Bill Ackman (William Albert Ackman) is an American investor, hedge fund manager and philanthropist. He is considered by some to be a contrarian investor, but sees himself as an activist investor. Ackman is the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management
Some research published at the University of Oxford characterizes his activities with the Canadian Pacific Railway as paradigmatic of ‘committed activism’. It is longer-term in nature with related benefits to the real economy, unlike shorter-term ‘financial activism’.
His investment style has been praised and criticized by US government officials, managers of other hedge funds, various retail investors and even the general public. Ackman’s most notable market games include the short selling of MBIA’s bonds during the 2008 financial crisis, his proxy battle with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and his stakes in Target Corporation, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and Chipotle Mexican Grill.
From 2012 to 2018, he held a $ 1 billion balance against the nutrition company Herbalife. It is a company that has claimed to be a pyramid scheme conceived as a multilevel marketing company. Ackman’s efforts were documented in the documentary film Betting on Zero.
BILL ACKMAN EDUCATION
He received a BA in History from Harvard College in 1988. Ackman’s thesis was ‘Scaling the Ivy Wall: the Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions’. He then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
BILL ACKMAN AGE
William Albert Ackman was born on May 11, 1966. He was 52 in 2018.
BILL ACKMAN FAMILY
Bill was born to Ronnie I. (née Posner) and Lawrence David Ackman, president of a New York real estate financing firm, Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group, and his family is Jewish.
BILL ACKMAN MOGLIE | BILL ACKMAN DIVORCE
On July 10, 1994, he married Karen Ann Herskovitz, a landscape architect. On December 22, 2016, it was reported that the couple had separated.
BILL ACKMAN CHILDREN
Bill and Karen have three children.
BILL ACKMANGOTHAM PARTNERS
Bill founded the Gotham Partners investment firm with fellow Harvard graduate David P. Berkowitz in 1992. The firm then made small investments in public companies. He teamed up with the insurance and real estate firm Leucadia National to bid for Rockefeller Center in 1995. Although the company didn’t win the deal, it caused an increase in interest in Gotham from investors which led to $ 500 million in assets by 1998. The company had rooted in litigation with various outside shareholders who also owned a stake in the companies in which Gotham had invested by 2002.
Despite an ongoing investigation into Ackman’s business by New York State and federal authorities, he began the search by challenging MBIA’s AAA rating in 2002. He was subsequently charged fees for copying 725,000 pages of statements regarding the financial services firm in accordance with a subpoena from its law firm. Bill called for a split between MBIA’s bond insurers structured finance business and also its municipal bond insurance business.
Ackman argued that MBIA was legally limited by trading billions of dollars of credit default swap (CDS) protection MBIA had also sold against various mortgage-backed CDOs, and was also using a second company, LaCrosse Financial Products, which MBIA described as an ‘orphan transformer’. He bought credit default swaps against MBIA corporate debt and then sold them at a large profit during the 2008 financial crisis. Ackman reported hedging his short position in MBIA on January 16, 2009, according to the 13D filed with the SEC. .
CARL ICAHN BILL ACKMAN
A feud developed between Ackman and Carl Icahn over a deal involving Hallwood Realty in 2003. They both accepted a ‘schmuck insurance’, under which, if Carl sold the stock within 3 years and made a 10% profit or more, he and Bill would share the proceeds. Carl then paid $ 80 per share. HRPT Property Trust acquired Hallwood, paying $ 136.16 per share in April 2004. Under the terms, Carl owed Ackman’s investors about $ 4.5 million, but he refused to pay and Ackman sued him. Eight years later, the court forced Carl to pay $ 4.5 million, plus 9% interest per annum from the date of the sale.
BILL ACKMAN PERSHING SQUARE
With $ 54 million from his personal funds and former business partner Leucadia National, Ackman started Pershing Square Capital Management in 2004. The company bought a significant stake in fast food chain Wendy’s International and successfully lobbied. to sell its Tim Hortons donut chain in 2005. In 2006, Wendy’s spun off Tim Hortons through an IPO and raised $ 670 million for Wendy’s investors. After Bill sold his stock at a substantial profit after an executive succession dispute, the stock price plummeted. This has raised criticism that the sale of Wendy’s fastest growing unit has left the company in a weaker market position.
