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Lex Fridman Podcast

#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech

Tue, 20 Feb 2024

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Bill Ackman is an investor who has led some of the biggest and controversial financial trades in history. He is founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack - Policygenius: https://policygenius.com/lex - AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil - Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/bill-ackman-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Bill's X: https://twitter.com/BillAckman Pershing Square Holdings: https://pershingsquareholdings.com/ Pershing Square Foundation: https://pershingsquarefoundation.org Neri Oxman conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbPHojL_61U Books mentioned: The Intelligent Investor: https://amzn.to/3ONnaZy America's Cultural Revolution: https://amzn.to/3SDz1dY PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:55) - Investing basics (13:47) - Investing in music (22:08) - Process of researching companies (26:47) - Investing in restaurants (32:16) - Investing in Google (37:58) - AI (43:13) - Warren Buffet (45:22) - Psychology of investing (54:53) - Activist investing (1:04:41) - General Growth Properties (1:20:57) - Canadian Pacific Railway (1:28:21) - OpenAI (1:32:32) - Biggest loss and lowest point (1:47:21) - Herbalife and Carl Icahn (2:04:11) - Oct 7 (2:10:42) - College campus protests (2:29:09) - DEI in universities (2:50:00) - Neri Oxman (3:15:30) - X and free speech (3:19:54) - Trump (3:27:30) - Dean Phillips (3:34:36) - Future

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0.049 - 18.882 Lex Fridman

The following is a conversation with Bill Ackman, a legendary activist investor who has been part of some of the biggest and at times controversial trades in history. Also, he is fearlessly vocal on X, FKA, Twitter, and uses the platform to fight for ideas he believes in.

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19.423 - 37.316 Lex Fridman

For example, he was a central figure in the resignation of the president of Harvard University, Claude Dean Gay, the saga of which we discuss in this episode. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.

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37.656 - 61.854 Lex Fridman

We got Element for delicious electrolytes, Policy Genius for insurance, AG1 for overall delicious health, Aidsleep for naps, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.

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61.975 - 86.005 Lex Fridman

I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. We love them. I love them. Maybe you will love them too. This episode is brought to you by Element, the thing I'm drinking right now, the thing I drink throughout the day, all days, when I travel, it is forever with me. The only flavor I now acknowledge exists is watermelon salt.

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86.125 - 106.474 Lex Fridman

There's many other flavors, and other people say they're also delicious. I don't know what they're saying. They probably don't know what they're talking about because the greatest flavor of all time is watermelon salt. Do you ever just go to a thing, to a very particular flavor of a thing, and that becomes your thing? There's never a doubt.

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106.834 - 129.109 Lex Fridman

When you go to a particular restaurant, or you go into an ice cream shop, or you go to the grocery store aisle with the delicious snacks, and you know exactly which snack you're getting. I have that. There's these chips that have very low carbs in them. And there's a lot of different kinds. But there's a particular kind I really like and a particular flavor.

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130.31 - 158.423 Lex Fridman

But I'm not ready to reveal what the brand or the flavor is to maintain a sense of mystery about my life. But more honestly, because I don't actually remember. I just remember the color. Anyway, that's me with watermelon salt and element. It's delicious. I have found the thing I need in my life, especially when I'm fasting or doing low-carb stuff. Get a simple pack for free with any purchase.

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158.483 - 187.567 Lex Fridman

Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for all kinds of insurance, life insurance, auto insurance, home insurance, disability insurance. They have really nice tools for comparison. This is the thing I need in my life for everything. This is where the good aspect of capitalism can come in, where you have freely competing entities

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189.284 - 211.514 Lex Fridman

Honestly competing. Transparent with full information available to the consumer where they get to choose. And choose honestly based on well-defined, clear, full set of parameters. All right? I love it. I need that for... other things I'm doing in my life. I need that for everything. In fact, going back to the other thing I mentioned, I need that for ice cream.

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211.954 - 231.477 Lex Fridman

I need a full, detailed comparison of the different flavors. I also need data on who enjoyed which flavor throughout human history. I'm not talking about just that ice cream shop. Across all ice cream shops, I want the data. And I don't just want the mean or the median, because that's going to end up on vanilla or chocolate, whatever.

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231.577 - 253.636 Lex Fridman

I want the clusters, and I want to know which cluster I belong to. I want the data. Anyway, so the tools that allow you to explore the parameters are very important, and that's what Policy Genius provides. With PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage.

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253.936 - 284.224 Lex Fridman

Head to PolicyGenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink that I drink to support better health and peak performance. The degree to which I love AG1 and my very good close friend Andrew Huberman loves AG1 has become a meme.

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284.865 - 314.277 Lex Fridman

And, you know, every meme is grounded in reality and truth. And my truth is that it just brings me happiness. You know, in days like I talk about in this episode, where all I eat is some McDonald's beef patties, it just brings me both sort of physiological and psychological comfort, knowing that I have at least some of the nutritional bases covered. Meat does make me feel good.

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315.478 - 338.432 Lex Fridman

But your body probably needs a lot of other stuff, especially for long-term longevity and long-term health and flourishing. But, of course, in the long term, we're all driving towards a cliff. And one day, too soon, we'll be driving off that cliff, hopefully with a smile. and maybe on that day I will also be drinking AG1. I drink it twice a day now.

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338.452 - 366.601 Lex Fridman

It's actually one of my favorite ways to take a break. I just sit on the couch and sip, listen to this peaceful kind of music, and just think, prepare my mind for the work ahead. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod 3 mattress. It controls temperature with a nap.

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367.141 - 394.187 Lex Fridman

It can cool you down to as low as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. But you're going to need the next sponsor if you're the kind of person that puts it up to 110 degrees. I have a lot of questions. Next sponsor is about to help, by the way. 110 degrees, I just have questions. I think I saw a social media post from Tim Kennedy saying, when you're alone, that guy's a poet.

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395.729 - 421.18 Lex Fridman

Also, he's insane on the mat. Anyway, he was posting, I think, on Instagram that when you're alone, the only correct temperature to exist in is 60 degrees, 58 degrees, something like this. Basically, he likes it freezing. And I can somewhat agree, especially on the surface of the bed. Cold bed, warm blanket, that's just the best way to take a nap. I need to go see Tim.

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421.841 - 445.486 Lex Fridman

Training Jiu-Jitsu with him is really fun. But he goes pretty intense. That guy lives life on 11. Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P-E-H-E-L-P. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.

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446.428 - 473.86 Lex Fridman

Individual or couples, it's easy, discreet, affordable, available anywhere. Listen, this is the easiest way to start talking and start diving deep. into the recesses of your subconscious mind. I'm a huge fan of talk therapy, of talking, talking rigorously, talking like it's an important thing with a goal in mind, like you're digging for something. That's what I try to do with this podcast.

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473.88 - 497.677 Lex Fridman

That's what I try to do with conversations In my private life, when I'm just sitting there at a coffee shop and a stranger sits down and says hello, I'm not a licensed therapist. Neither is the other person. We're just there for an open mic or a music thing or whatever the hell. We're amateur. We're amateur therapists of each other. Anyway, you should work with professionals.

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497.777 - 518.566 Lex Fridman

And that's what BetterHelp provides. The whole point is they make it easy. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Bill Ackman.

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535.427 - 548.213 Lex Fridman

In your lecture on the basics of finance and investing, you mentioned a book, Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham as being formative in your life. What key lesson do you take away from that book that informs your own investing?

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548.493 - 567.081 Bill Ackman

Sure. Actually, it was the first investment book I read. And as such, it was kind of the inspiration for my career and a lot of my life. So important book. Bear in mind, this is sort of after the Great Depression. People lost confidence investing in markets, World War II. And then he writes this book. It's for like the average man.

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568.001 - 590.639 Bill Ackman

And basically he says that you have to understand the difference between price and value, right? Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. And he said the stock market is here to serve you. And it's a bit like the neighbor that comes by every day and makes you an offer for your house. Makes you a stupid offer, you ignore it. Makes you a great offer, you can take it.

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591.119 - 608.07 Bill Ackman

And that's the stock market. And the key is to figure out what something's worth. And you have to kind of weigh it. He talked about the difference between, you know, he said the stock market in the short term is a voting machine. It represents speculative interests, you know, supply and demand of people in the short term.

