One of the most provocative and [music]

interesting investors in the country.

>> A legendary activist investor.

>> Pershing Square CEO and founder Bill

Ackman.

>> Taking [music] a short position and

going public with it is a pretty serious

business.

Interestingly, [music] some of the best

businesses in the world are trading at

the lowest multiples.

>> We're kind of the rebirth of the

closed-end [music] investment company

universe.

>> What did you think of Zara, the CEO of

OpenAI?

>> I'm sorry.

>> CFO.

Felt like the CEO.

>> Yeah, I I was Stop with that stuff.

>> Uh actually, I was super impressed.

Uh made me a lot more bullish on OpenAI,

and I thought

>> Right?

>> I thought she should be CEO of OpenAI.

>> [laughter]

>> That's what I thought.

>> I think Sam should be I think Sam should

be chair. I think he's much better.

>> a question I wanted to ask her that we

didn't get time, which was what's it

like working with Sam?

>> I mean, that could have been like the

hours in the documentary.

>> [laughter]

>> I wanted to kick this off at So, thank

you so much for being here. We've tried

a number of times to get you to All-In,

and it's great to to finally have you.

You obviously are a legend doesn't need

much of an introduction. Lately, in the

the last number of call it years or

months or quarters or what have you, it

seems like your investment philosophy

may be changing. Your model, where

you've been activist and you've entered

positions and exited positions, and

lately you've talked a lot about more

kind of permanent long-term holdings.

Would love to hear a little bit about if

that is actually a change and how your

evolution in your investment model has

kind of changed over over time.

>> Uh sure. So, I would say the biggest

change over time is an appreciation for

the importance of I would call business

quality. Long-term, durable, protected,

non-disruptable growth, I would say.

Early days, you're

smaller, more liquid investor, you don't

have to think as long-term. As you

become a bigger, concentrated investor,

uh

>> [snorts]

>> and over time you learn the importance

of durable kind of growth. That's the

most important factor.

Uh I would say I'm as

activist as I've ever been um but more

of it's on Twitter than it than uh I

would say

in the corporate context. And the reason

for that is when I started in uh

Pershing Square

no one sort of knew who we were.

And so

I actually one of our first investments

was Wendy's International. Wendy's owned

Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee and

donut chain, and the value of Tim

Hortons was more than the entire value

of Wendy's. We had this very simple

idea: buy Wendy's, spin off Tim Hortons,

double our money.

And uh we bought 10% of the company and

I called the CEO and he didn't return my

call. And I called him again, he didn't

return my call. I literally couldn't get

a return phone call. That was the

beginning. Uh so we actually I called a

friend who worked at Blackstone and

Steve Schwarzman agreed to write a

fairness opinion on what Wendy's would

be worth if we spun off Tim Hortons.

We kind of mailed it in, filed it

publicly, and 6 weeks later they spun

off Tim Hortons.

>> And then the CEO finally called me back

and uh he thanked me uh and he had

gotten fired uh

and and uh but he thanked me cuz he had

a huge exit package and

>> [laughter]

>> and

and he was very happy. But so in the

beginning we couldn't get a return phone

call, so we had to and we were small, so

we had to go to a conference and we had

to, you know, do presentations and go on

CNBC. What happens over time is you join

boards of directors, you become known as

an investor, you know, we're kind of a

constructive

shareholder. Um I know pretty much every

CEO in the S&P 500 either directly or

one person removed. And you know, maybe

I age I've aged a bit um but you build

kind of a reputation and today we buy a

stake in a company

sometimes they'll put out a tweet saying

you know, we welcome Pershing Square as

a shareholder, but they open the door

for us. You know, in the beginning we

had to bang down the door and today so

we we get very deeply involved in our

companies if it's needed. [snorts]

Uh other companies we own, there's no

nothing for us to do, just be the you

know, just clap.

>> Hm. So you are you are considered a

value add investor.

>> Yeah, but we only want to add value. I

The conversation last night was kind of

an interesting one. You know, the best

investments are one where you don't need

to join the board and do anything.

>> Well, that may be in a startup, but in a

mature business, it may be

>> No, I think in in the public company

context, one of the valuable things we

can do, that you know, the problem of

being a public company today is kind of

the very short-term nature of markets,

analysts, etc. And obviously to run a

business, a business is a, you know, a

good one is a forever thing. And you

want to make decisions in the context of

decades sometimes or certainly three,

five years. And how can you do that when

someone's asking about the tax rate in

the second quarter?

Um and having a big shareholder on the

board, where you can kind of test ideas

out with the big shareholder before you

expose them to the public, where the big

shareholder can say, "I'm supportive of

this initiative even though it's going

to hurt earnings in the next few

quarters." is a helpful thing.

