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 first meeting with the judge, the judge was like, look, this would never have happened were it not for a financial crisis. And once the judge said, I knew we were going to be fine because the company had really not done anything fundamentally wrong, maybe a little too aggressive in how they borrowed money. And stock went from 34 cents to $31 a share. And actually fun little anecdote.
We made a lot of people, a lot of money who followed us into it. I got a lot of nice thank you notes, which you get on occasion in this business, believe it or not. And then one day I get a voicemail. This is when there was something called voicemail, probably a few years later. And it's a guy with a very thick Jamaican accent leaving a message for Bill Ackman.
So, you know, I return all my calls, call the guy back. He's like, hi, it's Bill Ackman. I'm just returning your call. He's like, oh, Mr. Ackman, thank you so much for calling me. I said, oh, how can I help? He says, I wanted to thank you. I said, what do you mean? He said, I saw you on CNBC a couple of years ago and you were talking about this general growth and the stock.
I said, where was the stock at the time? He said, it's 60 cents or something like this. And I bought a lot of stock. And I'm like, well, how much did you invest? Oh, I invest all of my money. And he was a New York city taxi driver and he invested like $50,000 or something like this at 60 cents a share.
And he was still holding it and he went into retirement and he made, you know, 50 times his money. And, uh, you know, those are the moments that you feel pretty good about investing.
Like we got a lot of pushback from our investors actually, because we had never invested in a bankrupt company before. It's a field called distressed investing and they're dedicated, uh, distressed investors, and we weren't considered one of them. So Bill, what are you doing? You don't know anything about distressed investing. You don't know anything about bankruptcy investing, but I can read.
And you learned. And I learned. And sometimes it's very helpful not to be a practitioner, an expert in something, because you get used to the conventional wisdom. And so we just abstractly read the step back and look at the facts. And it was just a really interesting setup for... One of the best investments we ever made.
No, it's not that hard. I mean, I literally read a book on distressed investing. Ben Branch or something, something on distressed investing.
Most of the world's knowledge has already been written somewhere. You just got to read the right books. And also had great lawyers, built up some great relationships. We work with Sullivan and Cromwell. And the lawyer there named Joe Shanker, who I met earlier in my career. Pershing Square is actually my second act in the hedge fund business. I started a fund called Gotham Partners when I was 26.
One of my early investments was a company called Rockefeller Center Properties that was heading for bankruptcy. And the lawyer on the other side representing Goldman Sachs was a guy named Joe Shanker. So he was like an obvious phone call because we had yet another real estate bankruptcy. And that one we did very well, but I missed the big opportunity.
And I suffered severe psychological torture every time I walked by Rockefeller Center because we could have made, we knew more about that property than anyone else, but I knew less about deal-making and didn't have the resources. And I was 28 years old or 27. And they hired a better lawyer than we did. And they outsmarted us on that one in a way.
So I said, okay, I'm going to go hire this guy the next time around.
So a board can always admit a member at any time in their discretion for a U.S. company. Right. Maybe there's some jurisdiction where you need a shareholder vote, but in most cases, a board can vote on any director that they want. If the board doesn't invite you to the party, you have to apply to be a member, in effect.
And that process is called, basically, it's the process of ultimately running a slate for a meeting where you propose a number. Any shareholder can propose to be on a board of a company if they own one share of stock in the business.
And getting your name in the company's, you know, in the materials they sent to shareholders, those rules were written in a way that were very unfavorable and very difficult to get in the door.
And those rules have been changed very recently, where the company now has to include a candidate, really all the candidates in the materials they send to shareholders, so the shareholders pick the best ones. When we applied, or when we applied, when we ran proxy contests in the past, that was not the case.
And so you have to spend a lot of money, mostly mailing fees and all kinds of other legal and other expenses to let everyone know you're running, like running a political campaign. And then you've got to run around and meet with the big shareholders, fly around the country, explain your case to them. And then there's a shareholder meeting. And if you get a majority of the votes, you get on.
The battle comes when they don't want you down. Okay. And a lot of that has to do with... I would say pride, normal human kind of stuff. You know, a lot of times a board of an underperforming company doesn't want to admit that they've underperformed. And boards of directors 20 years ago when we started Pershing Square were pretty cushy jobs.
Sit on a board of a company, you play golf with the CEO, you know, at nice golf courses. You make a few hundred thousand dollars a year to go to four meetings. It was kind of a rubber stamp world where boards, you know, at the end of the day, the CEO really ran the show.
Once shareholders could actually dislodge board members and they could lose their seats, and that's really the rise of shareholder activism, boards started taking their responsibilities much more seriously because directors are typically, you know, there are many cases they're retired CEOs. This is kind of how they're making a living in the later part of their career. They sit on four boards.
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