比尔·阿克曼访谈：AI浪潮下的投资哲学、家庭危机与积极股东主义

Lex Fridman: Warren Buffett, the most brilliant investor in history, realized that he could not foresee the risks and disruptions associated with the advent of the Internet. Well, now with artificial intelligence, many say we are at the beginning of an industrial revolution. This is arguably a much harder problem. If you had to speculate, in your view, how will this play out over the next 18 months to several years? The pace of improvement is definitely the fastest we have ever seen in our lifetime—the fastest by far.

Bill Ackman: It is bound to come. Whenever it happens, there will be some kind of explosion or blowup, and people are going to suffer enormous losses. That kind of euphoria and subsequent reckoning happens in every major technological shift.

Lex Fridman: What does your investment process look like? For example, I'm really curious: how do you transition from the state of 'I'—where you personally develop an interest in something—to the state of 'we,' where the organization says, 'We are ready to write a check for $1 billion'? How does that consensus form?

Bill Ackman: Over time, our team has developed what feels like a spider-sense. If you look at our most successful investments, they typically share one trait: we were doing something that nobody had ever done before. We took unconventional paths and identified structural opportunities that others simply missed.

Lex Fridman: What advice would you give to the average person—someone earning an honest living who has saved some money and has the desire to invest? How should an ordinary investor navigate this?

Lex Fridman: Before we dive deeper into that, you went through an incredibly tough time recently with your family. Your daughter was a healthy young woman. What exactly happened to her?

Bill Ackman: It was something none of us knew she had: what is called an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, a congenital defect in the brain's vascular structure. As the doctors explained, normally arterial blood flows under high pressure through a bed of capillaries before reaching the veins. But with an AVM, there is a massive rush of arterial blood directly into the veins without the intermediary capillary network. Over time, under continuous strain, these fragile veins burst. Because the cranial cavity has a strictly limited volume, blood leaks out and intracranial pressure shoots up, causing heart palpitations and severe neurological collapse.

Bill Ackman: She was just a young woman full of life. That very day, she was supposed to travel to Abu Dhabi for a close friend's wedding scheduled for the following day. She had stopped by her apartment to pack a small carry-on bag before meeting her mother. When she didn't show up and was two hours late, everyone tried calling her, but no one could reach her phone for hours. I was asleep at the time. My eldest daughter sensed something was terribly wrong, left her place, and rushed over to Lucy's apartment to look for her.

Bill Ackman: When my eldest daughter got in, she found Lucy lying on the floor of her apartment, face down, barely breathing. She immediately called 911; over the line, the dispatcher could hear Lucy's labored, agonal gasping. My daughter didn't know the exact landline or building contacts at first, but a man in the building heard the frantic knocking, banged on the door, and helped get inside. My daughter handed me the phone, and I immediately jumped into a cab and raced across town.

Bill Ackman: One of the greatest hazards in that kind of situation is misdiagnosis: often, paramedics or ER staff might assume a young person collapsed because they had too much to drink at a party. The standard reaction to someone thought to be intoxicated is simply to put them under observation and let them sleep it off. But when someone is suffering an acute intracerebral hemorrhage, time is tissue. Intracranial bleeding progresses with terrifying speed. The longer the brain remains compressed under unbearable pressure, the more catastrophic and irreversible the permanent damage becomes.

Bill Ackman: I arrived at the hospital at 12:05 PM. The medical team was still running triage, trying to figure out what was wrong. Finally, a CT scan revealed massive intracranial bleeding. A neurosurgeon was urgently paged. The singular emergency objective was to alleviate the lethal intracranial pressure as quickly as humanly possible. The only viable surgical intervention was a decompressive craniectomy—removing roughly 40% of her skull so her swollen brain would have room to expand beyond its rigid bony borders rather than herniating.

Bill Ackman: After surgery, she was placed under intensive neuro-critical care. We met exceptional neurobiologists and specialists. Because a large section of her skull had been removed, she had to wear a protective headband, with no bone underneath to shield her brain. I looked at her and said, 'Look at me, you've got this. We are going to explore the absolute latest and greatest medical technologies.' But the doctors essentially told me: 'Bill, we don't even know what level of survival she can achieve. Her brain endured 19 hours of crushing intracranial pressure.'

Bill Ackman: I didn't actually realize until weeks later that neurosurgeons typically won't even operate to save someone if the brain has been under that magnitude of pressure for more than five hours, because brain death is virtually assumed. Yet Lucy endured 19 hours under that condition. She was as close to death as a human being could possibly get. We had no idea what her prognosis would be, but I am an incurable optimist. As time passed, her cognitive abilities began to reconstruct themselves. Lucy's core self emerged intact, including her wonderful, distinctive sense of humor. She was truly extraordinary.

Bill Ackman: She woke up, but initially she couldn't walk or speak. Watching her struggle to walk again was heartbreaking, but I firmly believe she will fully regain her ability to walk independently. Her speech recovery has been painstakingly slow. At first, she had around 17 vowel sounds, and therapists taught her to reliably produce about 15. Now she practices new consonants almost daily and can pronounce certain words. Her auditory comprehension, however, is completely sharp—she understands everything perfectly. In terms of her vision, she has also demonstrated meaningful progress.

Bill Ackman: I spent a tremendous amount of time collaborating with her physicians and neuroscientists. My proposal to them was simple: 'Let us take everything we are learning through Lucy's recovery and use it to help others facing catastrophic neurological injuries. Let's assemble the best minds and tools, and make cutting-edge restorative care accessible to everyone.'

Bill Ackman: About three or four months later, while driving back from a birthday celebration, I received a phone call from a close friend. We discussed Mount Sinai's vision for creating a comprehensive brain institute on their Fifth Avenue medical campus. The complication was that their existing master plan was likely a 10-year project requiring demolition of existing hospital wings and massive logistical displacement. Right around that time, a prime biotechnology facility at the corner of 65th Street and 11th Avenue became available—just ten blocks away from my office.

Bill Ackman: Within 60 days, we closed on the building and executed a purchase agreement for the remaining 3.4-acre parcel. Our overarching mission was to build the foremost brain institute in the world—an institution wholly dedicated to patient outcomes. We asked: How do we revolutionize acute neurological care? How can we offer restorative therapies that rewrite what is considered medically possible?

Bill Ackman: In the technology space, incredible breakthroughs are taking place simultaneously. Everyone is familiar with brain-computer interfaces and novel modalities for recording high-fidelity neural data directly from the brain, right? And then, of course, you combine that with artificial intelligence. We are capturing exponentially larger volumes of brain data, and with AI, we can interpret that neural data far better than ever before in human history. I hope Lucy will soon speak fluently and that her natural vision returns fully. But even if she faces persistent deficits, viable engineering solutions will emerge in a relatively short timeframe.

Bill Ackman: Think of the world we are entering: you wear glasses embedded with cameras that capture visual scenes, process the feed, and transmit calibrated optical signals straight into your visual cortex. I've had detailed conversations with Elon Musk about this. His fundamental view is that within a relatively short horizon—perhaps five years—bionic vision will arrive, to the point where individuals using it may actually see with greater fidelity than natural human eyesight.

