We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Bill Ackman, founder, chief executive officer and chairman of Pershing Square, part of the Great Investors podcast by Latticework. Each program in the series is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, researched by the MOI Global team from the investor’s own letters, talks and interviews. We make these programs so that members can learn how a great investor thinks and works, through the decisions he made and what he said about them at the time. Your feedback on what was useful, and on which investors to cover next, shapes what we produce. We start with who he is:
Bill Ackman grew up in Chappaqua, New York, where his father was a mortgage broker in the family firm. After Harvard College and a little under two years working for his father, he went to Harvard Business School. In 1992 he started Gotham Partners with David Berkowitz; it opened in early 1993 with a little over $3 million and closed in 2003. He founded Pershing Square in 2003, and its first fund opened on January 1, 2004. Pershing Square Inc. listed in New York at the end of April 2026.
He argues that a firm should own very few businesses, each one it can see ten, twenty and thirty years out, on permanent capital. His test is a stock market shut for ten years, and a business you would not mind holding through it. The one thing the firm does not compromise on is business quality: simple, predictable, dominant companies with a moat around them. His letter of March 2015 described the firm’s risk management: a few very sturdy baskets, kept where no margin call could force a sale at the wrong moment, and watched closely. He wrote: “We call this approach the sleep-at-night approach to risk management.”
Engaged ownership is Canadian Pacific, where the firm won a proxy contest in May 2012 and the new board chose Hunter Harrison as chief executive. The railroad’s operating margin went from 19 percent to 39 percent in 2015. It is also Chipotle, bought in 2016 after food-safety problems, where a Pershing Square partner helped find Brian Niccol, chief executive from 2018. Cheap protection is the 2020 hedge. In late February the firm bought credit default swaps on corporate debt indices and closed them out between March 12 and March 23. His annual letter for 2019 put the proceeds at $2.6 billion against $27 million in premiums and commissions. When the price of insurance is favorable, he wrote in March 2022, the firm over insures. Permanent capital is Pershing Square Holdings, listed in Amsterdam in October 2014. In December 2018 the firm bought Hilton into a falling market; his letter of March 2019 said it would likely have been a seller had the fund faced redemptions.
The program opens with the tablet on each desk at Pershing Square and the mistake that put it there. It goes back to a flat tire in the family driveway and the cold calls that raised Gotham’s first money. It follows the MBIA short from a trader’s tip in 2002 to the House subcommittee hearing of February 14, 2008. It has General Growth, bought at 34 cents a share, and the spin-off that became Howard Hughes. It gives the letter of January 2016 on the firm’s worst year. It ends with the listing of Pershing Square Inc. and the team around him.
The program quotes him from his letters to shareholders and his own talks and interviews. He spoke at Oxford’s Saïd Business School on October 29, 2013, and to the cadets at The Citadel in April 2025. He answered Columbia Business School’s newsletter Graham & Doddsville in November 2014 and its podcast Value Investing with Legends in October 2025. The conversations on The Knowledge Project and a CAZ Investments podcast came out in September 2026.
The complete program runs sixty-four minutes.
Get the next program the day it comes out. Great Investors is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube (or add the podcast feed to any app).
Transcript
The transcript is available for download to members only.