>> I just want to connect this last

conversation with Sarah to this.

Um

are you an investor in the AI complex?

And

how do you underwrite business model

quality from what you see on the outside

and in the entire complex?

>> I mean, yes, effectively we're an

investor. We're Actually today we own

Microsoft, we own Meta, we own Amazon.

Uh actually I think you're either

directly or indirectly you're invested

in AI. Yeah. Or it's a threat. So you

have to you have to understand it.

Um how do I think about AI in a business

model context?

>> model quality, yeah.

>> Look, when you're a concentrated

investor or an investor generally and

you're long-term investor, the most

important and most challenging thing to

do is determine what's the risk of

disruption. What's the risk of two guys,

two women from Stanford in a garage, you

know, coming up with something? That

risk I think has gone up uh

dramatically. This is the greatest era

in history to to build a business,

right? There's unlimited access to

compute, you know, certainly for a

startup, uh unlimited access to capital,

uh and a lot of incredible talent, which

means that the probability of your being

disrupted has gone up enormously. So the

hardest thing you have to do as an

investor is

understand, you know, and and that's

really where we spend most of our time.

>> in a moment like this then? Do you swing

towards the chaos or do you reposition

to things that are maybe more durable

and defensible from AI where the

destructibility is less?

>> What's interesting about markets is

people always

bring their eye to the new new thing.

Um and the new new thing is sort of

chips and semiconductors and energy and

that's where, you know,

uh

the shorter-term capital's going. What

tends to happen is really high-quality

things get left behind. Um and the same

thing really happened, you know, I was I

was there in 2000, you know, when the in

the in the in that sort of bubble. This

is, you know, this is different. I'm not

saying this is

um but there's some analogies and the

analogies are people got excited about

internet stocks and Berkshire Hathaway

traded at the lowest valuation I think

it ever traded at in its history as

people said, "Okay, that's all old

stuff." I think a similar thing is

happening today in a in a sense to

Amazon and Meta, Microsoft.

>> Those are the ones that

>> These are these are old-fashioned

companies in kind of this, you know, the

open AI

>> So they're undervalued in your mind?

>> Yes.

>> What else is undervalued? What about the

SaaS apocalypse though? Is it oversold

at this point?

>> Uh again, I think it's a careful

analysis. I worry more about a

Salesforce um than I do about your kind

of

um I think you got to do the work. I

think it's one company at a time, but I

think if, you know, if your software

company today, you have to be as AI

enabled as you can. You can I I think

there have been sort of monopolistic

type profit taking off of customers when

someone had a kind of a niche software

product that charging, you know, 30,000

a year or something like this. I think

those companies are really at risk. Uh

you know, Microsoft when the average

customer's paying, I don't know, 50

bucks a seat or some small number, uh

that platform's worth a lot more uh and

is less of risk.

>> I want to go back um

to COVID because you had an incredibly

viral moment

where you were on CNBC at that moment

and you pounded the table and you said

this is what's going to happen and

literally the market just ripped and you

you were

well first it went traded massively down

you were right on that side of the trade

and then you were on the right side of

the trade when it ripped back up. And

then I think it was maybe a month or two

ago I think publicly you basically

pounded the table and said this market's

going way higher.

Can you just put us in your head like

where does that

desire to be so

active and

you know you you it gives you so much

room to be wrong but then when you're

right it does add to the lore of Bill

Ackman of which you have a lot so how do

you balance that where does it come from

like why in these moments do you just

get so convicted that the that the

conviction just has to spill out and

then you're just so out there?

>> So I've always been like

my high school yearbook epithet was most

verbose. Uh me too.

>> [laughter]

>> And that and actually my my friend

actually lives around here

uh

he he has quote that he put next to my

name in my yearbook says a closed mouth

gathers no foot that was his.

And so that's kind of what I've lived by

I've always had this sort of desire to

speak the truth about things and

you know was just talking with Jake

actually we had breakfast this morning.

Uh and we're talking about my Rhonda

post do you remember that one so you

know there's just certain things that

need to be shared and discussed. But

with respect respect to markets I

actually what happened was

I was concerned about the country

because I felt we needed to have a

basically a two-week pause and this is

March of

or February I guess it was March

of 2020 and I assumed we were going to

just do a short-term shutdown let the

virus cool down as hospitals were going

to getting overwhelmed.

And

the president hadn't done that yet I was

kind of surprised by this.

And so that that was what inspired me to

go on TV as a way to reach uh President

Trump and say, "Look, we need to shut

down the country just for 2 weeks, you

know, like uh

and I said, "Look, you do this, okay?

The virus will blow over. Stocks are at

an incredibly cheap valuation. If we

handle this correctly, you're going to

make a ton of money, and we're buying."