Bill Ackman: Dr. Kellner, who supervised Lucy's overall neurosurgical care, described an unfortunate reality in the medical field: many neurologists and neurosurgeons operate under clinical nihilism. Historically, they simply don't believe that patients with devastating brain injuries can achieve meaningful, life-altering recovery. But we have encountered countless incredible stories of neuro-plastic recovery—stories that were wonderful to share with Lucy. We can do so much more. And New York is arguably the premier place on earth to build this. We are thrilled about what lies ahead.

Lex Fridman: That is truly incredible. What's fascinating is how you mobilized every relationship, resource, and expertise you developed in high finance and real estate to confront this personal crisis. You were able to rally brilliant minds and turn a vision into concrete reality. Families who yearn for medical breakthroughs are eager to participate. But on a human level, how do you emotionally cope with a catastrophe of this magnitude happening to your own child?

Bill Ackman: The first thing I had to do was confront reality and fully understand what had happened to my child. Through that process, I embraced an enduring principle: out of every terrible misfortune, something profoundly good can and must emerge. I have always carried this perspective throughout my life. Believing that Lucy's ordeal could catalyze a medical movement that helps innumerable human beings brought meaning to the pain and made me feel hopeful.

Lex Fridman: Have you always looked at life through that lens? Is that resilience something you acquired through experience? Was there a pivotal moment or crucible in your life where that worldview took root?

Bill Ackman: Throughout my career in business, I have encountered several near-death experiences where everything seemed on the brink of collapse. Yet in every single instance, after enduring the crisis, I emerged in an even stronger financial and strategic position. Those battles served as profound lessons. The old adage that 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' is absolutely true. For my daughter Lucy, as painful as this has been, I believe it will forge her into an extraordinary human being. When you recover from something that catastrophic, you develop the fortitude of a superhero.

Bill Ackman: One of the greatest catalysts for her recovery was that her mother was by her side every single day. I was stationed right there in the hospital room with them. Literally the day after she was admitted, we were in the middle of executing two initial public offerings (IPOs). So right out of Room 1107 on the 11th floor West at Mount Sinai Hospital, empowered by the wonders of Zoom, I would spend a few minutes caring for my daughter, then step into a 45-minute Zoom meeting to execute transactions. Both IPOs were completed successfully. Lucy was finally discharged from the hospital on August 8th. She transitioned to rehabilitation in Bridgehampton, later returned to the city for a small scheduled procedure, and weeks after the incident, our collective healing journey continues.

Bill Ackman: And we've been designing it to be the best rehab, recovery place for her to live. And, you know, socialization, social interaction is absolutely critical for someone recovering from something like this. The emotional support that you get and everything. And her friends have been amazing. Her friends have been with her every day. Every day, one or more of her friends shows up and talks to her, eats with her, engages with her. And she's like this super-giving person, a ton of friends. Everyone loves Lucy. And so she's getting an amazing return on that, because her friends are showing up to save her.

Shane Parrish: All of this makes me feel that humans can be so amazing.

Bill Ackman: Yeah, I mean, you can recover from almost anything. Yeah. And by the way, there's a lot more hope for people who've had strokes, brain injuries, military, TBI type stuff. And there are a number of people in the field that have been really frustrated with, you know, how far we've not gone, who want to be the ones that fix this.

Shane Parrish: What's been preventing us from going further? Like, why haven't we pushed the limits on this stuff?

Bill Ackman: The answer is some combination of the insurance industry and just economics and hospitals, how they work. I mean, a neurosurgeon wants to do their surgery and then move out to the next one. Neurosurgeons are highly compensated, but they get paid for doing surgeries. They don't get paid on patient recovery. Sometimes, you know, rehab, each hospital has some rehab program, but often it's embarrassingly, you know, not sufficient. And insurance companies only pay for six weeks of therapy. And then they get sent home. And their home is not the ideal place. And you need a whole village, you know, if they're the primary breadwinner and they're, you know, struck by this. Presumably, another member of the family is not working to take care of them. You know, the head of rehab actually, the center at Mass General, we were talking and he said, "Bill, you know, what Lucy's done is remarkable. She gets incredible care. The typical person, first of all, they're not going to get the surgery. Second of all, if they have the surgery, they go to a nursing home, you know, after hospital, because the family can't take care of them and they die a few months later from, you know, aspiration pneumonia, you know, the kind of care they get at a nursing home. It's really depressing." And, you know, so this is, I have the financial wherewithal to help her, and we can maximize the care. Let's try to investigate at the institute how to do it in a way that everyone can use. Technology can be super helpful. An incredible speech therapist gets $500 an hour. Insurance covers a percentage of that for some period of time, but people continue, you know, recovery goes on for years. But artificial intelligence, of course, can be a great speech therapist. So there are a lot of ways that technology will enable us to help people recover from these injuries.

Shane Parrish: And by the way, this all, you know, we're calling it the focus is brain rehab recovery and longevity, right? What does a brain rehab recovery institute do?

Bill Ackman: It focuses on brain recovery and your physical recovery. The brain plus your physical recovery is fundamentally longevity. And the other thing that hospitals aren't very good at is nutrition, right? The food in hospitals is frightening, right? They have someone who has a heart attack. And the next morning, they're having like pancakes with served with orange juice. In Lucy's case, you know, we made full food for every meal. The Institute's going to have amazing food because nutrition is critical. So there are a lot of things we can do taking advantage of this financial circumstance. I'm going to use it in a way that will enable us to build something optimal and I think ultimately self-staining.

Shane Parrish: You're an incredible father. What an amazing response to terrible circumstances.

Bill Ackman: You know, I would feel if I couldn't do it, I would be one of the most frustrated people in the world. I literally feel like I was designed to help her, like everything I know how to do.

Shane Parrish: You mentioned the aura ring, the data on the aura ring. What was the data that indicated something when it's...

Bill Ackman: So I've been in touch with the CEO. I've already reached out on Twitter. And I think you can, certainly with an Apple Watch and hopefully with an aura ring. So what happened was, if you look at her spike actually put it on Twitter at like 9 o'clock or so, there was a very quick spike in her pulse and then kind of a drop-off that looked, you know, kind of unusual. And if you combine that spike and a drop-off with someone falling, like the Apple Watch has an alert when someone falls. Right. Well, if that happens, and it happens when there's a huge spike and they're, you can reasonably assume. You can say, you know, did they have a heart attack? Did they have a whatever? You know, the easiest of things you can look at. And I think Or a ring should have the same capability. And I think they're working on it.

Shane Parrish: How do you keep your mind in a healthy place? Like, what do you do to keep your head right?

Bill Ackman: I play tennis almost every morning or do some form of exercise. I think that's probably the most important thing I do. Because it's the one thing I do of the course of the day where I'm completely focused on the ball that's coming at me as opposed to whatever else is going on. So I think that is a really important form of meditation for me. That's one. I've got a good night's sleep. I spend time with my family, things like that.

Shane Parrish: Do you still meditate?

Bill Ackman: I haven't in a while. I did for this challenging year, and I was middle of divorce. I was kind of on my own, and it really helped. And I probably should find 20 minutes a day to meditate.