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608.35 - 622.213 Bill Ackman

But in the long term, the stock market's a weighing machine, much more accurate. It's going to tell you what something's worth. And so if you can divine what something's worth, then you can really take advantage of the market because it's really here to help you. And that's kind of the message of the book.

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622.693 - 626.634 Lex Fridman

In that same way, there's a kind of difference between speculation and investing.

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626.946 - 654.929 Bill Ackman

Yeah, speculation is just a bit like buying, trading crypto, right? Strong words. Well, short-term trading crypto. Maybe in the long run, there's intrinsic value. But many investors in a bubble going into the crash were really just pure speculators. They didn't know what things were worth. They just knew they were going up. That's speculation.

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656.551 - 676.632 Bill Ackman

And investing is doing your homework, digging down, understanding a business, understanding the competitive dynamics of an industry, understanding what management's going to do, understanding what price you're going to pay. The value of anything, I would say, other than love, let's say, is the present value of the cash you can take out of it over its life.

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677.152 - 689.705 Bill Ackman

Now, some people think about love that way, but it's not the right way to think about love. Investing is about basically building a model of what this business is going to produce over its lifetime.

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690.525 - 702.913 Lex Fridman

How do you get to that, this idea called value investing? How do you get to the value of a thing? Even like philosophically, value of anything really, but we can just talk about the things that are on the stock market. Sure. Companies.

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703.433 - 724.658 Bill Ackman

The value of a security is the present value of the cash you can take out of it over its life. So if you think about a bond, a bond pays a 5% coupon interest rate. You get that, let's say, every year or twice a year, split in half. And it's very predictable. And if it's a U.S. government bond, you know you're going to get it. So that's a pretty easy thing to value.

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726.24 - 747.865 Bill Ackman

A stock is an interest in a business. It's like owning a piece of a company. And a business, a profitable one, is like a bond in that it generates these coupons or these earnings or cash flow every year. The difference with a stock and a bond is that the bond, it's a contract. You know what you're going to get as long as they don't go bankrupt in default.

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748.606 - 763.24 Bill Ackman

With a stock, you have to make predictions about the business. How many widgets are going to sell this year? How many are going to sell next year? What are the costs going to be? How much of the money that they generate do they need to reinvest in the business to keep the business going? And that's more complicated.

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764.421 - 781.914 Bill Ackman

But, you know, what we do is we try to find businesses where, with a very high degree of confidence, we know what those cash flows are going to be for a very long time. And there are very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about. And as a result, you know, many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future.

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782.094 - 789.1 Bill Ackman

So what we do for a living, what I do for a living, is find those rare companies that you can kind of predict what they're going to look like over a very long period of time.

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789.62 - 806.548 Lex Fridman

So what are the factors that indicate that a company is going to be something that's going to make a lot of money, it's going to have a lot of value, and it's going to be reliable over a long period of time? And what is your process of figuring out whether a company is or isn't that?

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807.789 - 829.347 Bill Ackman

So every consumer has a view on different brands and different companies. And what we look for are sort of these non-disruptible businesses, a business where you can kind of close your eyes, stock market shuts for a decade, and you know that 10 years from now, it's going to be a more valuable, more profitable company. So we own a business called Universal Music Group.

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830.868 - 855.483 Bill Ackman

It's in the business of helping artists become global artists, sort of the recorded music business. And it's in the business of, you know, owning rights to sort of the music publishing rights of songwriters. And, you know, I think music is forever, right? Music is a many thousand year old part of the human experience. And I think it will be, you know, thousands of years from now.

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856.414 - 880.395 Bill Ackman

And so that's a pretty good backdrop to invest in a company. And the company basically owns a third of the global recorded music. That's, you know, the most dominant sort of market share in the business. They're the best at taking an artist who's 18 years old, who's got a great voice and has started to get a presence on YouTube and Instagram and helping that artist become successful.

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880.935 - 893.082 Bill Ackman

And that's a unique talent. And the result is the best artists in the world want to come work for them. But they also have this incredible library of, you know, the Beatles, the Rolling Stone, U2, et cetera.

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893.162 - 914.916 Bill Ackman

So, and then if you think about what music has become, used to be about records and CDs and, you know, eight track tapes for those of whom, and it was about a new format and that's how they drive sales. And it's become a business, which is like the podcast business about streaming. And you can, streaming is a lot more predictable than selling records, right?

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914.936 - 935.29 Bill Ackman

You can sort of say, okay, how many people have smartphones? How many people are going to have smartphones next year? There's a kind of global penetration over time of smartphones. You pay, call it 10, 11 bucks a month for a subscription or less for a family plan. And you can kind of build a model of what the world looks like and predict, you know, the growth of the streaming business.

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935.55 - 953.961 Bill Ackman

You predict what kind of market share Universal is going to have over time. And you can't get to a precise view of value. You can get to an approximation. And the key is to buy at a price that represents a big discount to that approximation. And that gets back to Ben Graham. Ben Graham was about what he called, he invented this concept of margin of safety.

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955.101 - 977.003 Bill Ackman

You want to buy a company at a price that if you're wrong about what you think it's worth, and it turns out to be worth 30% less, you paid a deep enough discount to your estimate that you're still okay. It's about investing. A big part of investing is not losing money. If you can avoid losing money and then have a few great hits, you can do very, very well over time.

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977.383 - 999.493 Lex Fridman

Well, music is interesting because, yes, music's been around for a very long time, but the way to make money from music has been evolving. Like you mentioned streaming, there's a big transition initiated by, I guess, Napster, then created Spotify, of how you make money on music with Apple and with all of this. And the question is, how well are companies...

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1000.353 - 1021.551 Lex Fridman

like UMG, able to adjust to such transformations? One, I could ask you about the future, which is artificial intelligence, being able to generate music, for example. There have been a lot of amazing advancements. So do you have to also think about that? When you close your eyes, all the things you think about, are you imagining the possible ways that the...

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1022.643 - 1048.801 Bill Ackman

future is completely different from the present and how well this company will be able to like surf the wave of that sure and they've had to surf a lot of waves and actually the music business peaked the last time in like the late 90s or 2000 time frame and that really innovation napster digitization of music almost killed the industry and universal really led an effort to save the industry and actually made an early deal with uh spotify that enabled

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1049.421 - 1064.402 Bill Ackman

you know, the industry to really recover. And so by virtue of their market position and their credibility and their willingness to kind of adopt new technologies, they've kept their position. Now they of course had this huge advantage because I think the Beatles are forever. I think U2 is forever. I think Rolling Stones are forever.

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1065.283 - 1090.742 Bill Ackman

So they had a nice base of assets that were important and I think will forever be. Forever is a long time. But, you know, again, there are all kinds of risks in every business. This is one that I think has a very high degree of persistence. And I can't envision a world where beyond streaming, in a sense. Now, you may have a Neuralink chip in your head instead of a phone. Right.

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1090.822 - 1110.775 Bill Ackman

But the music is going to come in a digitized kind of format. You're going to want to have an infinite library that you can walk around in your pocket or in your brain. It's not going to matter that much of the form factor. The device changes. It's not really that important whether it's Spotify or Apple or Amazon that are the so-called DSPs or the providers.

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1111.896 - 1120.182 Bill Ackman

I think the values really kind of reside in the content owners, and that's really the artists and the label.

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1120.942 - 1146.851 Lex Fridman

And I actually think AI is not going to be the primary creator of music. I think we're going to actually face the reality that it's not that music has been around for thousands of years, but musicians and music has been around. We actually care to know who's the musician that created it. Just like we wanna know who's the artist, human artist that created a piece of art.

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1147.011 - 1172.648 Bill Ackman

I totally agree. And I think if you think about it, there's lots of other technologies and computers that have been used to generate music over time. But no one falls in love with a computer-generated track, right? And Taylor Swift, incredible music, but it's also about the artist and her story and her physical presence and the live experience.

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1173.348 - 1201.362 Bill Ackman

I don't think you're going to sit there and someone's going to put a computer up on stage and it's going to play and people are going to get excited around it. So I think... AI is really going to be a tool to make artists better artists. And I think like a synthesizer, right? Really created the opportunity for one man to have an orchestra. Maybe a bit of a threat to a percussionist, but maybe not.

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1201.422 - 1205.004 Bill Ackman

Maybe it drove even more demand for the live experience.

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1205.364 - 1222.678 Lex Fridman

Unless that computer has... human-like sentience, which I believe is a real possibility, but then it's really, from a business perspective, no different than a human. If it has an identity, that's basically fame and an influence, and there'd be a robot Taylor Swift, and it doesn't really matter.

