Bill Ackman on His Investing Playbook, His Bullish and Bearish Bets, and What Could Trigger the Next 2008
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The key to being a successful long term investor is being able to survive those kind of challenging market periods when everyone else is panicking. In fact, you want to have money to invest when others are panicking.
Bill Ackman doesn't just manage a portfolio. As the founder of Pershing Square, he has built one of the most closely watched hedge funds on Wall Street. When this guy tweets, he literally moves markets. Today, he tells me the biggest tip for investors.
Invest in something that you believe will withstand the test of time because the value of a business is the present value the cash generates over its life.
The macroeconomic risks he's worried about.
I think the biggest risk to markets is that there are a lot of very levered players in the market and we're at risk to some kind of extrinsic shock and that could put stocks to go down a lot.
And which company will win the AI race?
Some people are afraid of AI. They think it's going to be very destructive to jobs and so on. I think it will be actually a big driver of economic growth, a big driver of job growth, but you have to learn how to use the tools.
I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some Money Rehab. Bill Ackman, welcome to Money Rehab.
Thanks for having me.
So the economy feeling funky, but to be fair, it always feels a little bit funky. I don't think there's ever been a time it hasn't. What's your overall take on what's going on in the economy and markets right now?
So I think it's an unusual time in history. I think the big story is really AI. AI is driving an enormous amount of entrepreneurship. It's giving access to intelligence to a very broad group of people at very low cost. Google is basically free. And all, and then you have this massive infrastructure build in connection with AI. So you have, you know, some of the largest companies in the world competing to build the model for super intelligence and they need access to compute and data. And we're seeing a land rush as people are literally acquiring land, building data centers, filling them with GPUs, memory, and enabling this technology that's transforming the world. And I think it's going to have an enormous impact on all of us.
You know, some people are afraid of AI. They think it's going to be very destructive to jobs and so on. I think it will be actually a big driver of economic growth, big driver of job growth. But you have to learn how to use the tools. But I think the big story is really AI. Yes, we have a war going on in Iran. That, I think, will resolve itself. I don't think it's going to go on for years. I think it will resolve itself one way or another in a way that won't be too impactful in the U.S., And then I think you're seeing companies are actually doing quite well for the most part. But it is a bit of a bifurcated economy where some of the kind of lower income people are challenged with inflation. And that's a major concern.
So it's not all roses, I would say.
It's definitely not. It never is. So with OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX all going public, who do you think the winner is going to be?
You know, Anthropic seems to be the leader in terms of frontier models and building a business that apparently turned profitable recently. That's pretty impressive. What concerns me about OpenAI is, you know, kind of a prediction of very significant losses for the foreseeable future. And also, I think the open source models are getting so good. And, you know, the people will have access to either lower costs or free models that will enable them to answer most of the important questions or solve the problems that they need so i'm less of a believer in betting on the frontier model company you know spacex is a very interesting business you know the starlink franchise is enormously profitable and a near monopoly on kind of global satellite telephony you know their space franchise is incredible and and they have an amazing you know position in terms of data infrastructure if you want to rent a hundred thousand gpus about the only place you can do that
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:04
2
How does Bill Ackman assess the current economy and why is AI the big story right now?
6:04–12:32
3
Which AI companies does Ackman think will win—OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX—and why?
12:32–20:08
4
How does Ackman compare great businesses to bonds and evaluate stock valuation?
20:08–30:43
5
What advice does Ackman give new investors about picking stocks and starting with $1,000?
30:43–33:41
6
Why does Pershing Square keep a concentrated 12–15 stock portfolio and which names are they buying?
33:41–46:06
Speakers
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