Shane Parrish: How do you manage it all? I mean, you have four effective public entities. You have this with your daughter. You have a seven-year-old. You want to be a great husband. How do you harmonize all of these things?

Bill Ackman: So Persian Square has come a long way from when I started it. When I started it, I was sort of the chief bottle washer guy, and I would come up with all the ideas and I have an analyst that would help me prosecute them. And there was activism, I was the guy, etc. Over 22 years, we built an amazing team. We're in an industry where the half-life of someone who works for a firm, you know, people are paying, you know, the top people can move from one place to another and get huge, you know, $100 million bonuses for showing up, things like this. And the result is a lot of turnover in the industry. We have no turnover at Persian Square.

Shane Parrish: Is that good or bad?

Bill Ackman: Well, if there's someone that we've, you know, we've had no turnover. Obviously, we've made some mistakes and we've replaced some people over time. But if you look at the investment team, the investment team has been the same team for now nine years with a couple of new additions. And that's actually a really good thing. You know, if you have a constant revolving to work new people, you don't really know that you can trust people over time. You know, are they really telling you the truth? They're really telling you all the risks and rewards of a particular situation. When you've built a relationship with people and you work with them from nine years, and you have this culture of transparency and candidness, I don't for a second ever question anything that's being told to me by a member of the investment team. They're telling me the flat, you know, candid truth. That's a very comfortable place. So the answer to your question is, the Persian investment process is incredibly well run by a very experienced team that I play an important role in, at the ultimate say, but I am no longer the guy that generates the bulk of the ideas. I'm someone that generates a minority of the ideas in the portfolio, so that's helpful. And then the business itself, you know, the way it's structured is, you know, Ben is responsible for running a lot of the business elements of Pershing Square. So that frees me up to think. It frees me up to work on more strategic stuff. And it frees me up to come up with the occasional, you know, kind of idea. So Pershing kind of takes care of itself. Well, we have a number of public entities. We have an amazing accounting team. And those public companies all sort of do the same thing. They're really just, you know, there's the management company that earns fees from the entities run. That's Pershing Square Ink. P.S. Ticker. There are two funds that are publicly traded that own effectively the same portfolio. You know, there's certain governance responsibilities we have for those entities. But they're really, actually each of them have independent boards of directors. So our role there is as the kind of external investment manager. We have excellent boards at both of those. You know, the typical closed-end fund board is a bit of an embarrassment. I don't know how closely you follow the space, but, you know, you've seen Boas Weinstein going into proxy con. The typical closed-end fund board is a group of people who, not to make any, let's say BlackRock for the moment. I think I read somewhere that, you know, they sit on 86, the same six, six directors sit on 86 closed-end fund boards. It's hard to do real governance when you sit on 86 boards of directors, right? The typical limitation is four, you know, by ISS. We hired actually real directors. We pay them like real directors. They're not serving on multiple, you know, 50 other so we have really good boards. And what we do is fundamentally simple. So Persian kind of runs itself to some degree just because of delegation, incentives, alignment. You know, we have the best in alignment because no one's paid on individual stocks, so based on performance, at the end of the day, performance is going to be the biggest driver of our management company because the compounding of the underlying assets is what grows our fee stream. So it's just a very aligned entity. I own about 45% of the company. The team owns another, I think 35% of the company. And then we have a minority interest held by the public and some strategic investors that invest with us.

Shane Parrish: Please invest in us. And, you know, if you agree on the right actions to select the appropriate talent, and you know, some of you might be that person. The principles are written in stone tablets, and you have already been doing this for quite some time. But you are extremely competitive.

Bill Ackman: Of course.

Shane Parrish: I know what you want: to be the best investor in the world.

Bill Ackman: Of course. So it is like there is one path, and then there is another path. Because as a father and a husband, there is just one thing I want to say. In the end, setting up and immersing myself in artificial intelligence has occupied a significant part of my mind—what it should look like, what expectations to set—because over the past 60 or 90 days, we have been assembling a team. Similarly, at that moment, it was a bit like a proxy contest. Under the oversight of the board of directors, we needed to appoint a new general director and CEO. As soon as we appoint the general director, the team is formed and announced, and all of that, I will not interfere in the day-to-day operations. And the same can be said for AI. It will also be like managing a portfolio in a specific company context. You know, they might offer a board seat; I might preside over the board. But I do not think I should micromanage what we do in the AI setup, especially while we were simultaneously navigating a proxy contest.

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Shane Parrish: When do you think you are at your absolute best?

Bill Ackman: Actually, in many cases, it is when I am on vacation. Some of my very best ideas come when I am literally in a state of complete physical relaxation or mental peace.

Shane Parrish: You have spent a lot of time researching bubbles. How would you explain what a bubble actually is?

Bill Ackman: A bubble comes down to human nature and the desire to make massive amounts of money. People develop an intense fear of missing out (FOMO), so they jump in to participate and make money. This leads to ever more capital being poured into these transactions, driving up valuations until a massive boom occurs, and eventually, the bubble bursts. Historically, bubbles form around monumental technological shifts, such as railroads, automobiles, transistors, and the internet.

Shane Parrish: Do you think we are in one of those bubbles right now?

Bill Ackman: Well, we are definitely in a transitional period. AI is absolutely transformative. It is arguably the most transformative technology of our entire lifetimes. That said, there are definitely characteristic elements of a bubble present today. In the private venture capital space, a lot of crazy things are taking place. We are currently investing in a venture-stage business ourselves. Just two weeks ago, I met with representatives of a company who were not even actively fundraising; two days later, they closed a deal where investors put in $50 million at a $400 million valuation. And then just two weeks after that, they raised another $50 million at a $1 billion valuation. So many people are terrified of missing out on the future. As a result, massive amounts of capital are flooding into venture capital investments, competition is ferocious, valuations are leapfrogging, and benchmark scores are skyrocketing. I saw one company complete a round where their Series A was priced at a staggering $5 billion valuation.

Shane Parrish: How do you avoid that fear of missing out (FOMO)? What principles do you hold onto in life?

Bill Ackman: Look at Warren Buffett. In his sixty-year career, he has been extraordinary with his discipline. It is fascinating that during the real internet bubble, Berkshire Hathaway shares hit historical lows relative to the market. People thought he was finished because everyone else was making fast money while he refused to participate. Yet he simply kept going, completely unaffected, staying focused on long-term prospects.

Shane Parrish: What advice would you give to founders who are perhaps trying to raise capital right now?

Bill Ackman: Right now is a tremendous window of opportunity to raise capital. But if you raise capital, you must not spend it as if easy money will be around forever. During the internet bubble, there was practically unlimited capital available for rather dubious business plans. And then Barron's published a famous cover story over a weekend that listed all the internet companies in the public markets and analyzed how much cash they had left, calculated against their burn rate, showing exactly how many months they had before hitting zero. About a week later, the entire market peaked and crashed.

That dynamic happens to private companies that lack self-sustaining cash flow. It demands genuine discipline and self-restraint. When you take in $50 million or $100 million, do not fundamentally change your capital allocation methods, betting that you can simply tap the markets whenever you need cash. That reckoning always arrives, and when it does, the implosions are deafening as people lose immense sums of money, forcing a total industry reboot.