You know, valuation is like a tether on

the market, right? When it gets too

high, it's like this rubber band that's

stretching. And inevitably, it bounces

back. But it works the other way as

well. When stocks get too cheap, there's

this, you know, the the rubber band's

actually pulling valuations up.

>> Right.

>> And and so there are there are certain

moments where it gets to that place.

And sometimes, actually, if you call

that out, it causes people to have kind

of a psychological reset.

>> What happened recently that caused you

to call that out?

>> Stocks just got crazy cheap. Just

incredibly cheap of really high-quality

companies.

>> Right.

>> What I don't know I

I don't know why

>> extremely cheap in fundamentals and

>> Fundamentals based on, you know, what's

the value of a financial asset's present

value of the cash it generates over its

life. On that basis, stocks are of

really high-quality companies are really

cheap.

>> Is there any way to underwrite and you

know, I don't want to pick on specific

companies, but we have the three that

are going public, and then you have like

a Palantir, let's say.

And these things have become in very

popular in pop culture, in maxing

on subreddits, on, you know, the

public's consciousness, high-net-worth

individuals wanting to buy into SPVs

that are double

loaded and then getting wiped off the

cap tables.

Is there any way to underwrite 100 times

revenue, 50 times revenue, 150 times

revenue in these companies, or are these

just tremendously overvalued because of

the demand side?

>> I think you underwrite a SpaceX the way

you underwrite a venture capital

investment.

>> Interesting. Explain that. Unpack it.

>> So, everyone here invests in venture,

right? You know, you bet on, you know,

who's running it, right? The talent is

enormous. Um it's people who they taught

me

I had a professor business school he

said people opportunity context deal.

So on people SpaceX

>> One of one.

>> Yeah. Opportunity one of one.

Context you know, incredible and

actually you know, feel bad for Blue

Origin but not harmful to SpaceX the

fact that you know, they're they're

biggest

>> way behind.

>> Then you get to deal, okay? That's the

more complicated question for SpaceX.

Again, we don't know what the valuation

is going to be but if it's a billion a

trillion 750 billion dollars then you

say, okay, well, let's think five years

out. What does this company look like?

You know, what is Starlink? What's the

trajectory of Starlink?

You know, SpaceX's you know, near

monopoly in terms of low cost space

launch that's going to become

increasingly important and even Amazon

is going to have to become an even

bigger customer because they're not you

know, Blue Origin's you know, and and

time I would say has become increasingly

valuable in the AI era, right? You you

delay a model we were talking David and

I were talking about the administration

and and his kind of stepping in for the

president not to sign that executive

order to kind of slow us down.

>> Allegedly.

>> You lose a month, you lose a couple of

months today and it means a lot. So I

think the only question I have and I

haven't done the math, I you know, I I

actually invested in X

I invested in XAI. I'm in an SPV.

>> Ron Baron said, Bill you got to invest

in SpaceX so

>> so I'm I'm I'm in so now I have so

obviously I'm rooting for kind of a good

outcome.

I just doesn't I haven't done the

Yeah, you have to

>> What about Anthropic, OpenAI and

Palantir?

>> Okay, I'm sorry.

>> Uh Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir also fall

into this category. Do you underwrite

those as venture investments as well and

have you done the the work on those?

>> They're venture investments that do what

what's helpful is they're not seed or

series A, right? They're

you know, D or E but they're still like

venture investments. These companies

have proven they can generate a lot of

revenues and actually I was just saying

on Sarah, I thought she had a very, very

thoughtful

explanation on how they think about

committing capital, right? And and

that's the thing I haven't heard from on

OpenAI, which is why if I were OpenAI,

I'd be getting that message out because

you know, from the outside,

you're like, it's a pretty interesting

business model. You got a company that's

spending making capital commitments

that's massively in excess of, you know,

revenues. And how do you do that and

get, you know, it's it's degree of

difficulty, I would say, is hard.

>> Your perch on the boards of, let's call

it these more traditional Fortune 500

type businesses and your conversations

with those CEOs, how are they thinking

about AI? Is it something that they're

tipping into into with pilots? Are they

doing transformation initiatives? Do

they think this doesn't really apply to

us? We'll deal with it later. What

what's your sense of how they're

adopting or embracing AI?

>> say every CEO in America today is like,

how do I use AI? How does it apply to my

business? How is it a threat?

They got to find an internal champion.

They maybe have to recruit someone from

the outside. I would say it's on the

hierarchy of things they worry about,

it's probably number one as both an

opportunity and a threat. So, if you're

not paying attention to it, you're

you're I mean, your board is going to

be, you know, asking you with first

question every meeting about, you know,

what how we dealing with the AI threat?

How we dealing with the AI opportunity?