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1222.698 - 1224.8 Bill Ackman

That's a copyrightable asset, I would think. Mm-hmm.

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1225.14 - 1245.405 Lex Fridman

Right, yeah. Not sure that's the world I'm excited about. That's a different discussion. The world is not going to ask your permission to become what it's becoming. But you can still make money on it. Presumably there'd be a capital system and there'd be some laws under which I believe AI systems will have rights that are akin to human rights.

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1245.925 - 1247.866 Lex Fridman

And we're going to have to contend with what that means.

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1248.726 - 1268.402 Bill Ackman

Well, there's sort of name and likeness rights that have to be protected. Now, can a name be attributed to a Tesla robot? I don't know. I think so. I think it's quite obvious to me. Okay, so there's more potential artists for us to represent at Universal. Exactly. Exactly. All right. That's sort of one example. Another example could be just, you know, the restaurant industry, right?

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1268.582 - 1288.096 Bill Ackman

If you can look at businesses like a mcdonald's right it's a whatever the company's like a 1950 vintage business and here we are it's you know 75 years later and uh you can kind of predict what it's going to look like over time and the menu is going to adjust over time to consumer tastes and but i think the hamburger and fries is probably forever

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1289.827 - 1308.741 Lex Fridman

The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the hamburger and fries are forever. I was eating at Chipotle last night as I was preparing these notes. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, it is one of my favorite places to eat. You said it is a place that you eat. You obviously also invest in it. What do you get at Chipotle?

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1309.542 - 1322.389 Bill Ackman

I tend to get a double chicken. Bowl or burrito? I like the burrito, but I generally try to order the bowl. Yeah. Cut the carb part. For health reasons. All right. And double chicken, guac, lettuce, black beans.

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1323.129 - 1342.835 Lex Fridman

And I'm more of a steak guy, just putting that on the record. What's the actual process you go through? Like, literally, like- the process of figuring out what the value of a company is. Like, how do you do the research? Is it reading documents? Is it talking to people?

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1342.855 - 1363.948 Bill Ackman

How do you do it? It's all of the above. So Chipotle, what attracted us initially is the stock price dropped by about 50%. Great company, great concept. Athletes love it. Consumers love it. Healthy, sustainable, fresh food made in front of your eyes. And, you know, great. Steve Ells, the founder, did an amazing job.

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1364.79 - 1385.817 Bill Ackman

But ultimately the company's lacking some of the systems and had a food safety issue. Consumers got sick, almost killed the rent. But the reality of the fast food quick service industry is almost every fast food company has had a food safety issue over time. And the vast majority have survived. And we said, look, such a great concept.

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1386.518 - 1404.48 Bill Ackman

But they, you know, their approach was not, it was far from ideal. But we start with usually reading the SEC violence. So companies file a 10K or an annual report and they file these quarterly reports called 10Qs. They have a proxy statement which describes kind of the governance, the board structure. Conference call transcripts are publicly available.

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1404.74 - 1423.456 Bill Ackman

It's kind of very helpful to go back five years and kind of learn the story. You know, here's how management describes their business. Here's what they say they're going to do. And then you can follow along to see what they do. Uh, it's like a historical record of, you know, of how competent and, uh, truthful they are. You know, it's a very useful device.

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1423.476 - 1439.137 Bill Ackman

And then of course, looking at competitors, uh, and thinking about, you know, who could, what could dislodge this company? Um, Uh, you know, and then we'll talk to, if it's an industry, we don't know, well, we know the restaurant industry really well, music industry, you know, we'll talk to people in the industry.

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1439.337 - 1460.463 Bill Ackman

We'll try to understand, you know, the difference between publishing and recorded music. We'll look at the competitors. Um, we'll talk to, we'll read books. I read a book about the music industry or a couple of books about the industry. Um, So it's a bit like a big research project. And there are these so-called expert networks now. And you can get pretty much anyone on the phone.

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1461.444 - 1480.298 Bill Ackman

And they'll talk to you about an aspect of the industry that you don't understand and want to learn more about. Try to get a sense. You know, public filings of companies generally give you a lot of information, but not everything you want to know. And you can learn more by talking to experts about some of the industry dynamics, the personalities. You want to get a sense of management.

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1481.019 - 1487.266 Bill Ackman

I like watching, you know, podcasts. If a CEO were to do a podcast or a YouTube interview, you get a sense of the people.

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1488.067 - 1500.875 Lex Fridman

So in the case of Chipotle, for example, by the way, I could talk about Chipotle all day. I just love it. I love it. I wish there was a sponsor. I'll mention it to the CEO. Don't make promises you can't keep, Bill. I'm not making promises.

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1501.676 - 1506.118 Bill Ackman

Brian Nichols is a fantastic CEO. He's not going to spend $1 that he doesn't think is the company's best interest.

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1506.138 - 1530.954 Lex Fridman

All right. All I want is free Chipotle. Come on now. What was I saying? Oh, and so you look at a company like Chipotle, and then you see there's a difficult moment in its history, like you said, that there was a food safety issue, and then you say, okay, well, I see a path where we can fix this, and therefore, even though the price is low, we can get it to where the price goes up to its value.

0
💬 0

1532.195 - 1550.751 Bill Ackman

So the kind of business we're looking for is sort of the kind of business everyone should be looking for, right? A great business. It's got a long-term trajectory of growth out into the force, you know, even beyond the foreseeable distance, right? Those are the kind of businesses you want to own. You want businesses that generate a lot of cash. You want businesses you can easily understand.

0
💬 0

1550.771 - 1566.189 Bill Ackman

You want businesses with these sort of huge barriers to entry where it's difficult for others to compete. You want companies that don't have to constantly raise capital. And these are some of the great businesses of the world. But people have figured out that those are the great businesses. So the problem is those companies tend to have very high stock prices.

0
💬 0

1566.729 - 1583.542 Bill Ackman

And the value is generally built into that. the price you have to pay for the business. So we can't earn the kind of returns we want to earn for investors by paying a really high price. Price matters a lot. You can buy the best business in the world. And if you overpay, you're not going to earn particularly attractive returns.

0
💬 0

1584.262 - 1605.344 Bill Ackman

So we get involved in cases where a great business has kind of made a big mistake or you've a company that's kind of lost its way, but it's recoverable. And that's, we buy from shareholders who are disappointed, who've lost confidence, We're selling at a low price relative to what it's worth if fixed, and then we try to be helpful in fixing the company.

0
💬 0

1607.492 - 1632.089 Lex Fridman

You said that barriers to entry. You said a lot of really interesting qualities of companies very quickly in a sequence of statements that took less than 10 seconds to say. But some of them were fascinating. All of them were fascinating. So you said barriers to entry. How do you know if there's a type of moat protecting the competitors from stepping up to the plate?

0
💬 0

1632.749 - 1656.197 Bill Ackman

The most difficult analysis to do as an investor is that. It's kind of figuring out how wide is the moat, how, you know, how much at risk is the business to disruption. And we're in, I would say a period, the greatest period of disruptability in history, right? Technology. you know, a couple of 19 year olds can, you know, leave whatever university, or maybe they didn't go in the first place.

0
💬 0

1657.278 - 1676.463 Bill Ackman

They can raise, you know, millions of dollars. They can get access to infinite bandwidth storage. They can contract with engineers in low cost markets around the world. They could build a virtual company and they can disrupt businesses that seem super established over time. And then on top of that, you have,

0
💬 0

1677.183 - 1697.993 Bill Ackman

major companies with multi-trillion dollar market caps working to find profits wherever they can. And so that's a dangerous world in a way to be an investor. And so you have to find businesses that it's hard to foresee a world in which they get disrupted. And the beauty of the restaurant business, and we've actually, our best track record is in restaurants. We've never lost money.

0
💬 0

1698.834 - 1724.802 Bill Ackman

We've only made a fortune, interestingly, investing in restaurants. A big part of it's a you get Chipotle right, and you're at 100 stores, it's not so hard to envision getting to 200 stores and then getting to 500 stores. And the key is maintaining the brand image, growing intelligently, having the right systems. And when you go from 100 stores to 3,500 stores, you have to know what you're doing.

0
💬 0

1724.822 - 1743.727 Bill Ackman

And there's a lot of complexity. If you think about your local restaurant, the family's working in the business. They're watching the cash register. You can probably open another restaurant across town, but there are very few restaurant operators that own more than a few restaurants and operate them successfully.