I believe the companies that manage their capital conservatively will survive and achieve lasting success, while those that recklessly blow through funding will vanish in short order. My advice to founders is simple: treat every single dollar as if it were your own hard-earned money, and spend it with extreme caution. Never assume that freely available capital will exist in perpetuity. By all means, raise the money now while the window is open, but keep it safely in the bank. Do not spend it frivolously; deploy it only with strict discipline and rationality.

Shane Parrish: How do you view the difference between investing in public markets versus private venture capital projects?

Bill Ackman: In the public markets, what we invest in is what we define as super-durable growth companies. These are dominant businesses in their respective sectors. They have exceptionally high profit margins and pristine balance sheets. The crucial element of their success is their predictable ability to continuously gain or maintain market share, develop proprietary business models, and exercise genuine pricing power. In the public market, the CEO is important, but our philosophy has always been that if we do not like the CEO, the board can recruit a better leader to replace them.

In venture capital, however, you are fundamentally betting on an individual person, not just a business plan. When you invest, the company may not yet generate revenue or be profitable at all. What you are betting on is their personal ability to learn and scale fast enough so that over time, they can transition the enterprise from being a massive consumer of capital into an enduring producer of earnings.

While there are certain analytical similarities, venture investing depends far more heavily on the specific founder than public market investing does. In the best public companies, if something happens to the CEO, you can always bring in another world-class executive to run the ship. But in the best private venture companies, the founder is practically everything—if they fail, you essentially write off the entire investment.

Shane Parrish: When you look at an early stage investment, how much of it is the idea, and how much of it is the person?

Bill Ackman: I look at the person. It is not just about the idea, because in many cases the original idea does not work out smoothly, and the founder inevitably encounters immense obstacles. Take my most successful venture investment ever: Coupang. Bom Kim came to me, and his original business plan was simply to build the Groupon of South Korea. Back in 2009, I personally believed Groupon was a terrible business model. But Bom presented a remarkably persuasive case for why South Korea was an extraordinary launchpad for online commerce, and more importantly, I believed in him as an exceptional individual.

Ultimately, what he ended up building was the Amazon of South Korea, which had virtually nothing to do with his original business plan. So the ultimate successes in venture capital come from betting on the founder's innate capacity to overcome hurdles as they arise and evolve the business model over time.

Shane Parrish: How is AI changing the profession of investing?

Bill Ackman: The most important task an investor performs is assessing risk. At its core, the intrinsic value of a business is simply the present value of the cash it will generate over its remaining lifetime. In that calculation, the cash generated in the early years carries more mathematical weight than the later years, but if you want to make illiquid, long-term business investments, you must possess a high degree of confidence in predicting how that business will endure 10, 20, or 30 years from now. Even for liquid public investments, we apply that same standard. You should only invest if you would be completely comfortable owning the business even if the stock market were to shut down for the next ten years. That is a vital mental discipline.

When doing that calculation, you must factor in the catastrophic risk of business failure. And what AI has done is dramatically elevate the risk of failure across entire industries. Therefore, investors must become far more thoughtful and rigorous about competitive durability. It brings us right back to Warren Buffett. If you study Warren Buffett, the greatest investor in history, the reason he avoided many tech businesses was that he recognized he could not reliably foresee their long-term survival against technological disruption—take the internet, where Wikipedia completely destroyed the traditional encyclopedia industry. Today, AI presents an exponentially more difficult challenge. None of us have guaranteed immunity.

Shane Parrish: Let's look at disruption or another business risk that people haven't foreseen—disruption caused by AI. In your opinion, what kinds of businesses become more valuable as a result of AI, and what kinds are at risk?

Bill Ackman: Actually, yesterday I met with one of the founders of Cognition. It's a very fascinating company. And their software platform, or really their AI, allows, you know, banks—major financial institutions, for instance—institutions that spend enormous amounts of money working with legacy systems accumulated through acquisitions over time, where they ran these old programs. They can now rewrite COBOL into modern code in a matter of days rather than months. And I think the cost of running large financial institutions is going to decline significantly thanks to AI. Large consumers of technology, if you will, can capture some of that. They become far more effective.

Now, the question is: will they be able to retain those profits, or is that wrong? If everyone is forced to use the best software tools to become more effective in their own business, as AI becomes pervasive, the question is: do they retain this profit, or is that profit margin transferred over to the customer? That depends entirely on the nature of the business and its pricing power. Money in general is a commodity, and banks are engaged in providing money. So this is a difficult question, and it depends heavily on the industry.

Bill Ackman: AI is also going to enable the creation of many businesses that could not have been created before. And AI allows entrepreneurs—people who have never been entrepreneurs—to become entrepreneurs. Even with the latest, so to speak, Meta releases. I haven't personally had the opportunity to experiment with it hands-on, but the guys in the office were talking about how easy it is to use. Like Muse.ai, it is now so easy for people to create their own agents to do various things for them.

The pace of improvement is definitely the fastest I have ever experienced or seen in my lifetime. You know, if you think back to Microsoft in the early days—1.0 versus 2.0—there would perhaps be a multi-year gap between major impactful updates. Here, we are seeing significant impactful updates arriving within days. It's a bit like driving a Tesla and receiving overnight software updates.

Shane Parrish: Does this frighten you as an investor?

Bill Ackman: It doesn't frighten me—I mean, "frighten" is probably the wrong word. What I would say is that you really need to be thoughtful about moats, and how wide they actually are. And I think that is the single hardest question for an investor: predicting the risk of failure and obsolescence. Among the companies that are most dominant in the world today, there will be some that simply disappear.

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Shane Parrish: How do you go from "I'm interested in this company" to actually writing a check for a billion dollars?

Bill Ackman: Usually, these are companies that we have followed for a very long time. We are constantly searching for the highest quality companies in the world, and we maintain what is effectively a library of businesses we admire. We've loved the business, but we didn't have the opportunity to own it previously because, you know, we might have said, "Look, at this price—35 times earnings or whatever it might be—the expected rate of return is below our 20% ambition." So we do the preliminary work, and then we put it on the shelf, waiting for the valuation issue to resolve itself.

Then something happens—a macro event like COVID, or, say, the popping of the SaaS bubble that led to a massive re-rating across nearly all software businesses. That gave us the opportunity to buy a number of extraordinarily high-quality businesses at very attractive valuations.

The actual research process looks like this: usually we conduct exhaustive corporate research. Naturally, it starts with SEC filings—10-Ks, 10-Qs, and conference call transcripts. Then we work hard to understand the operational realities. We leverage our extensive network: we talk to former employees and executives of the company, industry-specific experts, competitors, and customers to understand the main issues.

From there, we build a financial and business model to evaluate: how does the math pencil out? What is the expected return at the price we can buy it at today? That represents part of the process.

Next, the team produces a detailed research memo and presents it to the broader group. Typically, that presentation is overseen by two of us—either Ryan or myself. Ryan is our CIO, and I am the portfolio manager. We bring our own independent evaluations, equipped with enough information to ask the tough, pertinent questions. The rest of the investment team—an additional five people—scrutinizes the idea alongside us. The entire group debates the investment. As an outcome, they either decide to invest, or they say, "Okay, there are still open questions; let's address them," and the team goes back to do more work. That is our core process.

