Bill Ackman
speaker
1,217 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 3 Jun
Bill Ackman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
There were a lot of stocks trading at basically the cash on the balance sheet, and his business model was buying these things at stupidly cheap prices, and eventually... But Ben Graham made most of his money investing in, I don't know, Geico or something.
There's a book, I think it's called The Financial History of Berkshire Hathaway, and that's for geeks.
Basically, this guy went back and read every 10Q, whatever, he actually went through the filings, looked at every deal that Buffett ever did, and you follow him over a 60-year period of time.
And the vast majority of the value he created at Berkshire was through actually the ownership of an insurance operation.
And what's interesting about insurance is that running an insurance company, you have two jobs.
One is you write business, right?
You take risk.
You collect premiums in exchange for the obligation to pay future claims.
And then you get money up front, and your responsibility is to invest that money.
The vast majority of insurance companies focus only on the liability side of the balance sheet.
Buffett was really the first to focus on actually more on the asset side of the balance sheet than on the liability side.
And over time,
on the liability side if you if you manage the assets of an insurance company well and the liabilities well you can build this enormously profitable compounding tax efficient machine over time the question is why haven't other people done this and the answer is if you're really good at investing you go work for a hedge fund you go work for fidelity you go work for wellington
but you don't go work for an insurance company.
So the insurance company's ability to recruit investment talent is very limited.
Buffett owned half the company.
He was really good at investing, which is why it worked.
So what we're doing is we're, you know, Buffett started with a crappy textile company.
He effectively liquidated it over time, reinvested in insurance, and then invested the assets well.
Howard Hughes is actually a really interesting company, but it's a business that Wall Street has not cared about for a long period of time.
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