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
It's like getting Michael Jordan to come out of retirement and come run the company. And Hunter was incredible. And other, Paul Lau, other members of my team were, you know, super engaged. And the board, you know, Canadians are known to be nice. So one of the problems we had is shareholders would never tell management or the board that they were losing.
It was not until the night before the meeting when the vote came in, the management realized that they lost. We got 99% of the vote and they offered us a deal. When they begged us to take a deal, they said, look, we'll resign tonight so that we don't have to come to the meeting tomorrow. That's how embarrassed they were. That was kind of an interesting one.
so for in both this proxy battle and um the company itself this was a one of your more successful investments it was i mean the stock's up about 10 times and it's an industrial company it's a railroad it's not like a growth like it's not google uh so it's a great story and the company's now run by a guy named keith creel and keith uh it was hunter's protege and in so many ways he's actually better than hunter uh he's doing an incredible job and we're
The sad part here is we did very well. We tripled our money over several years. And then I went through a very challenging period because of a couple of bad investments. And we had to sell our Canadian Pacific to raise capital to pay for investors who were leaving. But we had another opportunity to buy it back in the last couple of years. And so we're now, again, a major owner of the company.
But had we held on to original stock, it would have been epic, if you will.
I haven't read the off and right article, but the good news is we are off and right. And I say we, because we're a team, a small team, but a fortunately very successful one. So our batting average as investors is extremely high. And the good news is our record's totally public. You can see everything we've ever done. But the press doesn't generally write about the success stories.
They write about the failures. And so we've had some epic failures, you know, big losses. Good news is they've been a tiny minority of the cases. Now, no one likes to lose money. It's even worse to lose other people's money. And I've done that occasionally. The good news is if you stuck with us, you've done very well, you know, over a long time.
Yeah, that was an incredible story. Look, governance really matters. And the governance structure of OpenAI, I think, leaves something to be desired. You know, I think Sam's point was this and maybe Musk, Elon Musk point originally set up as a nonprofit.
Uh, and, uh, it reminds me, actually, I invested in a nonprofit run by a former Facebook founder where he's going to create a Facebook like entity for nonprofits to promote, you know, goodness in the world. And the problem was he couldn't hire the talent he wanted because he couldn't grant stock options. He couldn't pay market salaries.
Um, and ultimately we ended up, he ended up selling the business to a for-profit. So it taught me for-profit solutions to problems are much better than nonprofits. And here you had kind of a blend, right? It was set up as a nonprofit, but I think they found the same thing. They couldn't hire the talent they wanted without having a for-profit subsidiary.
But the nonprofit entity, as I understand it, owns a big chunk of open AI and the investors own sort of a capped interest where their upside is capped and they don't have representation on the board. And I think that was a setup for a problem, and that's clearly what happened here.
Yeah. Governance really matters. Boards of directors really matter. Giving the shareholders the right to have input at least once a year on the structure of the governance of companies is really important. And private venture-backed boards are also not ideal.
I'm an active investor in ventures, and there are some complicated issues that emerge in private venture-stage companies where board members have somewhat divergent incentives from the long-term owners of a business. And what you see a lot in venture boards is They're presided over generally by venture capital investors who are big investors in the company.
Oftentimes, it's more important to them to have the public perception that they're good directors so they get the next best deal. If they have a reputation for taking on management too aggressively, word will get out in the small community of founders and they'll miss the next Google. And so their interests are not just in that particular company. That's also one of the problems.
Again, it all comes back to incentives.
Yeah, so private venture-backed companies The boards tend to be very small. It could be a handful of the venture investors and management. They're often very rarely independent directors. It's just not an ideal structure. Oh, I see. You want independent. It's beneficial to have people who have an economic interest in the business and they care only about the success of that company.
Uh, as opposed to someone who, you know, if you think about the venture business, getting into the best deals is more important than any one deal. And you see cases where, you know, the boards go along with in some cases, bad behavior on the part of management because they want a reputation for being kind of a, a founder friendly, a director, you know, that's, that's kind of problematic.
You don't have the same issue in public company boards. Yeah.
Biggest loss of my career is a company called Valiant Pharmaceuticals. We made an investment in a business that didn't meet our core principles. The problem in the pharmaceutical industry, and there are many problems, as I've learned, is it's a very volatile business, right? It's based on drug discovery.
Uh, it's based on, you know, predicting, uh, kind of the future revenues of a drug before it goes off patent. Um, you know, lots, lots of complexities. And we thought we had founded a, a pharmaceutical company we could own because of a very unusual founder and the way he approached this business. Um,
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