Bill Ackman's takes on Mamdani, Trump and investing in the AI era

**Bill Ackman** (0:00)
I figured if I want to raise $10 million, why not go to the richest people in the world and ask them for a really small amount of money?

**Alyson Shontell** (0:06)
When you think of Bill Ackman, you think of someone who is one of the most influential investors of all time. But a decade ago, Bill's hedge fund, Pershing Square, looked like it might be on the brink of collapse.
Ackman faced almost $4 billion in losses from one investment and everything nearly spun out of control.

**Bill Ackman** (0:23)
This was a failure of due diligence on my part.

**Alyson Shontell** (0:27)
Bill managed a historic turnaround of his hedge fund. Today, he's the leading voice on Wall Street who is worth over $8 billion.

**Bill Ackman** (0:35)
You don't want to be a lemming in markets. You want to be the person looking the other direction.

**Alyson Shontell** (0:38)
He's also amassed a huge online presence with 2.7 million followers, where he candidly shares his sometimes very controversial beliefs on business, politics, and culture.

**Bill Ackman** (0:49)
Some people are like, well, I'm not going to open a Trump account for my child because I don't like that it's called Trump account. Okay, that's stupid.

**Alyson Shontell** (0:55)
I'm Alyson Shontell, and this is Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry. We'll be back after a short message from our sponsors.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:09)
Fortune spoke with Deloitte US CEO, Jason Gerzades, on how organizations are using AI to move beyond automation toward human-led value creation.

**Jason Gerzades** (1:18)
Leading organizations are using AI in a multitude of ways, but the focus is also beyond just deploying AI for the purposes of automation. The real challenge and I think the opportunity for leading organizations is, how do you create altogether different outcomes, different levels of value for customers, for employees, for other stakeholders, in order to increase the speed of decision-making, the level of differentiation in the market, beyond just automation. So it's really opening up new areas of value creation, new opportunities for employee experience and empowerment, and really cultural transformation for organizations led through the power of AI. Many CEOs are focused on deploying AI as they should, and I think all leading organizations and CEOs are on an AI journey.
But what may be missing is understanding the real power of the human side of AI capabilities and organizational change.
So leading organizations are thinking about human-led AI-powered solutions, and moving enterprise and the entirety of their workforce to be equipped and enabled to leverage AI in all of its form and fashions. Certainly, success is defined, at least today, in large part by automation and productivity. But really the real question around defining success for CEOs around use of AI is, is it changing the way your business competes? Is the basis of value creation, of customer success, and the overall value that the organization is creating being enabled or differentiated or changed by the use of AI? That's the real question.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:58)
Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry episodes are produced by Fortune's editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own, and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.

**Alyson Shontell** (3:19)
Bill Ackman, it's a pleasure to be here with you today. Thank you for spending the time. Of course.
The first thing I'd love to hear from you is your market update. What are you looking at? What's interesting? What's going on? And some of the risks you're seeing.

**Bill Ackman** (3:30)
So I guess markets are always interesting, but it seems like a particularly interesting time in history, amidst of a couple of important wars. At the same time, major technological change. AI, I think, is the story of the moment, of really the next many, many years. And thinking about implications for business, for the economy, for companies, for employees. I think the AI is really the story. In terms of markets, it's a time where people are, a fair amount of speculation. So on the, you might say, negative side, we think about the growth of one day options, these very kind of levered ETFs, all the money being spent, if you will, betting on sports. Speculation increases. That's a time, I would say, to be a little more cautious.
At the same time, if you look at market indices, people point out that multiples are higher, but the S&Ps have a market cap weighted index, which means the biggest companies have the biggest impact on valuations, and the biggest companies are really amazing businesses that have much higher growth trajectories than businesses of even a decade ago, 20, 30 years ago. So it's a different market today than one that you would look at, sort of, average multiples. And we're finding cheap stocks. In fact, some of the best, we call durable growth companies in the world, are available at prices that we find compelling because they're not at the cutting edge and they're not a dead center on the demand for chips or memory or even land and real estate for data centers.