0
💬 0

1744.127 - 1760.278 Bill Ackman

The quick service business is about systems and building a model that a stranger who doesn't know the restaurant industry can come in and enter the business and build a successful business. successful franchise. Now, Chipotle is not a franchise company. They actually own all their own stores.

0
💬 0

1760.838 - 1779.671 Bill Ackman

But many of the most successful restaurant companies are franchise models, like a Burger King, a McDonald's, Tim Hortons, all these various brands, Popeyes. And there it's about systems. But the same systems apply whether you own all the stores and it's run by a big corporation or whether the owners of the restaurants are sort of franchisees, local entrepreneurs.

0
💬 0

1780.231 - 1788.895 Lex Fridman

So if the restaurant has scaled to a certain number, that means they've figured out some kind of system that works. It's very difficult to develop that kind of system. So that's a moat.

0
💬 0

1789.555 - 1812.387 Bill Ackman

A moat is you get to a certain scale and you do it successfully. And the brand is now understood by the consumer. And what's interesting about Chipotle is what they've achieved is difficult. They're not buying frozen hamburgers getting shipped in. They're buying fresh frozen. you know, sustainably sourced ingredients, they're preparing food in the store. That was a first, right?

0
💬 0

1812.427 - 1832.664 Bill Ackman

The quality of the product at Chipotle is incredible. It's the highest quality food you can get for, you can get a serious dinner for under 20 bucks and eat really health, you know, healthfully and very high quality ingredients. And that's just not available anywhere else. And it's very hard to replicate and to build those relationships with, you know, farmers around the country.

0
💬 0

1832.684 - 1851.581 Bill Ackman

It's a lot easier to make a deal with one of the big you know, massive food producers and buy your pork from them than to buy from a whole bunch of farmers around the country. And so that is a big moat for Chipotle, very difficult to replicate. And by the way, another company I think you have a stake in is McDonald's? No, we own a company called Restaurant Brands.

0
💬 0

1852.341 - 1855.804 Bill Ackman

Restaurant Brands owns a number of quick service companies, one of which is Burger King.

0
💬 0

1856.405 - 1873.179 Lex Fridman

Burger King, okay, wow. It's been a meme for a while, but I've... Burger King is great too, Wendy's, whatever. But usually I go McDonald's. I'll just eat burger patties. I don't know if you knew you could do this, but a burger patty at Burger King can do this. McDonald's, it's actually way cheaper.

0
💬 0

1873.199 - 1874.38 Bill Ackman

They'll just sell you the patty.

0
💬 0

1874.48 - 1898.791 Lex Fridman

The patty. And it's cheap. It's like $1.50 or $2 per patty. And it's about 250 calories and it's just meat. And despite the criticism and memes out there, that's... Pretty healthy stuff. It's healthy stuff. And so when I go, the healthiest I feel is when I do carnivore. It doesn't sound healthy, but if I eat only meat, I feel really good. I lose weight. I have all this energy. It's crazy.

0
💬 0

1898.951 - 1914.743 Lex Fridman

And when I'm traveling, the easiest way to get meat is that. So you go to McDonald's, you order six patties? Exactly. So there's this sad meme of me just sitting alone in a car when I'm traveling, just eating beef patties at McDonald's. But I love it. And you got to do what you love, what makes you happy. And that's what makes me happy.

0
💬 0

1914.903 - 1921.767 Bill Ackman

Maybe we'll have Burger King featuring it. What about Flame World? What's with these fried burgers? We got to get you to Burger King, you know, grilled burgers.

0
💬 0

1921.967 - 1935.335 Lex Fridman

Wait, is this like fast food trash? I didn't know. I don't know the details of how they're made. I don't have allegiance to McDonald's. I think we got a chance to switch you to Burger King. Great. We'll see. Yeah. I'm making so many deals today. It's wonderful.

0
💬 0

1935.916 - 1936.156 Bill Ackman

Okay.

0
💬 0

1936.537 - 1940.761 Lex Fridman

You were talking about most, and this kind of reminded me of Alphabet, the parent company.

0
💬 0

1941.161 - 1943.543 Bill Ackman

Sure. It's a big position for us.

0
💬 0

1943.804 - 1968.346 Lex Fridman

So it's interesting that you think that maybe Alphabet fits some of these characteristics. Yeah. It's tricky to know with everything that's happening in AI. And I'm interviewing Sundar Pichai soon. It's interesting that you think that there's a moat. And it's also interesting to analyze it because the consumer is just a fan of technology. Why is Google still around?

0
💬 0

1968.586 - 1981.035 Lex Fridman

It's not just the search engine. It's doing it all online. the basics of the business of search really well, but they're doing all these other stuff. So what's your analysis of Alphabet? Why are you still positive about it?

0
💬 0

1981.375 - 2003.403 Bill Ackman

Sure. So it's a business we've admired as a firm for, you know, whatever, 15 years, but rarely got to a price that we felt we could own it because again, the expectations were so high and price really matters. And really the sort of AI scare, I would call it. You know, Microsoft comes out with ChatGPT. They do an amazing demonstration. People like this most incredible product.

0
💬 0

2004.243 - 2013.529 Bill Ackman

And Google, which had been working on AI even earlier, obviously than Microsoft. Microsoft was behind in AI. It was really their ChatGPT deal that gave them a kind of a market presence.

0
💬 0

2014.569 - 2039.15 Bill Ackman

um and then google does this fairly disastrous uh demonstration of bard and the world says oh my god google's fallen behind in ai ai is the future stock gets crushed google gets to a price around 15 times earnings uh which for a business of this quality is an extremely extremely low price and our view on google one way to think about it when a business becomes a verb

0
💬 0

2040.331 - 2061.914 Bill Ackman

That's usually a pretty good sign about the mode around the business. So, you know, you'd open your computer and you open your search and very high percentage of the world starts with a Google page and a one line where you type in your search. You know, the Google advertising search YouTube franchise is one of the most dominant franchises in the world.

0
💬 0

2062.594 - 2075.528 Bill Ackman

Very difficult to disrupt, extremely profitable. The world is moving from offline advertising to online advertising, and that trend, I think, continues. Why? Because you can actually see whether your ads work. You know, they used to say about advertising, you know,

0
💬 0

2077.49 - 2090.559 Bill Ackman

You spend a fortune and you just don't know which 50% of it works, but you just sort of spend the money because you know ultimately that's going to bring in the customer. And now with online advertising, you can see with granularity which dollars I'm spending.

0
💬 0

2091.039 - 2111.074 Bill Ackman

When people click on the search term and end up buying something and I pay, it's a very high return on investment for the advertiser and they really dominate that market. Now, AI, of course, is a risk. If all of a sudden people start searching or asking questions of ChatGPT and don't start with the Google search bar, that's a risk to the company.

0
💬 0

2111.434 - 2130.608 Bill Ackman

And so our view, based on work we had done and talked to industry experts, is that Google, if anything, by virtue of the investment they've made, the time, the energy that people put into it, We felt their AI capabilities were, if anything, potentially greater than Microsoft Chat GPT and that the market had overreacted.

0
💬 0

2131.609 - 2154.242 Bill Ackman

And because Google, you know, is a big company, global business, regulators scrutinize it incredibly carefully. They couldn't take some of the same liberties a startup like OpenAI did in releasing a product. And I think Google took a more cautious approach in releasing an early version of BARD in terms of its capabilities. And that let Lamarck the world to believe that they were behind.

0
💬 0

2154.582 - 2177.191 Bill Ackman

And we ultimately concluded they're tied or ahead, and you're paying nothing for that potential business. And they also have huge advantages. You think of all the data Google has, like the search data, all the various applications, email and otherwise, and the Google suite of products. It's an incredible data set. So they have more training data than pretty much any company in the world.

0
💬 0

2177.371 - 2195.966 Bill Ackman

They have incredible engineers. They have enormous financial resources. So that was kind of the bet. And we still think it's probably the cheapest of the big seven companies in terms of the price you're paying for the business relative to its current earnings. It also is a business that has a lot of potential for efficiency.

0
💬 0

2196.326 - 2219.256 Bill Ackman

You know, sometimes when you have this enormously profitable dominant company, All of the technology companies in the post-March 20 world grew enormously in terms of their teams, and they probably overhired. You've seen some, the Facebooks of the world, and now even Google, starting to get a little more efficient in terms of their operations. We paid a low multiple for the business.

