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
They collect a million, a million and a half dollars a year in director's fees. If they get thrown off the board by the shareholders, that's embarrassing, obviously, and it affects their ability to get on other boards. Again, incentives, as I said earlier, drive all human behavior. The incentives of directors, they want to preserve their board seats.
So if you have a director, now the directors on board serve in various roles. The most vulnerable ones are ones who, for example, chair a compensation committee. And if they put in a bad plan or they overpaid management, you know, they're subject to attack by shareholders.
But, you know, these contests are not dissimilar to political contests, whereas mudslinging and other side puts out false information about you. You have to respond and they're spending the shareholders money. So they have sort of unlimited resources and you're spending your and your investors money.
You know, when you're a small firm, finite resources, so they can outspend you, they can sue you, they can try to, you know, jigger the mechanics in such a way that you're going to lose. There's some unfortunate stuff that's happened in the past, you know, manipulative stuff.
Oh, of course. You know, there'll be, you know, articles about, you know, the dirty days where they would go through your trash and, you know, make sure that, you know, you're not sleeping around and, you know, things like this. But that's okay. I can, I'm subject, I can survive extreme scrutiny because I've been through this for a long time.
At the end of the day, it's actually very good on a board to have someone, you know, if you, there are many examples over time and some handful of high profile ones where the board fought tooth and nail to keep the activists off the board. And then once the activists got on the board and they said, you know, the guy's not so bad after all, the shareholders voted them on.
He's got some decent ideas and let's all work together to have this work out. And so there are very few cases where after the contest. And by the way, sometimes you have to replace the entire board. We've done that. But in most cases, you get a couple of seats on the board. And it's just, you want to build a board comprised of diverse points of view. And that's how you get to the truth.
The Canadian Pacific proxy contest. So Canadian Pacific was considered the most iconic company in Canada. It literally built the country because the rail that got built over Canada is what united the various provinces into a country. And then over time, because the railroad business is a pretty good business, They built a ton of hotels. They owned a lot of real estate.
And it became this massive conglomerate. But it was horribly mismanaged for decades. By the time we got involved, it was by far the worst-run railroad in North America. They had the lowest profit margins. They had the lowest growth rate. Every quarter, management would make excuses, generally about the weather, as to why they underperformed.
And there, there's a direct competitor, a company called Canadian National. as a rail goes right across the country. And Canadian Pacific would constantly be complaining about the weather. And basically, you know, same country, same regions. Drax weren't that far apart. But it was a really important company. And being on this board was like an honorary thing.
And everyone on the board was an icon of Canada. You know, the chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada. You know, the head of the most important grain, privately held grain company. You know, sort of an important collection of, you know, big time Canadian executives. Here we were, you know, this is probably... about 13 years ago.
And, you know, still maybe 44 year old from New York, not a Canadian, basically saying this is the worst run railroad in North America. And we bought 12% of the railroad at a really low price. And we brought with us to our first meeting, the greatest railroader ever, a guy named Hunter Harrison, who had turned around Canadian National. So we'd like, okay, we've got a great asset.
We've got the greatest railroad CEO of all time. He's come out of retirement to step in and run the railroad. And we brought him to the first meeting and they wouldn't even meet with him. And they certainly weren't going to consider hiring him. And that led us to a proxy contest.
Well, the key is we had to, one, come up with a group of directors who would be willing to step into a battle. Right. And we didn't want a bunch of New York directors or even American directors. We wanted Canadians. The problem was this was the most iconic company in Canada. And we wanted high-profile people. So we talked to all the high-profile people in Canada.
Every one of them would say, Bill, you're entirely right. This thing is the worst run of the road. It needs to be fixed. But, you know, I see John at the club. You know, I see him at the Toronto club. You know, I can't, you know, I can't do this, but you're totally right. Mm-hmm. And, uh, we had to, and that was the concern because you have to file your materials by a certain day.
You got to put together a slate. We needed a big slate because we knew that we had to replace basically all the directors. Uh, and then one, I spoke to, uh, a guy who was one of the wealthiest guys in Canada who was on the board at one point in time. And he said, uh, uh, Bill, I have an idea for you. There's this woman, Rebecca McDonald. Why don't you give her a call?
And I called Rebecca and she was the first woman to take a company public in Canada as CEO. And she was a kind of anti-establishment, not afraid to take on anything kind of person. And I called her, we had a great conversation. And she was in the Dominican Republic at her house. And I flew down to see her. And she said, yeah, I'm all in.
And actually, once we got her, that enabled us to get others. And then we put together our slate. And we had some pretty interesting dialogue with the company. They tried to embarrass us all the time. In the press, publicly, what were you talking about? In the press, publicly. You know, at one point I wrote an email saying, look, let's come to peace on this thing.
But if we don't, you're really forcing my hand and we're going to have to rent the largest hall in Toronto and invite all the shareholders. And it's going to be embarrassing for management. And I made reference to some nuclear winter. Let's not have it be a nuclear winter. And they thought they'd embarrass me by releasing the email, but it only inspired us.
And we rented the largest hall in Canada and we put up a presentation walking through, you know, here's Canadian national, here's Canadian Pacific, here's what they said, here's what they did. And we had Hunter get up. It was this incredibly charismatic guy from Tennessee, that amazing, you know, he's like a lion. Incredibly deep voice, unbelievable track record, incredibly respected guy.
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