NEW YORK — Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC, reported owning nearly 1.2 million shares of Vista Energy SAB at the end of the second quarter, valued at approximately $76 million as of June 30, according to a regulatory filing with the SEC on Friday. Vista is now the fund's second-largest holding, trailing only Amazon, and is the only non-U.S. company listed among its disclosed positions.
Thiel Macro's stake signals high conviction rather than a passive allocation, with Vista standing out as the sole international equity in a portfolio otherwise anchored in U.S. names.
Vista was founded in 2017 by Miguel Galuccio, who previously led the first drilling operations into Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale basin while running a state-owned energy company. Under his leadership, Vista has grown to produce the equivalent of about 160,000 barrels of oil and gas per day. Roughly 70 percent of that output goes to export markets, making Vista the country's top crude exporter by volume.
Vaca Muerta, the shale formation underlying Patagonia, has moved from speculative promise to measurable production. Argentine output from the basin has now surpassed 1 million barrels per day, a threshold that had long been contested by skeptics of the formation's commercial viability. That milestone is drawing serious capital from outside Argentina's borders.
Vista has also made acquisitions over the past two years to expand its production base, and it holds a stake in the VMOS shale oil pipeline and port project. That infrastructure, currently under construction, is scheduled to be operational next year. When complete, it will allow Argentina to ship significantly larger volumes of crude to international buyers, removing a bottleneck that has capped export revenue despite rising output.
Thiel's financial interest in Argentina sits alongside a visible personal presence in the country. He purchased a mansion in Buenos Aires, has spent time there this year and was spotted at a neighborhood chess club in the capital. In April, he met with President Javier Milei at the presidential residence. Milei said Thiel asked specifically about the probability that Milei's economic reforms would hold and about the country's wealth tax policies.
Milei has positioned Argentina as a free-market experiment after roughly two decades of heavy state intervention in the economy. Since taking office, his administration has reopened international capital markets to Argentine energy companies, which had been effectively shut out. That policy shift has driven infrastructure investment, including pipeline projects and port expansions that directly benefit producers like Vista.
Thiel is not the only outside investor taking a position. Chevron Corp has increased its presence in the Vaca Muerta basin, and Harold Hamm—the Oklahoma-based oil billionaire who built Continental Resources on U.S. shale—has entered Argentina as well. The convergence of established U.S. energy players and tech-adjacent capital into the same basin reflects a broader reassessment of Argentine political and regulatory risk under Milei.
A spokesman for Thiel did not respond to a request for comment by Saturday. Vista Energy trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker VIST. The fund's SEC filing covering the second quarter was submitted Friday and covers positions as of June 30.
The VMOS pipeline is the clearest near-term catalyst for Vista's export revenue. With Argentine crude production already past 1 million barrels per day and infrastructure previously constraining how much of that volume could reach global markets, the project's completion next year removes a binding constraint on monetization. Vista's stake in that pipeline gives it direct financial exposure to the throughput upside, not just the upstream production gains.
Thiel's position—$76 million concentrated in a single non-U.S. equity, ranked second only to Amazon in his disclosed holdings—is a direct bet on Milei's reform durability. The questions Thiel raised in his April meeting with the president, specifically about whether the reforms would be sustained and about wealth taxes, are the same variables that determine whether Vista's production growth translates into returns for foreign capital holders.
