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
And the value is generally built into that. the price you have to pay for the business. So we can't earn the kind of returns we want to earn for investors by paying a really high price. Price matters a lot. You can buy the best business in the world. And if you overpay, you're not going to earn particularly attractive returns.
So we get involved in cases where a great business has kind of made a big mistake or you've a company that's kind of lost its way, but it's recoverable. And that's, we buy from shareholders who are disappointed, who've lost confidence, We're selling at a low price relative to what it's worth if fixed, and then we try to be helpful in fixing the company.
The most difficult analysis to do as an investor is that. It's kind of figuring out how wide is the moat, how, you know, how much at risk is the business to disruption. And we're in, I would say a period, the greatest period of disruptability in history, right? Technology. you know, a couple of 19 year olds can, you know, leave whatever university, or maybe they didn't go in the first place.
They can raise, you know, millions of dollars. They can get access to infinite bandwidth storage. They can contract with engineers in low cost markets around the world. They could build a virtual company and they can disrupt businesses that seem super established over time. And then on top of that, you have,
major companies with multi-trillion dollar market caps working to find profits wherever they can. And so that's a dangerous world in a way to be an investor. And so you have to find businesses that it's hard to foresee a world in which they get disrupted. And the beauty of the restaurant business, and we've actually, our best track record is in restaurants. We've never lost money.
We've only made a fortune, interestingly, investing in restaurants. A big part of it's a you get Chipotle right, and you're at 100 stores, it's not so hard to envision getting to 200 stores and then getting to 500 stores. And the key is maintaining the brand image, growing intelligently, having the right systems. And when you go from 100 stores to 3,500 stores, you have to know what you're doing.
And there's a lot of complexity. If you think about your local restaurant, the family's working in the business. They're watching the cash register. You can probably open another restaurant across town, but there are very few restaurant operators that own more than a few restaurants and operate them successfully.
The quick service business is about systems and building a model that a stranger who doesn't know the restaurant industry can come in and enter the business and build a successful business. successful franchise. Now, Chipotle is not a franchise company. They actually own all their own stores.
But many of the most successful restaurant companies are franchise models, like a Burger King, a McDonald's, Tim Hortons, all these various brands, Popeyes. And there it's about systems. But the same systems apply whether you own all the stores and it's run by a big corporation or whether the owners of the restaurants are sort of franchisees, local entrepreneurs.
A moat is you get to a certain scale and you do it successfully. And the brand is now understood by the consumer. And what's interesting about Chipotle is what they've achieved is difficult. They're not buying frozen hamburgers getting shipped in. They're buying fresh frozen. you know, sustainably sourced ingredients, they're preparing food in the store. That was a first, right?
The quality of the product at Chipotle is incredible. It's the highest quality food you can get for, you can get a serious dinner for under 20 bucks and eat really health, you know, healthfully and very high quality ingredients. And that's just not available anywhere else. And it's very hard to replicate and to build those relationships with, you know, farmers around the country.
It's a lot easier to make a deal with one of the big you know, massive food producers and buy your pork from them than to buy from a whole bunch of farmers around the country. And so that is a big moat for Chipotle, very difficult to replicate. And by the way, another company I think you have a stake in is McDonald's? No, we own a company called Restaurant Brands.
Restaurant Brands owns a number of quick service companies, one of which is Burger King.
They'll just sell you the patty.
Maybe we'll have Burger King featuring it. What about Flame World? What's with these fried burgers? We got to get you to Burger King, you know, grilled burgers.
Okay.
Sure. It's a big position for us.
Sure. So it's a business we've admired as a firm for, you know, whatever, 15 years, but rarely got to a price that we felt we could own it because again, the expectations were so high and price really matters. And really the sort of AI scare, I would call it. You know, Microsoft comes out with ChatGPT. They do an amazing demonstration. People like this most incredible product.
And Google, which had been working on AI even earlier, obviously than Microsoft. Microsoft was behind in AI. It was really their ChatGPT deal that gave them a kind of a market presence.
um and then google does this fairly disastrous uh demonstration of bard and the world says oh my god google's fallen behind in ai ai is the future stock gets crushed google gets to a price around 15 times earnings uh which for a business of this quality is an extremely extremely low price and our view on google one way to think about it when a business becomes a verb
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