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
Today, you've got $32 trillion worth of debt, so it's overleveraged or it's highly leveraged and the leverage is only increasing. We're losing money, i.e. revenues aren't covering expenses. The cost of our debt is going up as interest rates have gone up and the debt has to be rolled over. We have enormous administrative bloat in the country.
The regulatory regime is incredibly complicated and burdensome and impeding growth. Our relations with our competitor nations and our friendly nations are far from ideal. And those conditions were present in 2020 as well. They're just, I would say, worse now. And I said, look, it's a great thing that we have a businessman as president.
And in my lifetime, it's really the first businessman as opposed to, I mean, maybe Bush to some degree was a business person. But I thought, okay. I always wanted the CEO to be CEO of America, and now we have Trump. Look, he's got some personal qualities that seem less ideal, but he's gonna be president of the United States. He's gonna rise to the occasion. This is gonna be his legacy.
And he knows how to make deals, and he's gonna recruit some great people into his administration, I hoped. And growth can solve a lot of our problems. So if we can get rid of a bunch of regulations that are holding back the country, We can have a president. Obama was a, I would say, not a pro-business president. He did not love the business community. He did not love successful people.
And having a president who just changed the tone on being a pro-business president, I thought would be good for the country. And that's basically what I said. And I would say Trump did a lot of good things. And a lot of people, you can get criticized for acknowledging that. But I think the country's economy accelerated dramatically.
And that, by the way, the capitalist system helps the people at the bottom. Best when the system does well and when the economy does well, you know, the black unemployment rate was the lowest in history when Trump was president. And that's true for other minority groups. Uh, so he was good for the economy.
Um, and he, you know, uh, he recognized, uh, some of the challenges and issues and threats of China early. Uh, he kind of woke up NATO. Uh, now again, the way he did all of this stuff, you can object to, um, but you know, NATO actually started spending more money on defense.
In the early part of Trump's presidency because of his threats, which turned out to be a good thing in light of, you know, the ultimately the Russia Ukraine war. And I think if you analyze Trump objectively based on policies, he did a lot of good for the country. I think what's bad is he did some harm as well. I do think civility disappeared in America with Trump as president.
A lot of that's his personal style. And how important is civility? I do think it's important. I do think he was attacked very aggressively by the left. by the media that made him paranoid. It probably interfered with his ability to be successful. He had the Russian collusion investigation overhang. And when someone's attacked, they're not gonna be at their best, particularly if they're paranoid.
I think there's some degree of that. But I'm, you know, I'm giving kind of the best of defense of Trump. You know, just you look at how he managed his team, right? Very few people made it through the Trump administration without getting fired or quitting. And, you know, who say they're the greatest person in the world when he hired them and they're a total disaster when he fired them.
It's not an inspiring way to be a leader and to attract really talented people. I think the events surrounding the election, you know, I think January 6th, he could have done a lot more to stop a riot. I don't consider it an insurrection, but a riot that takes place in our Capitol and where police officers are killed. or die, commit suicide for failure as they sought to do their job.
You know, he stepped in way too late to stop that. He could have stopped it early. You know, many of his words, I think, inspired people, you know, some of whom with malintent to go in there and cause harm and literally to shut down the government. There were some evil people, unfortunately, there.
So he's been a very imperfect president and also, I think, contributed to the extreme amount of divisiveness in our country. So I was ultimately disappointed by the note of optimism. And again, I always... Uh, you know, support the president. I trust the people ultimately to select our next leader. You know, it's a bit like, um, who wants to be a millionaire?
You know, when you go to the crowd and the crowd says a certain thing, you got to trust the crowd. Um, but, uh, usually in who wants to be a millionaire, it's a landslide in one direction. So, you know, which, which letter to pick. Here we had an incredibly close election, which itself is a problem.
So, you know, my dream and what I, you know, I've tried a little bit, played politics in the last little period to support some alternatives to Trump so that we have a president. You know, I use the, you know, example. Imagine you woke up in the morning, it's election day, whatever it is, this November 4th, whatever, 2024.
And you still haven't figured out who to vote for because the candidates are so appealing, right? that you don't know which lever to pull because it's a tough call. That's the choice we should be making as Americans. It shouldn't be, I'm a member of this party and I'm only going to vote this way. I'm a member of that party and I'm going to vote the other way. And I hate the other side.
And that's where we've been, unfortunately, for too long.
Yeah.
The problem is the party system is so screwed up and the parties are self-interested and there's another governance problem, right? An incentive problem. Michael Porter, who was one of my professors at Harvard Business School, wrote a brilliant piece on the American political system and all the incentives and market dynamics and what he called a competitive analysis. And it's a must read.
I should dig it up and send it around on X. But it explains how the parties and the incentives of these sort of self-sustaining entities where the people involved are not incentivized to do what's best for the country. It's a problem.
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