0
💬 0

2220.117 - 2238.142 Bill Ackman

One way to think about the value of the business is the price you pay for the earnings. Or alternatively, what's the yield? If you flip over the price over the earnings, it gives you kind of the yield of the business. So a 15 multiple is about almost a 7.5% yield. And that earnings yield is growing over time as the business grows.

0
💬 0

2238.422 - 2258.508 Bill Ackman

That's compared to what you can earn lending your money to the government, 4%. That's a very attractive going in yield. And then there's all kinds of what we call optionality in all the various businesses and investments they've made that are losing money. They've got a cloud business that's growing very rapidly, but they're investing basically 100% of the profits from that business in growth.

0
💬 0

2258.528 - 2278.013 Bill Ackman

So you're in that earnings number, you're not seeing any earnings from the cloud business. And they're one of the top cloud players. So very interesting, generally well-managed company with incredible assets and resources and dominance. And it has no debt. It's got a ton of cash. And so pretty good story.

0
💬 0

2279.234 - 2308.404 Lex Fridman

Is there something fundamentally different about AI that makes all of this more complicated, which is the sort of the exponential possibilities of the kinds of products and impact that AI could create when you're looking at Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Google, all of these companies, XAI. or maybe startups? Is there some more risk introduced by the possibilities of AI?

0
💬 0

2308.865 - 2331.378 Bill Ackman

Absolutely. That's a great question. Business investing is about finding companies that can't be disrupted. AI is the ultimate disruptible asset or technology. And that's what makes investing treacherous is that you own a business that's enormously profitable, management gets, if you will, fat and happy. And then a new technology emerges that just takes away all their profitability.

0
💬 0

2331.938 - 2350.185 Bill Ackman

And AI is this incredibly powerful tool, which is why every business is saying, how can I use AI in my business to make us more profitable, more successful, grow faster, and also disrupt or protect ourself from the, you know, the incomings. You know, it's a bit like, you know, Buffett talks about technology.

0
💬 0

2350.945 - 2375.579 Bill Ackman

A great business like a castle surrounded by this really wide moat, but you have all these barbarians trying to get in and steal the princess. And it happens. Kodak, for example, was an amazing, incredibly dominant company until it disappeared. Polaroid, this incredible technology. And that's why we have tended to stay away from companies that are technology companies.

0
💬 0

2375.599 - 2387.363 Bill Ackman

Because technology companies, generally, the world is such a dynamic place that someone's always working on a better version. And, you know, Kodak was caught up in the analog film world. And then the world changed.

0
💬 0

2388.103 - 2403.508 Lex Fridman

Well, Google was pretty fat and happy until Chagipati came out. How would you rate their ability to wake up, lose weight, and be less happy and aggressively rediscover their... search for happiness.

0
💬 0

2403.728 - 2417.074 Bill Ackman

I think you've seen a lot of that in the last year. And I would say some combination of embarrassment and pride are huge motivators for everyone from Sergey Brin to the management of the company.

0
💬 0

2418.355 - 2440.45 Lex Fridman

And Demis Hassab has thrown them into the picture and all of DeepMind teams and the unification of teams and all the shakeups. It was interesting to watch the chaos. I love it. I love it when everybody freaks out. Like you said, partly embarrassment and partly that competitive drive that drives engineers is great. I can't wait to see what, there's been just a lot of improvement in the product.

0
💬 0

2440.47 - 2450.477 Lex Fridman

Let's see where it goes. You mentioned management. How do you analyze the governance structure and the individual humans that are the managers of a company?

0
💬 0

2450.817 - 2470.77 Bill Ackman

So as I like to say, incentives drive all human behavior. And that certainly applies in the business world. So understanding the people and what drives them and what the actual financial and other incentives of a business are very important part of the analysis for investing in a company. And you can learn a lot.

0
💬 0

2470.89 - 2487.574 Bill Ackman

You know, I mentioned before, one great way to learn about a business is go back a decade and read everything that management has written about the business and see what they've done over time. See what they've said. You know, conference calls are actually, you know, relatively recent experiences. When I started in the business, there weren't conference call transcripts.

0
💬 0

2487.914 - 2506.862 Bill Ackman

Now you have a written record of everything management has said in response to questions from analysts at conferences and otherwise. You learn a lot about people by listening to what they say, how they answer questions, and ultimately their track record for doing what they say they're going to do. Do they under-promise and over-deliver? Do they over-promise and under-deliver?

0
💬 0

2507.882 - 2531.182 Bill Ackman

Do they say what they're going to do? Do they admit mistakes? Do they build great teams? Do people want to come work for them? Are they able to retain their talent? And then part of it is, how much are they running the business for the benefit of the business? How much are they running the business for the benefit of themselves? And that's kind of the analysis you do.

0
💬 0

2531.522 - 2537.017 Lex Fridman

Are we talking about CEO, COO? What does management mean? How deep does it go?

0
💬 0

2537.418 - 2557.989 Bill Ackman

Sure. So... This very senior management matters enormously. You know, we use the Chipotle example. Steve L's great entrepreneur, business got to a scale he really couldn't run it. We recruited a guy named Brian, helped a company recruit a guy named Brian Nickel. And he was considered the best person in the quick service industry. He came in and completely rebuilt the company.

0
💬 0

2558.209 - 2575.807 Bill Ackman

Actually, we moved the company. Chipotle was moved to California. And sometimes one way to redo the culture of a company is just to move it geographically. And then you can kind of reboot the business. But a great leader has great followership. You know, over the course of their career, they'll have a team they've built that will come follow them into the next opportunity.

0
💬 0

2577.548 - 2592.272 Bill Ackman

But the key is, you know, really the top person matters enormously because and then it's who they recruit. You know, you recruit an A plus leader and they're going to recruit other A type people. You recruit a B leader, you're not going to recruit any great talent beneath them.

0
💬 0

2593.995 - 2607.344 Lex Fridman

You mentioned Warren Buffett. You said you admire him as an investor. What do you find most interesting and powerful about his approach? What aspects of his approach to investing do you also practice?

0
💬 0

2607.824 - 2623.475 Bill Ackman

Sure. So most of what I've learned in the investment business, I've learned from Warren Buffett. He's been my great professor of this business. My first book I read in the business was The Ben Graham Intelligent Investor. But fairly quickly, you get to learn about Warren Buffett. And I started by reading the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports.

0
💬 0

2624.735 - 2642.223 Bill Ackman

And then I eventually got the Buffett partnership letters that you could see, which are an amazing read to go back to the mid 1950s and read what he wrote to his limited partners when he first started out and just follow that trajectory over a long period of time. So what's remarkable about him is one, duration, right? He's still at it at 93.

0
💬 0

2643.904 - 2666.368 Bill Ackman

uh you know to uh you know takes a very long-term view um but a big thing that you learn from him investing requires this incredible dispassionate uh unemotional quality you have to be extremely economically rational uh which is not uh a basic it's not something you learn in the jungle you know i don't think it's something that you know

0
💬 0

2666.8 - 2687.734 Bill Ackman

If you think about surviving the jungle, the lion shows up and everyone starts running, you run with them. That does not work well in markets. In fact, you generally have to do the opposite. When the lemmings are running over the cliff, that's the time where you're facing the other direction and you're running the other direction, i.e. you're stepping in, you're buying.

0
💬 0

2688.474 - 2706.744 Bill Ackman

Stocks are really low prices. Buffett's been great at that and great at teaching about what he calls temperament, which is this sort of emotional or unemotional quality that you need to be able to dispassionately look at the world and say, okay, is this a real risk? Are people overreacting?

0
💬 0

2708.245 - 2722.255 Bill Ackman

People tend to get excited about investments when stocks are going up and they get depressed when they're going down. I think that's just inherently human behavior. You have to reverse that. You have to get excited when things get cheaper, and you got to get concerned when things get more expensive.

0
💬 0

2723.296 - 2742.172 Lex Fridman

You've been a part of some big battles, some big losses, some big wins. So it's been a roller coaster. So in terms of temperament, psychologically, how do you not let that break you? How do you maintain a calm demeanor and avoid running with the lemmings?

0
💬 0

2744.198 - 2767.298 Bill Ackman

I think it's something you kind of learn over time. A key success factor is you want to have enough money in the bank that you're going to survive, you know, regardless of what's going on with volatility in markets. You know, people who, one, you shouldn't borrow money. So if you borrow money, you own stocks on margin. Markers are going down and you have your livelihood at risk.