Its funds owned a 10% stake in Target Corporation in December 2007, worth $ 4.2 billion through the purchase of shares and derivatives.
His funds then held a 38% stake in Borders Group in December 2010, and on December 6, 2010, Bill indicated that he would fund a $ 900 million buyout of Barnes & Noble.
In January 2009, at a panel meeting discussing Bernie Madoff, Bill defended his longtime friend Ezra Merkin, saying, “Did Ezra commit a crime? I don’t think ‘and’ I think [Merkin] is an honest person, an intelligent person, an interesting person, an intelligent investor ‘. Ezra was charged with civil fraud in April 2009 by New York State for “secretly routing $ 2.4 billion of client money into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi fraud without their permission.” In June 2012, an agreement was reached requiring Merkin to pay $ 405 million to victims, including the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.
Pershing Square Capital Management launched a new closed-end fund called Pershing Square Holdings in December 2012. It raised $ 3 billion in an October 2014 IPO on the Euronext stock market in Amsterdam.
Bill began buying JC Penney stock in 2010, paying an average of $ 22 for 39 million shares or 18% of Penney’s stock. In August 2013, Bill’s two-year campaign to transform the department store ended abruptly after he decided to step down from the board following a discussion with other board members.
BILL ACKMAN HEDGE FUND
In January 2015, LCH Investments named Bill one of the top 20 hedge fund managers in the world in January 2015 after Pershing Square made net gains of $ 4.5 billion for investors in 2014. It brought earnings over the lifetime of the fund to $ 11.6 billion since its launch in 2004 through the year-end 2014.
BILL ACKMAN VALEANT | VALEANT BILL ACKMAN
Bill, along with Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ outgoing CEO, J. Michael Pearson, and the company’s former interim CEO, Howard Schiller, testified before the US Senate Special Aging Commission on April 27, 2016. The jury then answered questions relating to the Committee’s concerns about the repercussions on patients and also on the healthcare system posed by Valeant’s business model and controversial pricing practices.
In March 2017, Bill sold his remaining 27.2 million stock position in Valeant to Investment Bank Jefferies for approximately $ 300 million.
BILL ACKMAN HERBALIFE | BILL ACKMAN HERBALIFE SHORT
Bill released a research report critical of Herbalife’s multilevel marketing business model, calling it a pyramid scheme in December 2012. He revealed that his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, short-sold the company’s shares directly. (not with derivatives) starting in May 2012. This caused a drop in the Herbalife share price. Bill spent $ 50 million on a public relations campaign against Herbalife in 2014, which was designed to hurt the company’s stock price.
His stance on Herbalife led to a live televised discussion with Herbalife supporter Carl Icahn on January 25, 2013 for nearly half an hour on CNBC. During the segment, Carl called Ackman ‘a crybaby in the schoolyard’ and claimed that making his short stance public will eventually force Bill to become the ‘mother of all short contractions’. Ackman admitted on Bloomberg Television on November 22, 2013 that Pershing Square’s open short position in Herbalife was’ $ 400 million to $ 500 million ‘in the red, but that he would not be ruled out and held short’ until the end of. Earth’.
Bill told Reuters he hedged his short selling position in November 2017, but he would continue betting against Herbalife using put options with no more than 3% of Pershing Square’s funds.
He abandoned his nearly $ 1 billion bet against Herbalife on February 28, 2018 after the company’s share price continued to rise, choosing instead to build his position in United Technology.
