The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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…”
Ackman: I really admire Elon Musk for handling near-catastrophe
“Look at Elon Musk. He's been on the brink of failure however many times, and it's, I think, why he's beloved by many, hated perhaps by some, but I really admire the guy in terms of how he's dealt with, you know, near catastrophe”
Ackman Attributes Business Judgment Failures to Distraction From Divorce
“It is, it can be very distracting to be contemplating whether one should stay married While running a business that requires, you know, a lot of, you know, judgment and clarity of thinking, and you know, I ultimately made some, you know, failures of judgment i…”
Ackman: Twitter gave a multi-day lead over traditional news during COVID
“And beginning sort of, as I got deeper into coronavirus, I started using Twitter actually as a news feed and found it to be very, very helpful and interesting. You know, almost having the experience of reading the news a couple of days before You read the news…”
Ackman: Markets overreact because marginal trading is driven by quarterly focus
“The markets generally overreact to short-term information and noise, because many stocks are traded on the basis of, you know, the marginal buyer and seller is a short-term investor trying to predict whether the stock's going to go up or down on the quarter.”
Ackman: 85% of Pershing Square's capital is permanent public capital
“85% of our capital is in the, you know, comes from a public company. And as a result, we have very, very long duration money, and we don't need to worry about this quarter or this year in making decisions, and that, I think, is a huge advantage.”
Ackman: Dedicated black swan funds surged 1,000% in market crash
“All they do is put on these kind of hedges waiting for disaster, and they're, you know, some of them are up a thousand percent. You know, some of the smaller ones are up a thousand percent in the last month or so.”
Ackman: Mall restructurings will convert excess retail into mixed-use facilities
“And so, again, you'll see restructurings where the lender to the mall ends up with the asset. Someone entrepreneurial decides, you know what, we don't need this much retail. We'll make half of it a hospital, medical facility, office, apartments, and then there…”
Ackman: I invest in startups partly to identify potential competitive threats
“And I'm a relatively small investor in, you know, startups and I do it for fun. I do it because, you know, occasionally I make a good investment and also it helps me see the future in terms of what potential threats are coming. That might disrupt either a busi…”