Paul Singer founded Elliott Investment Management in 1977 in New York. It is one of the oldest hedge funds under continuous management and is also one of the largest activist funds in the world. It is the management affiliate of American hedge funds Elliott Associates and Elliott International Limited. Launched in 1994, Elliott International Limited has consistently outperformed the S&P 500 index by ~5 percentage points annually since its inception, which is a track record mirrored by Elliott Associates. Paul Singer earned a BS in psychology from the University of Rochester and a JD from Harvard Law School. He then spent 4 years working in corporate law firms and the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette before founding Elliott Investment Management. Elliott Management has 38 clients and discretionary assets under management (AUM) of $97.37 billion, according to the Form ADV dated 13 February 2025. The last reported 13F filing for Q4 2024 included $16.66 billion in managed 13F securities and a top 10 holdings concentration of 82.44%.
Singer has built a reputation on Wall Street for his aggressive tactics that often generate significant shareholder value by exploiting weaknesses in various asset classes. His initial approach to investing was to target companies and even governments while purchasing extremely distressed debt. In February 2025, Singer appeared on a Podcast titled ‘In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen’, where he also discussed what he believes is the reason behind bad investments. While bad luck remains a relevant factor, he believes that these failures result from oversights and inadequate and/or incorrect hedging strategies:
“Sometimes it’s bad luck, but more frequently it’s (that) we missed something. We missed. Or the hedges weren’t, they weren’t the right hedges. The tracking error was much more than we expected. At the beginning of my career, 1977 to like 1987, hedging was much more simple, because we were long a convertible bond and short the stock into which the convertible was convertible. So that’s very straightforward. And tracking error wasn’t really a factor. We’ve become much more sophisticated in hedging, in creating bespoke hedges for different kinds of trades. But even those don’t work out exactly, you know, all the time. But sometimes, you know, the worst trades, and I don’t mind mentioning them, it’s a kind of a form of therapy and a pedagogical exercise. The worst trades are the trades that you misunderstand the risk. You put it into the wrong category.”
Our Methodology
To compile the list of billionaire Paul Singer’s 10 stock picks with huge upside potential, we sifted through Q4 2024 13F filings of Elliott Management from Insider Monkey. From these filings, we checked the upside potential from CNN for the top 20 stock picks and ranked the stocks in ascending order of this upside potential. We have also added Elliott Management’s stake in each stock as well as the broader hedge fund sentiment for it.
Note: All data was sourced on May 8.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
Pinterest Inc. (NYSE:PINS): Among Billionaire Paul Singer’s Stock Picks with Huge Upside Potential
A young, stylish woman using her smartphone to find inspiration for her latest DIY project.
Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE:PINS) is a visual search & discovery platform that allows people to find ideas, such as recipes, home, and style inspiration. It also allows them to search, save, and shop the ideas. The company offers various advertising products to help advertisers meet users, and an ad auction that allows advertisers to serve ads to users at relevant moments to optimize business outcomes.
In Q4 2024, Pinterest achieved its first $1 billion revenue quarter with 18% revenue growth, which was partly driven by a record number of clicks during the holiday season. The platform’s weekly active to monthly active user ratio also reached an all-time high of 62% in 2024. This success was further fueled by improvements in the company’s advertising platform.
Clicks to advertisers grew over 90% in Q4, even after lapping the initial launch of direct links from the previous year. Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE:PINS) focuses on actionability, relevance, and curation, while distinguishing itself as a positive place online. For 2025, management plans to use AI and its unique first-party signal to drive more personalized experiences.
Renaissance Large Cap Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE:PINS) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“We made several changes to the portfolio in the fourth quarter. Most recently, we added a new position in the Communication Services sector in December with Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE:PINS), a leading visual search and discovery platform with a unique curation function that enables users to find and display new ideas and creations that focus on interests such as fashion and home décor among other consumer goods. Since 2022, a new management team has transformed Pinterest into a shopping platform, providing more value and capabilities to advertisers includ ing direct connection with users, resulting in higher profits. In addition, the company was an early adopter of AI to increase personalization, advertising relevance options, and automated processes to increase ease-of-use for smaller advertisers. In the near term, we expect Pinterest to see monetization improvements with upside to Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and traction in new categories and international markets.”
Overall, PINS ranks 5th on our list of billionaire Paul Singer’s stock picks with huge upside potential. While we acknowledge the potential of PINS as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold great promise for delivering high returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than PINS but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
