value you offer, unless you're first and working fast to capture a significant market share. We'll need more than that to invest in your company, and for you to have a more substantial engagement in the field - whether it's through vertical specialization, for example, with proprietary information, or a horizontal core process."
Loeb's response to antisemitism in academia
Loeb was active against antisemitism in the US even before October 7. He had even planned to host a symposium on the subject at his home with Disney CEO Bob Iger, actor Chris Pine, and journalist Bari Weiss a few days before the massacre; the event was postponed to late October.
On October 7, Loeb says, "I was in a state of shock and pain, numbness. I was abroad but immediately returned home to be with my family and slowly began to connect with friends and acquaintances. This was the immediate effect of October 7: a spontaneous reaching out between New York Jews."
Like many other Jews who had studied at the prestigious institution, Loeb was horrified to see how the Columbia University campus had become one of the largest and most vocal centers of anti-Israel protests in the US. After the massacre, in parallel with the huge demonstrations that broke into the university's offices, Loeb told the "New York Post" that the anti-Israel riots might change his criteria for accepting candidates for jobs at his hedge fund. The decision led him to give preference to graduates of pro-Jewish campuses, such as Yeshiva University, University of Florida and Emory University, over long-standing institutions that did not fight antisemitism, such as Harvard, Yale and MIT.
You were one of the first to come out against the demonstrations on campuses about two years ago, the most prominent of which was in Columbia, where you studied.
"I think it's clear from the way the protests were conducted on campuses that it was organized in advance. You saw it on the signs, the leaflets that came out, the advance preparations. The other side has been preparing for this narrative shift for 20 or 30 years by infiltrating our universities, our politics, our curriculum from kindergarten to high school. It may be counterintuitive to think that such a barbaric act could be used to your advantage but they have managed to do it. And they were able to do it out of decades of ideology that they perpetuated, its link to Marxism, and the recruitment of lecturers who in turn influenced these students. Later on, they’ve excelled at using social media to recruit people who are vulnerable to these messages and flooded them with false information."
The demonstrations are down, but we have lost the young Americans. A recent poll shows that 60% of Gen Z support Hamas.
"Americans are broadly supportive of Israel and there are also populations with very high support rates such as conservative Christians and Republicans, but you're right that there's a problem. One problem is that even among Jews there are many opponents of Israel - the Jewish community in the US is very divided among itself.
What can Israel do to improve its public diplomacy profile in the world?
"I think it's incredibly complicated. Everyone has opinions about these things and they think they can do more, but it's hard. Look at the numbers: 16 million Jews in the world of whom perhaps only eight million are actually involved compared with a few billion, not just Muslims but people in general who are anti-Israel. The odds against us are just piling up."
Loeb's pro-Israel activism is not new, but it gained public prominence last year after an article in the "Washington Post" described his participation in a WhatsApp group about Israeli hasbara, alongside other Jewish businessmen such as Len Blavatnik, Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, brother of Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Loeb, who even before the war had been deepening his knowledge and faith in Judaism , sees the massacre and the subsequent war as a spiritual challenge. "Exactly a year earlier, on Simchat Torah in 2022, I began to study Torah. I was really looking forward to this date to mark the occasion with an exciting ceremony of a new reading."
Before the war, Loeb, together with Chabad, launched the "Simchat Torah Challenge," a US-wide Torah study group that currently numbers more than 20,000 people. "After October 7, Torah study groups spontaneously grew from a handful to a few dozen and then hundreds. People understand who they are and what they are working against - antisemitism and Jew-hatred, what happened on that terrible Saturday, what’s happening on campuses. Only a few have ever read Torah before, if at all, and yet, this is our way of honoring those who were murdered on Simchat Torah."
The spiritual awakening: "It began with the Shema"
Loeb's spiritual awakening begins with the illustrious roots he discovered about his own family that connect him to some of the most prominent Hassidic rabbis of late European Jewry. Loeb learned he is a descendent of prominent figures such as Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, Rabbi Baruch Teomim-Frankel, and "Haham Zvi" Hirsch-Ashkenazi, through whom he is also connected distantly to former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Meir Lau, whom he also met on his last trip to Israel earlier this month.
Loeb began taking Judaism more seriously during the Covid pandemic, when he heard about the Aleph Institute. Initiated by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Aleph works for humane punishment and incarceration in the US justice system and serves the religious needs of Jewish men and women in prison. The founder and executive director, Rabbi Sholom Ber Lipskar, contracted Covid in March 2020. "I asked him, is there anything I can do for you? Would you like me to donate to your synagogue?" says Loeb, "and he asked me to recite the Shema for him. I explained to him that I didn't really know how, so he had his son call me the next day and pray with me. It started with reciting the Shema together, continued to the siddur and then tefillin. Today I put on tefillin every day."
The friendship between the two and intensive Torah studies have become a Torah studies project, and since then Loeb has been an enthusiastic supporter of Beit Chabad and Hillel activities on US campuses, to create after-school Jewish frameworks for students. He also supports the N7 Initiative, which encourages joint investments by Israeli and Arab companies as part of the Abraham Accords. He is also a donor to Startup Nation Central which promotes policies to advance Israeli high-tech, co-founded by lead donor Paul E. Singer and headed by former Israel Innovation Authority chairman Avi Hasson. In addition, Loeb is a significant donor to the National Black Empowerment Council, an organization that fosters Black-Jewish alliances in the US.
His visit to Israel at the beginning of the month included a meeting with former Chief Rabbi Meir Lau as well as Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef. Loeb is familiar with the spirited debate surrounding conscription, and Rabbi Yosef’s involvement. "I try to stay out of the political discourse in Israel, but I think it's an internal issue that Israel needs to solve," he says. "It is clear that the situation you’re in right now is unsustainable and unfair. I think we need to find a better solution than the existing one, but I'll leave that to the politicians and rabbis."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 28, 2025.
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