Prince Alwaleed takes 5% Lucid stake, stock jumps 25%
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Prince Alwaleed bin Talal disclosed a 5.00% stake in Lucid — 19,513,000 Class A shares of the 390,256,808 outstanding — via a Schedule 13G filed July 28, with the triggering event dated July 23.
- Lucid (LCID) shares jumped as much as 25% on Tuesday after the filing surfaced, even though crossing the 5% threshold is what forced the disclosure in the first place.
- The 13G is the passive ownership form: Alwaleed certified the shares were 'not acquired and are not held for the purpose of or with the effect of changing or influencing the control of the issuer,' and he holds sole voting and dispositive power.
- Alwaleed personally is distinct from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, though both sit inside the Kingdom's financial orbit via Kingdom Holding Company — the PIF has poured roughly $9.5 billion into Lucid since 2018, including a $550 million convertible preferred stock investment in April and an $800 million draw from a Saudi-backed credit facility.
- Uber bought 11.5% of Lucid earlier this year as part of a $500 million robotaxi deal built around the Gravity SUV, making Alwaleed the second deep-pocketed backer to surface at scale.
- Lucid's fundamentals remain stressed: the stock is down ~77% over the past year off a $2.37 low, the company cut ~18% of its workforce in June, and it sits under its third CEO, Silvio Napoli.
- The article attributes the 25% move primarily to short-squeeze mechanics — heavy short interest and a low nominal share price — not to any change in Lucid's business outlook.
Why it matters: Technically passive, but layered atop PIF's ~$9.5 billion lifeline and Lucid's 77% annual stock slide with heavy short interest, the filing became a textbook short-squeeze trigger. The deeper signal: a Saudi royal outside the PIF now publicly holds 5%, reinforcing the Kingdom's backstop narrative even as Lucid still needs billions more to survive.