Shane Parrish: How are you using AI internally in your investment process to accelerate work or perform tasks that you typically wouldn't be able to do otherwise?

Bill Ackman: Right now, we use AI primarily as a research tool to get smart quickly on specific topics. But I would say it has not penetrated deeply into our core investment decision-making process. We don't use it for core model building. Everyone has equal access to AI; there is no differentiation in that.

I believe human judgment is the heart of the process. It's about deep understanding, verifying all the facts, and reviewing historical precedents. But if you look at our most successful investments, they were almost always situations where we were doing something that had never been done before. For example, buying credit default swaps on corporate debt, investing in corporate equities facing distress, or shorting AAA-rated bond insurers during the financial crisis. Those were among our best investments ever, and you could never find them in a generic model. AI would never recommend them.

It wouldn't do anything for that. Many investors struggled with their performance post-2010 and into 2011, but we navigated that period differently.

Shane Parrish: You continually raised your standards for business quality, right?

Bill Ackman: Yes. We constantly raised our standards for business quality. We want to own the world's best businesses with an extraordinarily low risk of failure, and we are disciplined about that.

We are not only long-term concentrated equity investors; we are also opportunistic. We've made substantial sums of money multiple times when we identified macroeconomic realities that diverged sharply from the consensus view. When you have that kind of differentiated insight and can find an asymmetric structure to express that bet, you can make an enormous amount of money.

That's why we made a great deal of money during COVID: we looked at what was unfolding and realized the global economy was about to shut down. Later, we made money realizing that massive inflation was inevitable, so we bet aggressively that interest rates would rise.

Around 2015 and 2016, as I've discussed previously, we suffered very significant losses. After that painful experience, I decided: we need to take our foundational investment principles, literally carve them into a stone tablet, and place it right on the conference table. Having a clear checklist is truly an indispensable tool against costly mistakes.

What's on this control checklist? The nature of the businesses we invest in: simple, predictable companies that generate bountiful free cash flow; the caliber of management we seek; a focus on large-cap, highly liquid public equities; and an explicit discipline against short-selling positions. That was a huge and valuable lesson.

On the asymmetric side, we look for cases where our view differs markedly from the rest of the world, and where we can express that view through instruments offering a massively disproportionate reward relative to our downside risk. But for core holdings, it's very straightforward: we look for the world's greatest companies with durable, resilient growth. We spend immense amounts of time evaluating their moats. And crucially, they must be led by world-class management teams—or, if they aren't, we must have someone in mind whom we could install to replace leadership if necessary.

Shane Parrish: Why did you stop short selling?

Bill Ackman: I resolved never to short stocks like that again, because shorting carries an asymmetry in the wrong direction. You can lose an infinite amount, while your upside is strictly capped. In the financial crisis, we shorted bond insurance companies—

Shane Parrish: Was that MBIA?

Bill Ackman: Yes. But even then, most of the money we made came from buying credit default swaps rather than simply shorting common stock. Later on, when we took on other shorts, someone would turn around and claim that I was a fraudster. We were dealing with what was fundamentally a pyramid scheme. We did exhaustive work and demonstrated, "This is a fraudulent pyramid scheme." And our counter was, "How could we be running a scheme when we are shorting a stock and simultaneously submitting exhaustive detailed analyses directly to the FTC?" You see, they would...

Bill Ackman: They'll have to investigate and the people being harmed are the most disadvantaged people in society. So we thought it was an amazing setup. We like to make investments where the wind is at our back. And we said, look, the wind's at our back. We're helping a group of disadvantaged people who are being taken advantage of. It's an evil company. This has to work. And we underestimated the risk of market dynamics, i.e., Carl Icahn showing up, buying the stock, putting capital to work against us. And it just reminded us that it's a really shady business.

Host: The company that you were, they're shorting the pyramid scheme—well, won't mention the name—but that generated these huge attacks against you. There were websites against you. There was a famous CNBC segment that I think came as a result of that. What about the personal cost to you when you're willing to put out a contrary opinion like that?

Bill Ackman: Well, it's much easier to be an investor in companies. You make a lot more friends, right? You buy a stock, other people pile in with you. It goes up. Everyone wins. You short a stock, and in that case, we were the vast majority, the short interest. So everyone else was sort of on the other side. Then you had a company that we were an existential threat to. They were willing to use whatever. They had been attacked over time by critics, by media, by otherwise. They built up a lot of infrastructure to go after the critics. So they were kind of well prepared to go after us. And then it became a bit of a hedge fund trade where let's go squeeze Bill. That was kind of the unfortunate part of it where, you know, in some sense, the industry is like, okay, these guys are over their skis. We can squeeze them out. And that was not the fun part.

Host: You were relatively quiet, I would say, from a public life point of view, compared to what you were before. And now, in the last few years, you've been a lot more vocal. Why now?

Bill Ackman: I've always been kind of a free speech kind of thing. Go back to my high school yearbook. I was listed as most verbose, and my yearbook epithet was 'a closed mouth gathers no foot.' So I was sort of known for being expressive about my point of view. You know, one of my important drivers in life was I always wanted to be able to say what I believed. You know, as my follower count grew on Twitter, it gave me on the margin more influence. And as I cared about various issues, you know, I wanted to help advance a narrative. And that's why I've been more public about it. And I've been rewarded by it working, you know, beginning with smaller things. And you can actually influence the administration, the course of history with a tweet, which is pretty cool. A lot of evil can go by if no one's willing to say the emperor's not wearing clothes or more.

Host: I want to come back just one second to the AI thing before we move on from it. Like, how are you using that personally?

Bill Ackman: I'm using it a lot more recently. You know, my daughter's had a major health incident. And AI is amazing at vetting, helping you make medical decisions for a child. It's an incredibly powerful tool. And I think every doctor should actually be checking their work with, you know, Dr. Claude or pick your favorite website, my favorite AI.

Host: Do you think companies like Brookfield get more valuable, where it's like a tangible almost infrastructure, becomes more valuable in a world of AI? And there's another bet, and I'd love to hear your reaction to this, which is, you know, sort of Thrive is starting to buy these sports teams under the assumption that we have this barbell, right? We have AI in one hand. On the other hand, these tangible experiences are going to become more and more meaningful to people, and presumably they'll pay more for those experiences.

Bill Ackman: So on Brookfield, I think it's an incredibly well-run, amazing company. They're very good at infrastructure, and they're very good at financing. They're very good at building things. So think data centers, think power. There's effectively infinite demand for compute, and they're very well positioned. So I think Brookfield is an AI winner for sure. They'll provide a lot of the backbone, power and otherwise.

