Bill Ackman
Founder and CEO, Pershing Square Capital Management · 1 appearance on the record.
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investorfounderexecutive@BillAckman ↗pershingsquareholdings.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Bill Ackman is an activist hedge fund manager who oversees concentrated public equity investments through Pershing Square Capital Management, which he founded in 2004 after co-founding Gotham Partners. He is widely recognized for high-stakes corporate campaigns and macro hedges.
33statements → 8claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.79/5average certainty → 2.45/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 23said about them ↓
4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
4 predictions · 4 assertions · 7 opinions · 11 insights · 7 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Bill argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Ackman: Herbalife runs paid Google ads targeting my name
“Herbalife is still running a negative campaign about me personally, which I find fairly remarkable. The way you can see this is if you Google my name I don't know if you want to do this right now. What will pop up is an advertisement And it, the advertisement …”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Bill Ackman on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Bill Ackman said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Ackman: SoftBank's Mega-Funds Did a Massive Disservice to Startups and Markets
“And so with SoftBank injecting, you know, a hundred billion dollars in marking up the value of companies and giving them capital that they could use to postpone going public, I think it's fundamentally been a disservice to the capital markets and probably to t…”
Pershing Square Bought $2.05 Billion in Equities While Unwinding COVID Hedge
“We'd invested two billion fifty million between March 12th and March 18th at 1230 in the stock market buying, you know, additions, adding to our portfolio, buying, repurchasing Starbucks. We had sold half the hedge for a 1,000,000,300, a little more than half …”
Ackman: Heavy Index Fund Ownership Reduces Market Liquidity and Amplifies Volatility
“Having index funds as major holders of securities in stable market conditions actually reduces the liquidity of companies, and it means that sort of hedge funds and more active investors who are making day-to-day buy and sell decisions actually push securities…”
Ackman: Short Sellers Uncover Corporate Fraud Much More Often Than Regulators
“I give a lot of credit to the folks at Muddy Waters who have unearthed a meaningful number of fraudulent companies, and I've yet to find an example of a regulator finding a fraudulent company. It's either a journalist often being fed by a short seller or a sho…”
Ackman: Some Tesla short sellers crossed the line trying to harm company
“In the case of Tesla, you know, I do think, you know, some of the short sellers went beyond the role of identifying overvaluation and their attempts to actually harm a company, and that's where I think it goes beyond the pale.”
Ackman: Pershing Square held $71B notional CDS hedge committing $500M annually
“And we at the peak had seventy billion, actually seventy-one billion of notional insurance that cost about an average of 70 basis points per annum. So about five hundred million dollars. We committed to make five hundred million dollars a year in payments for …”
Bill Ackman Turned $27 Million in CDS Premiums Into $2.6 Billion
“We ended up spending twenty seven million on premium because we built a seventy billion dollar CDS position beginning in the third week of February, you probably had it completely on by the early, you know, first few days of March, and we started taking it off…”
Ackman: Airline bankruptcies will not stop planes from flying
“Airplanes are not going to stop flying because airlines go bankrupt. What will happen is, you know, the, Owners of the planes, the lessors of the planes, and or the bondholders will end up, you know, controlling airlines.”
Government Shouldn't Offer Boeing Better Relief Financing Terms Than Warren Buffett
“Boeing spent many, many tens of billions of dollars on share repurchases. I do think, you know, if Buffett doesn't want to, the government shouldn't come in on terms that are more favorable than where Warren Buffett would provide the company with capital”
Berkshire Hathaway's Next Leaders Will Aggressively Push Operating Margins and Efficiency
“It appears to us the next generation is going to be much more focused on, you know, extracting the most from the businesses Berkshire owns.”
Burlington Northern Underperforms Profit Potential Due to Warren Buffett's Hands-Off Style
“I mean, just looking at the Burlington Northern Railroad, we know a lot about railroads by virtue of our experience at Canadian Pacific. It's the largest You know, it should be the most profitable, highest margin railroad in the world. It's not. And I think a …”
Ackman: Inability to Short Venture-Backed Startups Enables WeWork-Style Value Destruction
“The market you can't short today is basically, or difficult to short today is the venture backed market. And that's why you're going to see, that's why the WeWorks of the world are allowed to happen and billions of dollars of money gets wasted.”