0
💬 0

2767.958 - 2791.355 Bill Ackman

It's very difficult to be rational. So key is getting yourself to a place where you're financially secure. You're not going to lose your house, right? That's a kind of a key thing. And then also doing your homework, you know, stock prices, stocks can trade at any price in the short term. And if you know what a business is worth and you understand the management, you know it extremely well.

0
💬 0

2792.435 - 2806.2 Bill Ackman

It's not nearly as, it doesn't bother you when a stock price goes down or it has much less impact on you because you know, you know, again, as Mr. Graham said, you know, the short term, the market's a voting machine. You have a bunch of lemmings voting one direction. That's concerning.

0
💬 0

2806.22 - 2826.091 Bill Ackman

But if it's a great business, doesn't have a lot of debt and people are going to just listen to more music next year than this year, you know, you're going to do well. So it's a bit some combination of being personally secure and also just knowing what you own. And over time, you build calluses, I would say.

0
💬 0

2826.991 - 2844.129 Lex Fridman

So psychologically, just as a human being. speaking of lions and gazelles and all this kind of stuff, is there some, is it as simple as just being financially secure? Is there some just human qualities that you have to be born with slash develop?

0
💬 0

2844.98 - 2863.265 Bill Ackman

I think so. I think, now I'm a pretty emotional person, I would say, or I feel pretty strong emotions, but not in investing. I'm remarkably immune to kind of volatility and that's a big advantage. And it took some time for me to develop that. So you weren't born with that, you think?

0
💬 0

2863.385 - 2867.386 Lex Fridman

No. So being emotional, do you want to respond to volatility?

0
💬 0

2868.306 - 2890.927 Bill Ackman

Yeah. And you just, it's a bit, again, I, you can learn a lot from other people's experience. It's one of the few businesses where you can learn an enormous amount by reading about other periods in history, you know, watch, you know, following Buffett's career, the mistakes he made. If you're investing a lot of capital, every one of your mistakes is gonna be big, right?

0
💬 0

2891.007 - 2914.135 Bill Ackman

So we've made big mistakes. The good news is that the vast majority of things we've done have worked out really well. And so that also gives you confidence over time. But because we make very few investments, we own eight things today or seven companies of that matter. If we get one wrong, it's gonna be big news. And so the other nature of our business you have to be comfortable with

0
💬 0

2914.755 - 2921.959 Bill Ackman

There's a lot of public scrutiny, a lot of public criticism, and that requires some experience.

0
💬 0

2923.319 - 2937.969 Lex Fridman

I think we'll talk about some of that. Financially secure is something I believe also recommend for even just everyday investors. Is there some general advice there? from the things you've been talking about that applies to everyday investors?

0
💬 0

2938.249 - 2961.111 Bill Ackman

Sure. So, never invest money you can't afford to lose. Where it would, if you lost this money, you know, you lose your house, et cetera. So, having... Being in a place where you're investing money that you don't care about the price in the short term. It's money for your retirement and you take a really long-term view. I think that's key.

0
💬 0

2962.793 - 2987.851 Bill Ackman

Never investing where you borrow money against your securities. The markets offer you the opportunity to leverage your investment. And in most worlds, you'll be okay. Except if there's a financial crisis or... You know, a nuclear device gets detonated, God forbid, somewhere in the world. Or there's an unexpected war. Or, you know, someone kills a leader unexpectedly.

0
💬 0

2987.871 - 3006.403 Bill Ackman

You know, things happen that can change the course of history, and markets react very negatively to those kinds of events. And you can own the greatest business in the world, trading for $100 a share, and next moment it could be $50. So as long as you don't borrow against securities, you own really high-quality businesses, and it's not money that you need in the short term...

0
💬 0

3007.844 - 3021.414 Bill Ackman

then you can actually be thoughtful about it. And that is a huge advantage. The vast majority of investors, it seems, tend to be the ones that panic and the downturns get over-related when markets are doing well.

0
💬 0

3022.074 - 3029.676 Lex Fridman

So be able to think long-term and be sufficiently financially secure such that you can afford to think long-term.

0
💬 0

3030.696 - 3049.841 Bill Ackman

Buffett is the ultimate long-term thinker. And just the decisions he makes, the consistency of the decisions he's made over time, and fitting into that sort of long-term framework is very educational, let's put it that way, for learning about this business.

0
💬 0

3049.861 - 3060.847 Lex Fridman

Yeah. So you mentioned eight companies, but what do you think about mutual funds that are for everyday investors that diversify across a larger number of companies?

0
💬 0

3061.848 - 3082.343 Bill Ackman

I think there are very few mutual funds. Uh, there are thousands and thousands of mutual funds. They're very few that earn their keep in terms of the fees they charge. Uh, they tend to be too diversified. Um, and, uh, too short term, and you're often much better off just buying an index fund.

0
💬 0

3082.703 - 3100.825 Bill Ackman

And many of them perform, if you look carefully at their portfolios, they're not so different from the underlying index itself, and you tend to pay a much higher fee. Now, all of that being said, there's some very talented mutual fund managers, a guy named Will Danoff at Fidelity. He's had a great record over a long period of time.

0
💬 0

3100.845 - 3121.78 Bill Ackman

The famous Peter Lynch, Ron Barron, another great long-term growth stock investor. So there's some great mutual funds, but I put them in the handful versus the thousands. And if you're in the thousands, I'd rather someone bought just an index fund basically.

0
💬 0

3122.352 - 3132.815 Lex Fridman

Yeah, index funds. But what would be the leap for an everyday investor to go to investing in a small number of companies, like two, three, four, five companies?

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3133.897 - 3157.226 Bill Ackman

I even recommend for individual investors to invest in a dozen companies. You don't get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50. Most of the benefits of diversification come in the first, call it 10 or 12. And if you're investing in businesses that don't have a lot of debt, They're businesses that you can understand yourself.

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3158.427 - 3178.277 Bill Ackman

Actually, individual investors did a much better job analyzing Tesla than the so-called professional investors or analysts, the vast majority of them. So if it's a business you understand, if you bought a Tesla, you understand the product and its appeal to consumers, it's a good place to start when you're analyzing a company. So I would invest in things you can understand. That's kind of a key.

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3179.917 - 3202.428 Bill Ackman

You like Chipotle. You understand why they're successful. You can go there every week and you can monitor, is anything changing? How's chicken al pastor? Is that a good upgrade from the basic chicken? You know, the drink offerings improving, the store is clean. I think you should invest in companies you really understand.

0
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3202.648 - 3214.453 Bill Ackman

Simple businesses where you can predict with a high degree of confidence what it's going to look like over time. And if you do that in a not particularly concentrated fashion and you don't borrow money against your securities, you'll probably do much better than your typical mutual fund.

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3214.83 - 3220.794 Lex Fridman

Yeah, it's interesting. Consumers that love a thing are actually good analysts of that thing, or I guess a good starting point.

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3220.974 - 3248.396 Bill Ackman

By the way, there's much more information available today. When I was first investing, literally we had people faxing us documents from the SEC filings in Washington, D.C. Now everything's available online. Conference call transcripts are free. You have AI. You have unlimited access. data and all kinds of message boards and Reddit forums and things where people are sharing advice.

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3248.757 - 3259.59 Bill Ackman

And everyone has their own, by virtue of their career or experience, they'll know about an industry or a business. And that gives them, I would take advantage of your own competitive advantages.

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3260.371 - 3267.956 Lex Fridman

I'm just afraid if I invest in Chipotle, I'll be like analyzing every little change of menu from a financial perspective and just be very critical.

0
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3267.976 - 3271.839 Bill Ackman

If it's going to affect your experience, I wouldn't buy the stock.

0
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3272.577 - 3296.384 Lex Fridman

Yeah, I mean, I should also say that I am somebody that emotionally doesn't respond to volatility, which is why I've never bought index funds. And I just noticed myself psychologically being affected by the ups and downs of the market. I want to tune out because if I'm at all tuned in, it has a negative impact on my life. Yeah, that's really important. Can you explain what activist investing is?

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3296.404 - 3313.297 Lex Fridman

You've been talking about investing and then looking at companies when they're struggling, stepping in and reconfiguring things within that company and helping it become great. So that's part of it, but let's just zoom out. What's this idea of activist investing?