Bill Ackman: Yeah, I'm a big Josh Kushner fan. You know, I don't know how much of the recent baseball investment is Thrive-related or personal. I'm not quite clear to me, but I do think that there's a lot of people sitting home being lonely, but you go to a big sport event, you know, the feeling that you have at a Knicks game, maybe at the end of the game, half the crowd is unhappy. But while it's underway, it's sort of a very human... elation type experience. Now, I don't know that baseball teams are, you know, they're not valued in a way that I think about valuing most assets. I think they're valued more like an artwork than a financial enterprise. You know, the vast number of sports teams as far as I know, if they make money, it's not a lot. And it's not like the owners expecting them to generate massive cash. You know, they're taking a small return today that's going to generate a lot more cash flow in the future. I would think the vast majority of sports owners is prepared to spend every dollar that they're allowed to, you know, in expanding the franchise.

Host: Are you going to buy a sports team?

Bill Ackman: No.

Host: You went from being an occasionally loud activist to trying to enact change behind the scenes. Why the change, and is it more effective this way?

Bill Ackman: It's because we were able to effectuate change behind the scenes when we weren't when we started. When we went into the business, we didn't have credibility or reputation. We hadn't been in the boardroom. I was 20, you know, 20 plus years younger. And in that world, you have limited financial resources, you have limited reputational resources. You can buy 5% of a company, and you have to win on the power of the idea. To get the big institutions to support you, you might have to end up in a proxy contest, et cetera. 20 years later, I've been on multiple boards, as I have other members of the team. We have a track record of success of investing in a company, being a long-term investor. In the early days, they would say, oh, you're just a short-term investor. Over time, we've been able to prove that we're actually our interests are the interests of the long-term holders of the business. And so today, we buy a stake in the company. We literally get letters from the CEO. Recently, we made a number of new investments. And in a couple of the cases, we actually got very nice—three of the five or six cases, we got letters from the CEO saying, you know, thank you so much for investing in our company. You know, I read your second quarter letter. You think about the business in the way we do. You know, let us know when we can come see you. And if we have any ideas for them, I'm sure they'll be very receptive in taking them. In that world, we don't have to be an activist.

Host: Do you think if you're going to go activist, you should have to hold your shares for a certain period of time?

Bill Ackman: I don't think you should be legally required, but I think, yes, I think activism, more direct answer to your question, that is focused on causing the stock price to go up in the short term, but causing the company long-term harm obviously makes no sense. You know, cut your expenses dramatically, i.e., and underinvest so that we can report a more profitable quarter, that's not going to lead to a good outcome. Or, you know what, lever up the company and return the capital to shareholders. You know, the most extreme version was greenmail, which has largely been outlawed. But you can view certain kinds of activism as a form of almost greenmail. You know, let's benefit the short-term holders at the expense of people who are stuck owning the stock, and the board's job is to kind of shut that stuff down. And I think shareholders, you know, the Vanguard, BlackRock, you know, the index fund owners, they're forever owners. They're not going to support some kind of short-term initiative that will cause long-term negative consequences.

Host: You talked about index funds there for a second. What advice do you have for the ordinary person who's like making a paycheck and wants to invest?

Bill Ackman: So if you want to be an investor, it's something you've got to allocate real time to. It's something you have to study and learn. You've got to do your homework on companies. So that's a decision. If you just want to have exposure to the stock market, I do think index funds are a very good approach. And they've beaten most active investors over long periods of time.

Host: How would you do that? Would you do dollar cost averaging on a monthly basis? Would you be like, oh, it's high now, so I'll hold off? Like, how do you think about it?

Bill Ackman: I think the key is to one start young. So the sooner you can start putting aside money that you can invest for the long term, the better for your retirement, you know, the power of compounding. I wouldn't sit around holding cash because you think the market's expensive.

Host: You mentioned stock options earlier. I want to come back to that. How do you think about stock options from a mature company perspective, or let's say Meta or Microsoft or an example like that, where they could pay cash easily, but they use options? Where they use restricted stock as some form.

Bill Ackman: The benefit of some form of restricted stock or options is the vesting. It gives you some ability to retain talent in a way that just paying someone cash every year doesn't. So I think it's still a very useful tool, it also obviously creates more alignment. People actually care about the share price, which I think is an important discipline for employees. Now, Pershing Square, the management company, which was the gift we gave with purchase, we don't intend to issue any meaningful amount of options or restricted stock. We have an employee base that already owns, we spread equity very widely throughout the firm. So 80% of the stock or so is held by the team. So we're in the fortunate position of not having to issue equity or options for a very long time. But maybe 20 years from now, we have a new generation that doesn't have any equity in the company. We may choose. It can be a useful tool.

Host: I was very happy the market gave me an opportunity to purchase some of that when it came out. It went down to like $23 or something.

Bill Ackman: Yeah, I bought some too.

Host: I want to talk about Netflix for a second. You bought this...

Interviewer: You sold, and then about a month later, you bought it back again. What drove that decision? You were wrong, and now you are right. How did you change your mind?

Bill Ackman: Netflix is a business we had followed for a very long time. And then, potentially for the first time, they missed their forecast on subscriber growth. The stock collapsed. And, you know, we think Netflix is a magnificent business with an extremely dominant position. So we acquired a very substantial stake in the company.

Bill Ackman: Then we met with the leadership. And we shared with them a detailed presentation. They completely agreed with our thesis on the company. So we were completely aligned with the management. We discussed things like: "Why wouldn't you introduce an advertising model, a lower-cost tier?" And they said: "We will never do that. We're not doing that."

Bill Ackman: Literally about three or four weeks later, they reported earnings. And if you go back and look at the earnings release, the leadership seemed shocked. They had missed their subscriber numbers again. And so they were very surprised by this. And what did they say? "We have to adapt. We are going to launch an advertising tier." Literally three weeks prior, they had said they would never do that.

Bill Ackman: My conclusion was this: when you invest in a company and you learn new information that contradicts your original thesis, you either need to buy more because the stock is cheaper and the new information is immaterial, or you need to exit because your thesis has been broken. We made the decision to exit because the thesis, as presented, was broken.

Bill Ackman: In the letter we wrote to our investors, we explained: "Look, we are selling here for this reason: we believe management can solve this problem, but Pershing Square invests in businesses where we have the highest degree of confidence in the world. And we believe the dispersion of outcomes has increased dramatically."

Bill Ackman: They could be right; it could be a home run. But there was also a much greater probability that they wouldn't get it right. They knew nothing about an ad model. Would it be successful? No one knew. With that wide range of outcomes, we had much better places to deploy our capital. We took the money and bought Google (Alphabet). You don't have to make it back the same way you lost it, right? We always look for high confidence. And the predictability in that situation had been lost.

Bill Ackman: What happened then? They executed extremely well. They launched a highly successful ad-supported model. They became an even more dominant company. They generate vastly more cash flow from the business. And in the streaming wars, they won. Even Disney World, the pinnacle of the world, was pushed into the background. You practically have to turn off the lights before you turn off Netflix. They are where creative talent goes to sell content.

Bill Ackman: Later on, they worked so well that the multiple expanded significantly and it wasn't as interesting. But with a relatively recent pullback, the valuation compressed again. So now, with high confidence as we previously had, we own it again. They proved themselves, the price made sense, and we bought it back.

Interviewer: Let's talk about the business that I think everybody knows: Howard Hughes. How did you get involved with this? Why are you so excited about it?