Bill Ackman: Pershing Square Is Permanently Done With Public Short Selling
“In the life's too short kind of point of view, you know, we're done with public short selling. It's just not our thing anymore.”
Ackman: Top business school students lack experience dealing with failure
“The single most important thing you need to understand is how to deal with failure, and the vast majority of people who got to, you know, Harvard Business School, or pick your favorite you know, top business or law school has not had to deal with failure, and …”
Ackman: If an investment thesis is not obvious quickly, it is probably bad
“In fact, if you have to spend A large amount of time, and it's not obvious. It's probably not a good investment”
Pershing Square Executed Its Massive COVID-19 Portfolio Hedge in One Hour
“I mean, the, just most recently, our hedge that we put on to protect the portfolio, I guess, I wasn't specifically doing work on that investment at all, but I was thinking about the ramifications, for example, of the coronavirus, and then came to a conclusion …”
Ackman: Venture-Backed Companies Stay Private Too Long and Suffer Worse Governance
“Look, I think that a lot of companies have stayed private too long, and so I'm actually a fan of the public markets and a fan of public company governance versus the kind of governance that you've seen, certainly in many of the venture-backed companies, WeWork…”
Ackman: Complex Venture Preference Structures Hide Inaccurate Late-Stage Startup Valuations
“And so the incentive on the part of many of these sort of earlier stage funds is to have markups in the portfolio, because it's a way of showing to your investors that you're making business progress. And I think it does encourage, you know, certain kinds of b…”
Ackman: Herbalife runs paid Google ads targeting my name
“Herbalife is still running a negative campaign about me personally, which I find fairly remarkable. The way you can see this is if you Google my name I don't know if you want to do this right now. What will pop up is an advertisement And it, the advertisement …”
Ackman: Taxpayer money shouldn't save structurally declining businesses
“It makes sense to take taxpayer money and try to save a otherwise dying business. So think about businesses that are in structural decline. This would, you know, likely put them out of business. But I wouldn't spend any of taxpayer resources on them.”
Ackman: Pandemic will force corporate America away from aggressive leverage
“I do think this is a depression era moment in the sense, psychologically, the same way that the generation of people that went through the depression thought very different about, differently about financial leverage, you know, than the generations that came a…”
Ackman: Berkshire Hathaway stock is a real bargain in the $180s
“And actually the big opportunity for Berkshire is Berkshire itself prior to the coronavirus crisis was a cheap stock, you know, in the low 200, you know, in the one eighties it's, you know, a real bargain.”
Ackman: Unlike Short Selling, Long Investment Mistakes Shrink as Portfolio Percentages
“The good news is when you buy things as opposed to short things, your mistakes become smaller.”
Ackman: Herbalife settled with SEC for $20M over China disclosures
“In the last six months, and you can Google it, Herbalife paid, settled with the SEC for twenty million dollars for misleadingly describing their China business and their public finance, because it actually, the compensation scheme is precisely the same as, and…”
The other half of the tape: Bill Ackman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 19 times in 3 episodes on the Knowledge Project. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shane Parrish 9Andrew Wilkinson 8Keith Creel 1Bethany McLean 1
Statements about Bill Ackman, by other people (4)
Creel: Bill Ackman offered $200M when asked for $100M in unplanned capex
“I went into the board meeting, and I said, we have an issue. For me to optimize my service, I've got to run west out of Saskatoon, not east, but I need a hundred million dollars to spend on rail and ties and ballasts, and that was not planned for at all, and B…”
Wilkinson spent $60,000 on a charity lunch to diligence Bill Ackman
“What I ended up doing is I spent 60,000 dollars bidding on a charity lunch where I'm like, okay, I get to donate charity. I get to meet this interesting guy. And my plan was that if he was an asshole, I would sell all of it as soon as we got out. And if I like…”
McLean: Unlike Enron, Valeant attracted smart money like Sequoia and Bill Ackman
“With Enron, when you got to what was commonly considered the smart money, people either weren't invested in Enron, or they were short. And it was largely long-only funds and index funds, and what we think of in terrible terms, but the dumb money that was inves…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2022 18 mentions in 2 episodes 9 per episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #82 Bill Ackman: Getting Back Up | Apr 28, 2020 | 1h 19m |