BILL ACKMAN BOOK
Bill has his analysts read the following books;
- Security analysis by Benjamin Graham
- The Warren Buffet Way di Robert G. Hagstrom
- Trust Game: As hedge fund manager Bill Ackman called Christine Richard’s Wall Street’s Bluff
- Beating the Street di Peter Lynch
- Earnings Quality of Thornton O’Glove
- Safety margin: Seth Klarman’s risk-averse value-for-money investment strategies
- The Intelligent Investor at Benjamin Graham
- One Up on Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild
- You Can Be A Stock Market Genius: Uncover Joel Greenblatt’s Secret Hideaways of Stock Market Profits
- The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America di Lawrence A. Cunningham e Warren Buffett
- Fooling some people all the time, a short (and now complete) story, updated with a new epilogue by David Einhorn and Joel Greenblatt
NET WORTH OF BILL ACKMAN
According to Forbes Magazine, Bill has an estimated net worth of $ 1.09 billion in 2018.
BILL ACKMAN PHILANTHROPY
Bill has donated to charitable causes such as the Center for Jewish History, where he successfully led an effort to withdraw $ 30 million in debt, personally contributing $ 6.8 million. The donation and those of Bruce Berkowitz, founder of Fairholme Capital Management, and Joseph Steinberg, president of Leucadia National, were also the three largest individual gifts the center has ever received.
His foundation donated $ 1.1 million to the Innocence Project in New York City and Centurion Ministries in Princeton, NJ Bill is a signatory to The Giving Pledge, pledging to donate at least 50% of his wealth to charitable causes. .
He co-founded the Pershing Square Foundation in 2006, along with his then wife Karen, to support innovation in economic development, education, health, human rights, the arts and urban development. Since its inception, the Pershing Square Foundation has committed over $ 400 million in grants and social investments. The Ackmans were on The Chronicle of Philanthropy ‘Philanthropy 50’ most generous donor list in 2011.
The Challenged Athletes Foundation, which provides sports equipment to people with physical disabilities, honored Ackman in a gala fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in July 2014 in New York City for helping raise a record 2.3 million dollars.
Bill approved Michael Bloomberg as a potential U.S. presidential candidate in the 2016 presidential election. He is also a longtime donor of Democratic candidates and organizations, including Richard Blumenthal, Chuck Schumer, Robert Menendez, the Democratic National Committee and the Committee for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign.
HEIGHT OF BILL ACKMAN
Ackman’s height has not yet been revealed.
BILL ACKMAN NEWS
Bill Ackman makes multiple layoffs in his Pershing Square hedge fund
Billionaire hedge fund manager William Ackman, whose investment assets have shrunk by more than half in the past three years, made a second round of staff cuts and fired three members of the investor relations team, two sources said. they are familiar with the matter.
Last week, the famed manager cut an investor relations executive and two investor services executives at his New York-based hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, the sources said. These layoffs come after Ackman cut his staff by 10 in January, reducing the company to 46 employees from 56.
A company spokesperson declined to comment.
The new round of layoffs shows that Ackman, one of the industry’s most fickle activist investors, is moving forward with a review that some had questioned but has so far been successful, involving both cost cuts and changes in investment strategy.
Pershing Square now oversees about $ 8 billion in assets, less than half the amount managed at its peak in 2015. Assets have declined after three years of losses that have prompted many investors to ask for some of their money back.
Unlike other managers who may be attempting to replace outgoing capital, Ackman has decided to reorganize his company, telling clients he wants to go back to his roots by running a smaller company and only ramping up business through better returns and not bringing in new ones. investors.
In addition to the layoffs, key members of his team have voluntarily left.
Investment team member Ali Namvar has retired and Vice President Steve Fraidin has returned to legal practice as a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.
Investment team member Brian Welch is leaving at the end of this month. The investment team has historically had between eight and 10 members.
In its early years, Ackman wowed with double-digit returns, often offering some of the best returns in the industry.
As part of the revamp, Ackman, one of the most visible managers in the industry, said he would stay out of the spotlight to focus on investing while leaving customer visits to others. So far this year the company has bet on Nike, United Technologies and Lowe’s.
So far, Ackman’s promises to deliver better returns seem to be materializing. As of mid-June, the Pershing Square private hedge fund grew by more than 9%, while the publicly traded fund, Pershing Square, grew 11.4% since the beginning of the year.