Bill Ackman: Sure. Howard Hughes was created out of another successful investment. We invested in a company called General Growth Properties during the financial crisis. The stock had declined 99%, and we acquired a 25% stake in the company.

Bill Ackman: A few months before they filed for bankruptcy, they tried to avoid it, but it was inevitable. On our side, we believed we could use the restructuring process to preserve value. So I joined the board and worked on the reorganization.

Bill Ackman: They had previously purchased assets from Rouse, which included entire planned cities. The market wanted General Growth to be just like Simon Property—a clean operator of premium shopping malls. These non-core businesses, raw land holdings, and Master Planned Communities (MPCs) were viewed as oddities inside a shopping mall company.

Bill Ackman: So we took all of the non-core assets and implemented a spin-off to create Howard Hughes. By the way, this was the first time I saw something like this: typically when a company spins off a business as a dividend, the spun-off stock falls as investors dump it. In this case, General Growth shares rallied, and Howard Hughes surged as well because of the unrecognized market value.

Bill Ackman: David Simon called it a "terrible company." He made a competitive bid. But we and Brookfield finished the plan and created the organization. He called it a "sewing company" because it was essentially a collection of leftover assets that nobody else wanted.

Bill Ackman: But we believed in those assets. We put in a great entrepreneurial team—David Weinreb and Grant Herlitz—to monetize and streamline those holdings, eventually focusing the portfolio over the last five or six years purely on Master Planned Communities (MPCs). We said: look at the market, it will eventually understand why this is such a great business.

Bill Ackman: An MPC is a comprehensively planned city. Today, these are complete towns. We own The Woodlands in Houston—a city of 150,000 people. It has high-rise office buildings, shopping centers, schools, and churches. I describe this business as being a bit like the game SimCity, where we are the benevolent owner of the entire community.

Bill Ackman: What does that mean for us? It means we own all the commercial land and the residential land across the entire area. We sell residential lots to homebuilders, and we retain the commercial land to build whatever the community needs. When viewed through a very long-term multi-decade lens, this business generates enormous amounts of cash over time.

Bill Ackman: These are thriving small towns. But after 14 years, Wall Street still looks at Howard Hughes as just a real estate business, and raw land and real estate historically carry a poor reputation over the long term. Yet our land holdings are fundamentally different. Imagine if you owned New York and held all the free commercial and residential land for 100 years. You would literally make trillions of dollars.

Bill Ackman: That is genuinely possible here. And in fact, the land we own is precisely where people are migrating to: Texas, Las Vegas, Hawaii. Yet the stock has perpetually traded at a huge discount to the net asset value of the holdings. Over time, we kept increasing our stake, and today we own 47% of the company.

Bill Ackman: We are transforming this into what we call a modern-day Berkshire Hathaway. What did Buffett do? He started with a textile business that was in structural decline. Over time, he wound down textile production and bought banking operations, a candy company, and other businesses. He accumulated capital over a long period while issuing very few shares.

Bill Ackman: Crucially, he acquired insurance companies specializing in property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, run by the finest underwriting management in the insurance industry. We are going to transform Howard Hughes in the exact same way: building an insurance underwriting operation, with Pershing Square managing the investment assets.

Bill Ackman: What Buffett accomplished took time. He gathered short-to-medium-term float from insurance premiums paid in advance of losses, and then he took those insurance company assets and invested them in common equities. Buffett is an exceptional common stock investor, as we all know.

Bill Ackman: As a result, the insurer often makes money on the liability side by generating an underwriting profit—collecting more in premiums than it pays out in claims—giving it a negative cost of capital. Then, he invests those funds into high-return, productive assets. When you pair high-return assets with a negative cost of capital, you can generate annual compounding returns well north of 20%.

Bill Ackman: And that is precisely what we are doing today with Howard Hughes. Right now, nobody recognizes this, and nobody pays attention to it. Why? Because to the market, it's just another real estate company, and investors hate real estate right now.

Bill Ackman: But the primary characteristic of Howard Hughes' business is that it naturally liquidates its land over time. Every year, we sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of land. In Hawaii, we sell hundreds of millions of dollars of condominiums each year, with roughly $4 billion in condo contracts currently in the pipeline or being delivered. Additionally, we generate approximately $300 million in Net Operating Income (NOI) from our income-producing commercial real estate assets.

Bill Ackman: Historically, the company took all those proceeds and reinvested them into more real estate—for instance, acquiring another MPC in Phoenix. We are not doing that anymore. We will reinvest all the necessary capital to ensure these small cities remain wonderful places to live, consistently ranked among the best places to live in the country. But beyond that, the business will generate billions of dollars of excess capital.

Bill Ackman: We are going to deploy that capital primarily into the insurance business. When you allocate equity capital into an insurance company, it allows you to underwrite more premiums and leverage that equity capital into high-conviction equity investments. This will become an extraordinary vehicle of long-term compounding. In fact, we have already invested $300 million into it...

Bill Ackman: We have added millions in additional capital since the acquisition of the company at Vantage. And over time, kind of accidentally, as we realized how much cash could be generated from property operations, we accelerated the transition of the company into an insurance holding company.

Host: But Buffett held a very large share in his business—he owned roughly half of it. You own about 47%. That was what allowed him to think with such a long-term horizon, right?

Bill Ackman: That's right, which is why we apply a truly long-term approach. We assembled a very, very talented team, and therefore we set up the insurance business, while we manage the assets.

Host: People often throw that term around. What does that actually mean to you?

Bill Ackman: It means that we are doing the same thing Buffett did, because insurance is the true engine of Berkshire Hathaway's value—so much of that value ultimately stems from its insurance operations. When Buffett talks about buying Coca-Cola or buying operating companies, it is supported by insurance float. So we are taking a very long-term view in how we manage these insurance operations. And rather than constantly issuing and diluting shares, we maintain a strictly limited number of shares outstanding. That is the beauty of insurance: it is a hugely profitable business. Over the next several years, our business will transform. Today, roughly 70% is in real estate, but within the next five years, probably 70% will be insurance capital. We simply cannot find a better model than that.

Host: If you look back, what allowed him to maintain that long-term horizon was having long-term shareholders, a permanent capital base, not paying out dividends, investing the cash generated by the business into common equities, and placing talented people in management across Berkshire Hathaway. Why isn't everyone copying this? It sounds so straightforward.

Bill Ackman: It is very hard to pull off. One reason is the nature of being a public company. Berkshire's success is, in many ways, a unique historical event. Another crucial fact is that Buffett didn't charge "two and twenty." Instead, he took a modest salary and participated purely as a shareholder alongside everyone else. Imagine how different Berkshire's success would look if he had been charging 2 and 20! His willingness to work basically for free was enormously helpful ethically, and it smoothed out negotiations throughout his career.

Bill Ackman: Furthermore, he walked away from the partnership business when it reached $100 million—$25 million of which was his own, and $75 million belonging to outside investors. Had he continued in the partnership format, first of all, he wouldn't have built this permanent capital base. He was exhausted from having to deal with investors over short-term results. If you are forced to make decisions under that kind of pressure, you lose your freedom.

Host: How do you think about that in your own structure? When you consider the businesses and employees you oversee indirectly, your employees and team have invested around $500 million of their own money.

