Billionaire Investor Bill Ackman Shares His Blueprint For The Next Decade of Wealth

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**Bill Ackman** (1:00)
We think in some sense more than ever, if you're a top artist and you want to become a global artist, you need a label to help you break out.

**Maneet Ahuja** (1:13)
Welcome. I'm Maneet Ahuja, Editor-at-Large at Forbes and Founder of Iconoclast, and I'm thrilled to be joined by legendary hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, CEO, Founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, who recently filed a $5 billion IPO. Bill, thank you so much for joining us.

**Bill Ackman** (1:28)
Thanks for having me.

**Maneet Ahuja** (1:29)
So Bill, as we mentioned, four days ago, you rang the opening bell, you filed your IPO. Tell us, you put more capital in on day two. Tell us about that experience and how it's doing.

**Bill Ackman** (1:41)
So the New York Stock Exchange puts on a good, nice little celebration, which is a lot of fun. And it's the very beginning of what will be a very long-term story. I mean, it's 22 years in that we're taking our company public. So basically, this offering is the IPO or the listing of the management company, the general partner, a bit like the Blackstone or Apollo business model. And then a new, it's really our first US listed investment company, where if you have $43, you can buy a share of stock and be an investor with us on the best terms we've ever offered to investors. So we're kind of excited to have the potential for millions of shareholders over time.

**Maneet Ahuja** (2:16)
And so I've known you a long time and I know that you're somebody of conviction, right? So in day two, you double down and put more capital into the fund. Tell me what some of the feedback has also been from some of your investors and the excitement around that.

**Bill Ackman** (2:29)
I mean, sure. So one, we don't view this as, yes, it's a responsibility having other people's money, but we are by far the largest investors in the investment entity. The management team has about $500 million invested in this new entity, and our goal is to grow it at a very nice rate over kind of a long period of time. And the people that we've tried to recruit to the IPO are ones that, for the most part, are in this for the very long term. The nature of the IPO process actually learned a few things.
Like what?

**Maneet Ahuja** (2:56)
Tell us.

**Bill Ackman** (2:57)
So my goal was to make this kind of a very favorable outcome, in some sense, for every person. And so we did something almost backwards, what they do in IPOs, which is normally kind of the big institutions get the preferable allocations, and the little guy might get 10 cents on the dollar in terms of what they're looking for. We said, you know what, I'm going to give every retail investor a full allocation to the transaction, because I want to favor the up-and-comer.
Well, the result of that was, I think retail investors got a lot more stock than they bargained for. I think they've gotten in the habit of asking for more shares than they really want. So if someone asked for 10,000 shares, they actually want 1,000. Well, I gave them 10,000. So they found themselves at 1:55 p.m. on Wednesday with about 10 times as many shares they wanted. And so that led to, I would say, the last few days of the trading of the closed-end fund, not ideal. It's trading at about a maybe 14% discount to the cash we have sitting in the till of the company. Well, that is an opportunity for someone coming in today, which is you can buy cash at a discount. And over time, I expect we can compound it at a very nice rate.