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, you know, good friends and family, you know, I had, uh, you know, go take a walk with a friend every night, um, you know, and a sister who loves me and parents who are supportive, but they were, you know, they were all worried about their, their son, their brother, you know, it was, it was a moment.
And also, by the way, the other thing to think about is when you recover from something like this, you really appreciate it. And also, as much as the media loves when some successful person falls, they love writing the story of success, they love even more the story of failure, but when you recover from that, it's kind of like the American story. America, you think of the great entrepreneurs,
and how many failures they had before they succeeded. You know, how many rocket launches, you know, did SpaceX have explode on the pad, right? And then you look at success. I mean, that's why Musk is so admired.
It's historic. So we at Pershing Square shorted very few stocks. And the reason for that is short selling is just inherently treacherous. If you buy a stock, it's called going long. You're buying something, your worst case scenario is you lose your whole investment. You buy a stock for 100, it goes to zero, you lose $100 per share. You buy one share, you lose 100.
You short a stock at 100, what it means is you borrow the security from someone else. The analogy I gave that made it easy for people to understand, it's a bit like you think silver coins are going to go down in value. And you have a friend who's got a whole pile of these 1880 silver US dollars. And you think you're gonna go down a value. You say, hey, can I borrow 10 of those dollars from you?
He's like, sure, but what are you gonna pay me to borrow? I'll pay you interest on the value of the dollars today. So you borrow the dollars that are worth $100 each today. You pay them interest while you're borrowing them. And then you go sell them in the market for $100. That's what they're worth. And then they go down in price to 50.
You go back in, you buy the silver dollars back at $50 and you give them back to your friend. Your friend is fine. You borrowed 10, you gave him the 10 back and he got interest in the meantime. He's happy. He made money on his coin collection. You, however, made $50 times the 10 coins. You made 500 bucks. That's pretty good.
The problem with that is what if you sell them and they go from a hundred to a thousand and Now you're going to have to go buy them back. And you're going to pay, you know, whatever, $10,000 to buy back coins, you know, that you sold for 500. You're going to lose $9,500. And there's no limit, right, to how high a stock price can go. Companies go to $3 trillion in value, right?
Tesla, a lot of people shorted Tesla, saying, oh, it's overvalued. He's never going to be able to make a successful electric car. Well, I'm sure there are people who went bankrupt shorting Tesla. That's why we didn't short stocks.
But I was presented with this actually reporter that covered the other short investment we made early in the career, a company called MBIA, came to me and said, Bill, I found this incredible company. You got to take a look at it. It's a total fraud and they're scamming poor people. And we should say that MBIA was a very successful short. It was.
A big part of it was that we used a different kind of instrument to short it, where we reversed that sort of... We made the investment asymmetric in our favor, meaning... Put up a small amount of money. If it works, we make a fortune. Whereas short selling is you kind of sell something and you have to buy it back at a higher price.
Herbalife didn't have the, what's called credit default swaps that you could purchase. Not a big enough company. Didn't have enough debt outstanding to be able to implement. You had to short the stock in order to make it as successful to bet against the company. And the more work I did in the company, the more I was like, oh my God, this thing's an incredible scam.
You know, they purport to sell weight loss shakes, but in reality, they're selling, you know, kind of a fake business plan. And the people that adopt it lose money and they go after poor people. They go after, actually in many cases, undocumented immigrants. who are pitched on the American dream opportunity.
And because they have few other options, because they can't get legal employment, they become Herbalife distributors.
And it's a business where you, so-called multi-level marketing, multi-level marketing is sort of the name for a legitimate company like this, or it's a pyramid scheme, where basically your sales are really only coming from people who are, you convince them to buy the product by getting them into the business. That's precisely what this company is.
And like, okay, shorting a pyramid scheme seems like one, we'll make a bunch of money, but you know, two, the world will be behind us because they're harming poor people. You know, regulators will get interested in a company like this. And we said, you know, the FTC is going to shut this thing down. And we did a ton of work and I gave this sort of epic presentation, laying out all the facts.
Stock got completely crushed. And we were on our way. And the government actually got interested early on, launched an investigation pretty early, SEC and otherwise. But then a guy named Carl Icahn showed up. And we have a little bit of a backstory. But his motivations here were not really principally driven by thinking Herbalife was a good company. He thought it was a good way to... uh, hurt me.
So he, he basically bought a bunch of stock and said it was a really great company. And, you know, Carl, at least at the time through his weight around a bit, I was a credible investor, had a lot of resources and, uh, that began the saga.
I'd say legendary in a sense, yes, for sure. An iconic. Iconic? Carl Icahn. Oh, that's very well done. So definitely an iconic investor. So what was the backstory between the two of you? So I mentioned that I had another period of time where significant business challenges. This was my first fund called Gotham Partners.
And we had a court stop a transaction between some private, a private company we owned and a public company. It's another long story. If you want to go there. I would love to hear it as well. But it was really my deciding to wind up my former fund. And we owned a big stake in a company called Hallwood Realty Partners, which was a company that owned real estate assets.
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