Bill Ackman: Exactly. Our employees have invested about $500 million. That is very unusual in our industry. What we have built as an anchor in each of the public entities we manage is a permanent capital base. When markets panic and people scramble for liquidity, they can sell their shares on the open market, but the capital remains inside the fund. That is what allowed us to aggressively buy equities during the COVID crash and during the Global Financial Crisis.

Bill Ackman: What was brilliant about Buffett is that once he reached a certain age, he decided how he wanted to live his life, and he didn't want to live it constantly having to raise money. If you are in the open-ended hedge fund business, here is what happens: when you are doing great, institutional allocators take money away from you simply because you've become too large a percentage of their overall portfolio. And during bad periods, people redeem because of poor performance. If you don't keep an open door and constantly pitch them, people won't write checks when you need capital, and every few months you find yourself having to re-explain your business. You end up spending all your time and energy trying to maintain the stability of your capital base. The bigger you are, the more overwhelming that burden becomes. I was constantly distracted by it, so we simply decided to step away from open-ended funds. Having permanent capital is far superior.

Host: Let's talk about Bremont. How did you first get involved with this watchmaking company?

Bill Ackman: Yes, Bremont. It started when I was attending a board meeting at a multi-use center. During the lunch break, I walked into the mall and came across a Bremont watch. I had never heard of the brand before, but I bought the watch. For a long time, it sat tucked away in my safe, and I had practically forgotten about it.

Bill Ackman: Years later, I was planning a trip to London on Pershing Square business. A friend told me that while wearing a beautiful Patek Philippe watch on the street in London, he was mugged and had it stolen. He told me, "Bill, you can no longer wear a nice luxury watch in London. At best it gets stolen, and at worst, you get hurt."

Bill Ackman: So I literally asked myself: "What watch can I wear that I love, but won't be devastated if I lose, and that comes from a lesser-known brand that won't attract criminals?" I looked through my watch drawer and found that Bremont. I thought, "This is perfect," and wore it. I was staying in Mayfair, and walking down the street the very next day, I passed right in front of a Bremont boutique. I went in, bought a gift, and they even gifted me a complimentary Bremont wall clock. I asked, "Who owns this?" and they told me it was started by two English brothers.

Bill Ackman: When I got back, I wrote them a note expressing my admiration and offering to help them grow the business. They responded enthusiastically, and eventually I acquired a minority stake in the company. We tried expanding retail boutiques, but our boutiques weren't profitable—it simply didn't work, and it drained capital. At that stage, I was mostly just checking in on the deal without being actively involved.

Bill Ackman: My real involvement began when the company hired a new CEO named Davide Cerrato. A conflict arose between Davide and the board of directors. A sharp disagreement developed within the board regarding the strategic direction of the enterprise, and I sided with Davide.

Bill Ackman: I believed he was making all the right decisions. He is a phenomenal watch designer, and he dramatically elevated the quality of the timepieces. I loved the direction he was taking. But the old guard, people who had been with the company for twenty years, felt the changes were too drastic and happening too fast—right down to changing the logo. They worried that the brand was losing its core identity. There was tension on the board, and having an activist mindset, I became much more involved. I ultimately invested additional capital to acquire effective control of the company, joined the board as non-executive chairman, and helped align everyone. They have made incredible progress over the past couple of years, and working with that team has been a wonderful experience.

Bill Ackman: Look at this watch right here—it is super cool. It was engineered to withstand extreme conditions, even for lunar missions. The visibility at night is extraordinary, and it features a ceramic bezel with unbelievable craftsmanship. I am a genuine fan, I paid for it myself, and I wear it constantly.

Host: Speaking of managing leaders, tell me about how you find and evaluate CEOs. What methodology do you use to place the ideal person in top leadership positions, and how do you know when you've found the right one?

Bill Ackman: For Pershing, based on our extensive experience, finding someone who has successfully done the exact job before offers the lowest risk and the highest probability of exceptional returns. When Chipotle was dealing with its food safety crisis, we desperately needed a world-class CEO, and Brian Niccol's name kept surfacing repeatedly.

Bill Ackman: We tapped into extensive professional networks to speak with individuals who had worked directly under Brian or competed against him in the industry. Through that kind of comprehensive 360-degree reference check, we received overwhelmingly enthusiastic recommendations, which confirmed he was our man. I would say that evaluating and selecting leadership talent is one of my greatest strengths. While no one is completely flawless and I have made occasional mistakes in the past, over decades I have developed a deep ability to understand people. What you need in a leader is someone with immense passion for the work, extraordinary capability, relentless energy, and unwavering integrity.

Host: Let's turn to your public persona and professional character. People often have strong opinions about you, but on a personal level, you seem remarkably comfortable in your own skin, pursuing the truth and standing up for your ideas, regardless of pushback. Is that an accurate reflection?

Bill Ackman: That's entirely true. I have no problem whatsoever with public scrutiny. At a personal level, I am completely comfortable pursuing the truth. While some people cling dogmatically to specific ideas, I simply focus on uncovering the facts.

Bill Ackman: For the general public, something bad had happened, and that is why you think you want activists. Believe it or not, it has been 10 years. Oh, another 10 years, again? I don't think we should or will have to do it in that traditional form.

Bill Ackman: We participated, and I think we held a large share. Inside the company, they realized something was being done wrong, and we thought the effort spent was well worth it. But we never have to run another proxy contest against trustees with someone who has 3 million followers on Twitter. I think this is a terrible way to conclude governance.

Bill Ackman: I think we have enough influence to arrive at the right answers constructively. That is why I believe we don't need traditional activism. Activism used to mean outside-the-boardroom oversight because they wouldn't invite you in. Today, I believe at any company where we are a shareholder, if we wanted representation on the board of directors, they would give it to us. Because we are a large shareholder, we have a good reputation, we are long-term investors, and we are committed to doing whatever work is required. We will see it through.

Host: Same question to you: what does success mean to you?

Bill Ackman: Well, my definition of success for Pershing Square... you know, I want our investors to succeed, and of course that can be measured. It is incredibly rewarding to see meaningful investments change people's lives at the right moments—allowing them to retire, do what they want to do, pay for their children's education, or buy the home they want to retire in.

Bill Ackman: But for me personally, my definition... you know, turning 60 feels like it happened in an instant. I celebrated mine, and he is turning 60 this May.

Host: Wait, let's dig into this for a second. What does that mean?

Bill Ackman: Every year, I love summer—it is one of my favorite seasons—and summer goes by so quickly. Most people, even healthy people, live to around 80. I am 60 years old now, which leaves maybe 20 to 25 summers. I certainly hope artificial intelligence and better medical breakthroughs will allow us to live much longer. My grandmother lived to nearly 106 while smoking and drinking, though I'm not sure if that helped her or not.

Bill Ackman: Realizing that time is running short, I have decided what I really want: to have the greatest positive, beneficial impact on as many people as possible. Starting with my family, and extending outward. In fact, this institute is, in a sense, a vehicle for that purpose. To exert a truly massive, helpful impact where it is most needed—that is what is essential, and that is my ultimate definition of success.