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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But the music is going to come in a digitized kind of format. You're going to want to have an infinite library that you can walk around in your pocket or in your brain. It's not going to matter that much of the form factor. The device changes. It's not really that important whether it's Spotify or Apple or Amazon that are the so-called DSPs or the providers.
I think the values really kind of reside in the content owners, and that's really the artists and the label.
I totally agree. And I think if you think about it, there's lots of other technologies and computers that have been used to generate music over time. But no one falls in love with a computer-generated track, right? And Taylor Swift, incredible music, but it's also about the artist and her story and her physical presence and the live experience.
I don't think you're going to sit there and someone's going to put a computer up on stage and it's going to play and people are going to get excited around it. So I think... AI is really going to be a tool to make artists better artists. And I think like a synthesizer, right? Really created the opportunity for one man to have an orchestra. Maybe a bit of a threat to a percussionist, but maybe not.
Maybe it drove even more demand for the live experience.
That's a copyrightable asset, I would think. Mm-hmm.
Well, there's sort of name and likeness rights that have to be protected. Now, can a name be attributed to a Tesla robot? I don't know. I think so. I think it's quite obvious to me. Okay, so there's more potential artists for us to represent at Universal. Exactly. Exactly. All right. That's sort of one example. Another example could be just, you know, the restaurant industry, right?
If you can look at businesses like a mcdonald's right it's a whatever the company's like a 1950 vintage business and here we are it's you know 75 years later and uh you can kind of predict what it's going to look like over time and the menu is going to adjust over time to consumer tastes and but i think the hamburger and fries is probably forever
I tend to get a double chicken. Bowl or burrito? I like the burrito, but I generally try to order the bowl. Yeah. Cut the carb part. For health reasons. All right. And double chicken, guac, lettuce, black beans.
How do you do it? It's all of the above. So Chipotle, what attracted us initially is the stock price dropped by about 50%. Great company, great concept. Athletes love it. Consumers love it. Healthy, sustainable, fresh food made in front of your eyes. And, you know, great. Steve Ells, the founder, did an amazing job.
But ultimately the company's lacking some of the systems and had a food safety issue. Consumers got sick, almost killed the rent. But the reality of the fast food quick service industry is almost every fast food company has had a food safety issue over time. And the vast majority have survived. And we said, look, such a great concept.
But they, you know, their approach was not, it was far from ideal. But we start with usually reading the SEC violence. So companies file a 10K or an annual report and they file these quarterly reports called 10Qs. They have a proxy statement which describes kind of the governance, the board structure. Conference call transcripts are publicly available.
It's kind of very helpful to go back five years and kind of learn the story. You know, here's how management describes their business. Here's what they say they're going to do. And then you can follow along to see what they do. Uh, it's like a historical record of, you know, of how competent and, uh, truthful they are. You know, it's a very useful device.
And then of course, looking at competitors, uh, and thinking about, you know, who could, what could dislodge this company? Um, Uh, you know, and then we'll talk to, if it's an industry, we don't know, well, we know the restaurant industry really well, music industry, you know, we'll talk to people in the industry.
We'll try to understand, you know, the difference between publishing and recorded music. We'll look at the competitors. Um, we'll talk to, we'll read books. I read a book about the music industry or a couple of books about the industry. Um, So it's a bit like a big research project. And there are these so-called expert networks now. And you can get pretty much anyone on the phone.
And they'll talk to you about an aspect of the industry that you don't understand and want to learn more about. Try to get a sense. You know, public filings of companies generally give you a lot of information, but not everything you want to know. And you can learn more by talking to experts about some of the industry dynamics, the personalities. You want to get a sense of management.
I like watching, you know, podcasts. If a CEO were to do a podcast or a YouTube interview, you get a sense of the people.
Brian Nichols is a fantastic CEO. He's not going to spend $1 that he doesn't think is the company's best interest.
So the kind of business we're looking for is sort of the kind of business everyone should be looking for, right? A great business. It's got a long-term trajectory of growth out into the force, you know, even beyond the foreseeable distance, right? Those are the kind of businesses you want to own. You want businesses that generate a lot of cash. You want businesses you can easily understand.
You want businesses with these sort of huge barriers to entry where it's difficult for others to compete. You want companies that don't have to constantly raise capital. And these are some of the great businesses of the world. But people have figured out that those are the great businesses. So the problem is those companies tend to have very high stock prices.
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