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
Do they say what they're going to do? Do they admit mistakes? Do they build great teams? Do people want to come work for them? Are they able to retain their talent? And then part of it is, how much are they running the business for the benefit of the business? How much are they running the business for the benefit of themselves? And that's kind of the analysis you do.
Sure. So... This very senior management matters enormously. You know, we use the Chipotle example. Steve L's great entrepreneur, business got to a scale he really couldn't run it. We recruited a guy named Brian, helped a company recruit a guy named Brian Nickel. And he was considered the best person in the quick service industry. He came in and completely rebuilt the company.
Actually, we moved the company. Chipotle was moved to California. And sometimes one way to redo the culture of a company is just to move it geographically. And then you can kind of reboot the business. But a great leader has great followership. You know, over the course of their career, they'll have a team they've built that will come follow them into the next opportunity.
But the key is, you know, really the top person matters enormously because and then it's who they recruit. You know, you recruit an A plus leader and they're going to recruit other A type people. You recruit a B leader, you're not going to recruit any great talent beneath them.
Sure. So most of what I've learned in the investment business, I've learned from Warren Buffett. He's been my great professor of this business. My first book I read in the business was The Ben Graham Intelligent Investor. But fairly quickly, you get to learn about Warren Buffett. And I started by reading the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports.
And then I eventually got the Buffett partnership letters that you could see, which are an amazing read to go back to the mid 1950s and read what he wrote to his limited partners when he first started out and just follow that trajectory over a long period of time. So what's remarkable about him is one, duration, right? He's still at it at 93.
uh you know to uh you know takes a very long-term view um but a big thing that you learn from him investing requires this incredible dispassionate uh unemotional quality you have to be extremely economically rational uh which is not uh a basic it's not something you learn in the jungle you know i don't think it's something that you know
If you think about surviving the jungle, the lion shows up and everyone starts running, you run with them. That does not work well in markets. In fact, you generally have to do the opposite. When the lemmings are running over the cliff, that's the time where you're facing the other direction and you're running the other direction, i.e. you're stepping in, you're buying.
Stocks are really low prices. Buffett's been great at that and great at teaching about what he calls temperament, which is this sort of emotional or unemotional quality that you need to be able to dispassionately look at the world and say, okay, is this a real risk? Are people overreacting?
People tend to get excited about investments when stocks are going up and they get depressed when they're going down. I think that's just inherently human behavior. You have to reverse that. You have to get excited when things get cheaper, and you got to get concerned when things get more expensive.
I think it's something you kind of learn over time. A key success factor is you want to have enough money in the bank that you're going to survive, you know, regardless of what's going on with volatility in markets. You know, people who, one, you shouldn't borrow money. So if you borrow money, you own stocks on margin. Markers are going down and you have your livelihood at risk.
It's very difficult to be rational. So key is getting yourself to a place where you're financially secure. You're not going to lose your house, right? That's a kind of a key thing. And then also doing your homework, you know, stock prices, stocks can trade at any price in the short term. And if you know what a business is worth and you understand the management, you know it extremely well.
It's not nearly as, it doesn't bother you when a stock price goes down or it has much less impact on you because you know, you know, again, as Mr. Graham said, you know, the short term, the market's a voting machine. You have a bunch of lemmings voting one direction. That's concerning.
But if it's a great business, doesn't have a lot of debt and people are going to just listen to more music next year than this year, you know, you're going to do well. So it's a bit some combination of being personally secure and also just knowing what you own. And over time, you build calluses, I would say.
I think so. I think, now I'm a pretty emotional person, I would say, or I feel pretty strong emotions, but not in investing. I'm remarkably immune to kind of volatility and that's a big advantage. And it took some time for me to develop that. So you weren't born with that, you think?
Yeah. And you just, it's a bit, again, I, you can learn a lot from other people's experience. It's one of the few businesses where you can learn an enormous amount by reading about other periods in history, you know, watch, you know, following Buffett's career, the mistakes he made. If you're investing a lot of capital, every one of your mistakes is gonna be big, right?
So we've made big mistakes. The good news is that the vast majority of things we've done have worked out really well. And so that also gives you confidence over time. But because we make very few investments, we own eight things today or seven companies of that matter. If we get one wrong, it's gonna be big news. And so the other nature of our business you have to be comfortable with
There's a lot of public scrutiny, a lot of public criticism, and that requires some experience.
Sure. So, never invest money you can't afford to lose. Where it would, if you lost this money, you know, you lose your house, et cetera. So, having... Being in a place where you're investing money that you don't care about the price in the short term. It's money for your retirement and you take a really long-term view. I think that's key.
Never investing where you borrow money against your securities. The markets offer you the opportunity to leverage your investment. And in most worlds, you'll be okay. Except if there's a financial crisis or... You know, a nuclear device gets detonated, God forbid, somewhere in the world. Or there's an unexpected war. Or, you know, someone kills a leader unexpectedly.
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