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3313.777 - 3331.492 Bill Ackman

I think recently, in the last couple of days, I read an article saying that more than 50% of the capital in the world today invests in the stock market's passive, indexed money. And that's the most passive form, right? So if you think about an index fund, a machine buys a fixed set of securities, right?

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3332.253 - 3356.718 Bill Ackman

in certain proportion uh there's no human judgment at all and there's no real person behind it in a way they never take steps to improve a business they just quietly own securities what we do is we invest our capital in a handful of things we get to know them really really well because you're going to put 20 of your assets in something you need to know it really well but

0
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3357.589 - 3382.112 Bill Ackman

Once you become a big holder and if you've got some thoughts on how to make a business more valuable, you can do more than just be a passive investor. So our strategy is built upon finding great companies in some cases that have lost their way and then helping them succeed. And we can do that with ideas from outside the boardroom. Sometimes we take a seat on a board or more than one.

0
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3384.073 - 3397.683 Bill Ackman

And we work with the best management teams in the world to help these businesses succeed. So when I first went into this business, no one knew who we were. And we didn't have that much money. And so to influence what was, to us, a big company...

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3398.784 - 3421.019 Bill Ackman

uh we had to make a fair bit more noise right so we would buy a stake we'd announce it publicly we'd attempt to engage with management the first activist investment we made at persian square was wendy's i couldn't get the ceo to ever return my call he didn't return my call so we actually in that case our idea was wendy's owned a company called tim hortons which was this coffee donut chain

0
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3422.22 - 3444.037 Bill Ackman

And you could buy Wendy's for basically $5 billion. And they owned 100% of Tim Hortons, which itself was worth more than $5 billion. So you could literally buy Wendy's, separate Tim Hortons and get Wendy's for negative value. That seemed like a pretty good opportunity, even though the business wasn't doing that well. So we bought the stake, called the CEO, couldn't get a meeting, nothing.

0
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3444.417 - 3462.745 Bill Ackman

So we hired actually Blackstone, which was at that time had an investment bank. And we hired them to do what's called a fairness opinion of what Wendy's would be worth if they followed our advice. And they agreed to do it, paid him a fee for it. And then we mailed in a letter with a copy of the fairness opinion saying 20s would basically be worth 80% more if they did what we said.

0
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3463.325 - 3478.851 Bill Ackman

And six weeks later, they did what we said. So that's activism, at least an early form of activism. With that kind of under our belt, we had a little more credibility. And now we started to take things and stakes in companies. The media would pay attention. So the media became kind of an important partner.

0
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3479.992 - 3499.118 Bill Ackman

And, you know, some combination of shame, embarrassment, and opportunity motivated management teams to do the right thing. And then, you know, beyond that, there's certain steps you can take if management is recalcitrant and the shareholders are on your side. But it's a bit like running for office. You've got to get all the constituents to support you and your ideas.

0
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3499.859 - 3512.843 Bill Ackman

And if they support you and your ideas, you can overthrow, if you will, the board of a company. You bring in new talent and then take over the management of a business. And that's the most extreme form of activism. So that's kind of the early days.

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3513.487 - 3527.673 Bill Ackman

And a lot of the early things that we did were, you know, call it what we call sort of like investment banking activism, where we'd go in and recommend something a good investment bank would have recommended. And if they do it, we make a bunch of money, and then we moved on to the next one.

0
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3528.933 - 3549.206 Bill Ackman

And then we realized an investment, a company called General Growth, was the first time we took a board seat on a company. And there was some financial restructuring and also an opportunity to improve the operations of the business, sit on the board of a company. And that was one of the best investments we ever made. And we said, okay, we can do more than just be an outside the boardroom investor.

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3549.506 - 3565.887 Bill Ackman

And we can get involved in helping select the right management teams and helping guide the right management teams. And then we've done that over years. And then I would say the last seven years, we haven't had to be an activist. An activist is generally someone who's outside banging on the door, trying to get in.

0
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3566.427 - 3584.053 Bill Ackman

We're sort of built enough credibility that they open the door and they say, hey, Bill, what ideas do you have? So welcome, would you like to join the board? We're treated differently today than we were in the beginning. And that is, I would say, some people might just call it being an engaged owner.

0
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3585.314 - 3607.171 Bill Ackman

By the way, that's the way investing was done in the Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan days, you know, 150 years ago, right? You had these iconic business leaders that would own 20% of US steel. And when things would go wrong, they'd replace the board and the management and fix them. And over time, we went to a world where mutual funds were created like in the 1920s, 30s.

0
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3609.116 - 3630.285 Bill Ackman

index funds with Vanguard and others. And that all these controlling shareholders would kind of gave their stock to society or their children and multiple generations. And there were no longer kind of controlling owners of businesses or very few. And that led to underperformance and the opportunity for activists over time. And what activism has done, and I think we've helped lead this movement,

0
💬 0

3631.045 - 3641.092 Bill Ackman

is it restored kind of the balance of power between the owners of the business and the managements of the company. And that's been a very good thing for the performance of the U.S. stock market, actually.

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3641.612 - 3652.059 Lex Fridman

So the owners meaning the shareholders. Yes. And so there's a more direct channel of communication with activist investing between the shareholders and the people running the company.

0
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3652.199 - 3673.621 Bill Ackman

Yes. So activists generally never own more than 5% or 10% of a business. So they don't have control. Right. So the way they get influence is they have to convince the other, you know, they have to get to sort of a majority of the other shareholders to support them. And if they can get that kind of support, they can behave almost like a controlling shareholder. And that's how it works.

0
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3674.241 - 3678.606 Lex Fridman

So the running of a company is, according to Bill Ackman, is more democratic now.

0
💬 0

3679.676 - 3697.487 Bill Ackman

It is, it is, but you need some thought leaders. So activists are kind of thought leaders because they can spend the time and the money. A retail investor that owns a thousand shares doesn't have the resources or the time. They got a day job. Whereas an activist day job is finding the handful of things where there are opportunities.

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3698.621 - 3709.906 Lex Fridman

So on average, is it good to have such an engaged, powerful, influential investor helping direct the direction of a company?

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3711.127 - 3730.246 Bill Ackman

Depends who that investor is, but generally I think it's a good thing. And that's why, you know, one of the problems with being CEO of a company today and having a very diversified shareholder base is the kind of short-term, long-term balance. And you have investors who have all different interests in terms of what they want to achieve and when they want it achieved.

0
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3731.352 - 3755.022 Bill Ackman

And a CEO of a new company, a new CEO of an old company, let's say, hasn't had the chance to develop the credibility to make the kind of longer term decisions and can be stuck in a cycle of being judged on a quarterly basis. And a business, the best businesses are forever assets. And decisions you make now have impact three, four or five years from now.

0
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3756.215 - 3770.278 Bill Ackman

In order to make, and sometimes there are decisions we make that have the effect of reducing the earnings of a company in the short term, because in the long term, it's going to make the business much more valuable. But sometimes it's hard to have that kind of credibility when you're a new CEO of a company.

0
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3770.558 - 3785.944 Bill Ackman

So when you have a major owner that's respected by other shareholders sitting on the board saying, hey, the CEO is doing the right thing and making this expensive investment in a new factory. We're spending more money on R&D because we're developing something that's going to pay off over time.

0
💬 0

3786.724 - 3795.351 Bill Ackman

That large owner on the board can help buy the time necessary for management to behave in a longer-term way. And that's, I think, good for all the shareholders.

0
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3795.552 - 3820.66 Lex Fridman

So that's the good story, but can it get bad? Can you have a... a CEO who is a visionary and sees the long-term future of a company, and an investor come in and have very selfish interest in just making more money in the short-term, and therefore destroy and manipulate the opinions of the shareholders and other people on the board in order to sink the company,

0
💬 0

3822.452 - 3828.457 Lex Fridman

maybe increase the price, but destroy the possibility of long-term value.

0
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3828.777 - 3848.374 Bill Ackman

It could theoretically happen. But again, the activist in your example, which only doesn't own a lot of stock, the shareholder basis today, the biggest shareholders are these index funds that are forever, right? The BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, their ownership stakes are just at this point only growing because of the inflows of capital they have from shareholders.

0
💬 0

3849.114 - 3867.422 Bill Ackman

So they have to think or they should think very long-term and they're going to be very skeptical of someone coming in with a short-term idea. that drives the stock price up, you know, in the next six months, but impairs the company's long-term ability to compete. And basically that ownership group prevents this kind of activity from really happening.

