Billionaire Peter Thiel buys 1% stake in Argentine Vaca Muerta oil firm, filing shows

Palantir chair and co-founder Peter Thiel has bought a 1% stake in Argentina's Vista, ‌one of the largest oil companies operating in the ‌country's Vaca Muerta shale formation, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The ​filing, published on Friday, comes four months after the tech billionaire met with Argentine President Javier Milei in the presidential palace, after which Milei told a local media outlet they discussed economic policies and ‌his opposition to wealth ⁠taxes.

Thiel had recently bought a mansion in an upscale neighborhood of Buenos Aires, local media reported.

The billionaire's ⁠Thiel Macro LLC hedge fund bought around 1.2 million American Depositary Shares in Vista worth about $76 million, according to the SEC filing, equivalent ​to ​1% of Vista's capital.

The fund declared ​a portfolio of $418.7 million, ‌including stakes in Vistra, Amazon and power and energy firms American Electric Power, DTE Energy, FirstEnergy, CMS Energy and X-Energy.

Vista operates in Vaca Muerta, home to the world's second-largest shale gas and fourth-largest oil reserves, located in Neuquen province in Argentina's Patagonia region.

Vista currently ‌produces 160,000 barrels of oil equivalent ​per day and has invested more than $6.5 ​billion in Argentina. In ​May, it raised its investment and production outlook for ‌Vaca Muerta, a formation roughly ​the size of ​Belgium.

Milei has expressed his intention to leverage Patagonia's vast open spaces and cold climate to build data centers. Data center ​projects have met opposition ‌in other parts of Latin America due to their ​high water and energy needs.

(Reporting by Lucila Sigal and ​Sarah Morland; Editing by Jamie Freed)