0
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3867.902 - 3873.407 Lex Fridman

So people are generally skeptical, short-term activist investors.

0
💬 0

3873.747 - 3880.613 Bill Ackman

Yes. And they're very few. I don't really know any short-term activist investors, not ones with credibility.

0
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3881.752 - 3894.837 Lex Fridman

You mentioned general growth. I read somewhere it called arguably one of the best hedge fund trades of all time. So I guess it went from $60 million to over $3 billion.

0
💬 0

3895.557 - 3911.846 Bill Ackman

It was a good one. All right. But it wasn't a trade. I wouldn't describe it as a trade. A trade is something you buy and you flip. This is something where we made the investment initially in November of 2008. and we still own a company we spun off of General Growth, and it's now 15 years later.

0
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3913.126 - 3918.447 Lex Fridman

Can you describe what went into making that decision to actually increase the value of the company?

0
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3918.467 - 3941.756 Bill Ackman

Sure. So this was at the time of the financial crisis, circa November 2008. Real estate's always been a kind of sector that I've been interested in. I began my career in the real estate business working for my dad, actually. arranging mortgages for real estate developers. I have deep ties and interest in the business. General Growth was the second largest shopping mall company in the country.

0
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3942.396 - 3955.563 Bill Ackman

Simon Properties, many people have heard of. General Growth was number two. They own some of the best malls in the country. At that time, people thought of shopping malls as these non-disruptible things. Again, we talk about disruption. Malls have been disrupted in many ways.

0
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3956.623 - 3977.694 Bill Ackman

Uh, and general growth stock, uh, the general growth, the company, the CFO in particular was very aggressive in the way that he borrowed money. And he borrowed money from a kind of wall street, uh, not long-term, uh, mortgages, but generally relatively short-term mortgages. It was pretty aggressive as the value went up, he would borrow more and more against the assets.

0
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3977.734 - 3996.299 Bill Ackman

And that helped the short-term results of the business. The problem was during the financial crisis, the market for what's called CMBS, commercial mortgage-backed securities, basically shut. And the company, because its debt was relatively short-term, had a lot of big maturities coming up that they had no ability to refinance. And the market said, oh my God,

0
💬 0

3996.96 - 4015.774 Bill Ackman

The lenders are going to foreclose and the shareholders are going to get wiped. The company's going to go bankrupt. They're going to get wiped out. The stock went from $63 a share to 34 cents. So, and there was a family, the Bucks bound family owned, I think about 25% of the company. And they had a $5 billion, $5 billion of stock that was worth 25 million or something by the time.

0
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4016.594 - 4036.913 Bill Ackman

we bought a stake in the business. And what interested me was I thought the assets were worth substantially more than the liabilities. The company had 27 billion of debt. and had $100 million value of the equity down from like 20 billion. Okay. And one that, you know, sort of an interesting place to start with a stock down 99%.

0
💬 0

4038.434 - 4055.62 Bill Ackman

But the fundamental drivers, the mall business, our occupancy, how occupied are the malls? Occupancy was up year on year between 07 and 08, interestingly. Net operating income, which is kind of a measure of cashflow from the malls, that was up year on year. So kind of the underlying fundamentals were doing fine.

0
💬 0

4056.567 - 4081.931 Bill Ackman

The only problem they had is they had billions of dollars of debt that they had to repay. They couldn't repay. And if you kind of examine the bankruptcy code, it's precisely designed for a situation like this, where it's kind of this resting place you can go to kind of restructure your business. Now, the problem was that every other company that had gone bankrupt, the shareholders got wiped out.

0
💬 0

4082.492 - 4094.715 Bill Ackman

And so the market's seeing every previous example, the shareholders get wiped out. The assumption is the stock is going to go to zero. But that's not what the bankruptcy code says. What the bankruptcy code says is that the value gets apportioned based on value.

0
💬 0

4095.895 - 4115.548 Bill Ackman

And if you could prove to a judge that there was the assets worth more than the liabilities, then the shareholders actually get to keep their investment in the company. And that was the bet we made. And so we stepped into the market and we bought 25% of the company in the open market for, we had to pay up. It started out at 34 cents. I think there were 300 million shares.

0
💬 0

4116.349 - 4134.4 Bill Ackman

So it was at $100 million value. By the time we were done, we paid an average of, we paid 60 million for 25% of the business. So about $240 million for the equity of the company. And then we had to get on the board to convince the directors the right thing to do. And the board was in complete panic, didn't know what to do, spending a ton of money on advisors.

0
💬 0

4135.971 - 4157.397 Bill Ackman

And, you know, I was a shareholder activist, you know, four years into Pershing Square and no one had any idea what we were doing. They thought we were crazy. Every day we'd go into the market and we'd buy this penny stock. And we'd file what's called a 13D, every 1% increase in our stake. And people just thought we were crazy. We're buying stock in a company that's going to go bankrupt.

0
💬 0

4157.637 - 4180.829 Bill Ackman

Bill, you're going to lose all your money. You know, run. Okay. And I said, well, wait, you know, bankruptcy code says that if there's more asset value than liabilities, we should be fine. And the key moment, if you're looking for fun moments, is there's a woman named Maddie Buxbaum, who was from the Buxbaum family. And her cousin, John, was chairman of the board, CEO of the company.

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💬 0

4181.93 - 4200.988 Bill Ackman

And I said, as she calls me after we disclose our stake in the company, she's like, Billy Ackman, I'm really glad to see you here. And I met her like, I don't think it was a date, but I kind of met her in a social context when I was like 25 or something. And she said, look, I'm really glad to see you here. And if there's anything I can do to help you, call me. I said, sure.

0
💬 0

4202.61 - 4215.699 Bill Ackman

We kept trying to get on the board of the company. They wouldn't invite us on. Couldn't really run a proxy contest, you know, not with a company going bankrupt. And their advisors actually were Goldman Sachs. And they're like, you don't want the fox in the hen house. And they were listening to their advisors.

0
💬 0

4216.619 - 4233.517 Bill Ackman

So I called Maddie up and I said, Maddie, I need to get on the board of the company to help. And she says, you know what? I will call my cousin and I'll get it done. Mm-hmm. she calls back a few hours later, you'll be going on to the board. I don't know what she said to her because... What she was convincing.

0
💬 0

4233.577 - 4251.721 Bill Ackman

Next thing you know, I'm invited to on the board of the company and the board is talking about The old equity of general growth. Old equity is what you talk about the shareholders are getting wiped out. I said, no, no, no. This board represents the current equity of the company. And I'm a major shareholder. John's a major shareholder. There's plenty of asset value here.

0
💬 0

4251.741 - 4270.513 Bill Ackman

This company should be able to be restructured for the benefit of shareholders. And we led a restructuring for the benefit of shareholders. And it took, let's say, eight months. And the company emerged from chapter 11. We made an incremental investment into the company. And the shareholders kept the vast majority of their investment.

0
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4271.273 - 4287.839 Bill Ackman

All the creditors got their face amount of their investment, par plus accrued interest. And it was a great outcome. All the employees kept their jobs. The mall stayed open. There was no liquidation. The bankruptcy system worked the way it should. I was in court all the time.

0
💬 0

4288.179 - 4308.629 Bill Ackman

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.

0
💬 0

4309.489 - 4328.621 Bill Ackman

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.

0
💬 0

4329.363 - 4350.228 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.

0
💬 0

4350.308 - 4370.998 Bill Ackman

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.

0
💬 0

4371.018 - 4381.305 Bill Ackman

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.

0
💬 0

4381.874 - 4390.823 Lex Fridman

What gave you confidence through that? Once a penny stock and I'm sure you were getting a lot of naysayers and people saying that this is crazy. It's the same thing. You just do the work.

0
💬 0

4391.283 - 4410.995 Bill Ackman

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.

0
💬 0

4411.735 - 4430.92 Bill Ackman

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.

0
💬 0

4431.42 - 4450.216 Lex Fridman

How hard is it to learn some of the legal aspects of this? Like you mentioned bankruptcy code. Like I imagine it's very sort of dense language and dense ideas and the loopholes and all that kind of stuff. Like if you're just stepping in and you've never done distressed investing, how hard is it to figure out? It's not that hard.

0
💬 0

4451.57 - 4459.232 Bill Ackman

No, it's not that hard. I mean, I literally read a book on distre