So, it's absolutely top of mind.

>> Are you seeing much early success? I

mean,

through your, you know, again, through

your visibility into these companies. I

mean, there's a lot of mixed signals

that we get like McKinsey did a study

and said that 95% of enterprise

initiatives actually fail. Chamath,

you've made this point around 80, 90,

that a lot of these enterprises don't

really know how to deploy AI. The the

you know, the fanciest title in Silicon

Valley these days is a forward deployed

engineer, which is basically a like an

IT consultant who can close the gap

between the promise of AI and the ROI of

it. And I think people are just trying

to figure out like how do we how do we

use this thing? I mean, have you seen

much actual success? Is this the Is this

the question right now? Is this how do

we bridge this gap?

>> So, I haven't seen much success

other than I mean, I'll give you the

Pershing Square

story. You know, we're a tiny little

company. How are we using AI today? The

first use case is really on the legal

side. Um [snorts]

and

you know, kind of almost almost you call

it a compliance back office type you

know, functionality. I think we're still

super super early in terms of big

companies using AI effectively.

>> Can I ask or test a thesis with you? You

know, the the venture underwriting model

where you think about people, you're

underwriting a founder and their

capacity to lead and redirect the

organization in a changing environment.

In technology environment, market

environment and whatnot. And we have

seen repeatedly similar success at scale

if the company is still founder led

where the founder feels like they have

the authority to make all the radical

decisions needed to make sure that that

company persists and changes as needed

in a changing environment. Have you

looked at founder led companies versus

non-founder led companies where perhaps

the founders really do have an inherent

advantage in being able to navigate the

changing environment and actually

generate outsized returns over time? And

I ask this particularly as it relates to

the SaaS apocalypse and if you take a

look at the companies that are founder

led today versus not, if you're not

founder led, you have an incentive to

not make a mistake and get fired. If

you're founder led, you don't give a

Your job is to make sure the

company

>> Yeah, I think the answer is exactly what

you said. I think the problem is that

the average life of an S&P 500 CEO is

probably

I don't know, 4 years or 3 or 3 and 1/2

years or something like this.

And you're focused on, you know, kind of

shorter term compensation. You don't

generally don't have a big economic

stake in the business. You're a founder,

this is your entire life. It's your

entire reputation. It's not like you're

going to go get another job. You got to

kind of make it work. And also when

you're in the board room, you have the

authority of either being a major

voting, you know, voice, or or a um

you've got a huge economic stake in the

company. You know, when we join a board

of a company, we're often the largest or

the sec- the largest non-index fund type

shareholder. That kind of gives us, you

know, a little bit of a disproportionate

voice in the boardroom. Imagine if you

have that and you're CEO of the company,

right? So, I think that does give you

and and also if you've gotten to be a

successful founder over time,

uh guaranteed that you've made a number

of very challenging call calls over time

that turned out to be right, otherwise

you wouldn't be there. And so, you look

at Mark Zuckerberg, right, when he

bought, I don't know, Instagram,

everyone's like shocked at the price

paid or WhatsApp, you know, they seemed

like, you know, sort of outside the you

know, the company only had, whatever, 19

employees or something when he paid a

billion something. Um but you make

enough of those calls um

and uh

you can make the other challenging call.

>> antithetical to a Ben Graham investing

model? Like, you have to have a

different set of skills as an investor

to to identify this talent versus

>> Yeah, so I mean, Ben Graham is a really

important voice for investors in that he

said, "Look, you got to think about a

business

a stock certificate is an interest in a

business as opposed to just this piece

of paper." That's probably one of his

most important kind of aphorisms. But he

was investing for the most part in

liquidations. He was in that you know,

in the days of Ben Graham where there

weren't there's no Edgar system and nor

to get a 10K filing, you had to go to

the headquarters of the company. There

were a lot of stocks trading at, you

know, basically the cash on the balance

sheet. And his business model was, you

know, buying these things at stupidly

cheap prices and eventually Um but Ben

Graham made most of his money investing

in I don't know, Geico or something. Uh

you know, not

>> Tell us a little bit about you know,

there's a sort of activist and

significant shareholder, but then

there's Howard Hughes, and you've talked

a little bit about Berkshire Hathaway

2.0 or just being inspired by that

Chamath you were inspired by for a long

time.

>> Well, Bill Bill just took Pershing

Square public.

>> Yeah, but with with the Howard Hughes

Corporation specifically, tell tell us

about that effort cuz you're operating

that business.

>> There's a book uh I think it's called

The Financial History of Berkshire

Hathaway. That's for geeks. Um it

basically this guy

went back and read every 10-K

whatever you actually went through the

filings, looked at every deal that

Buffett ever did, and you follow him

over 60-year period of time. And the

vast majority of the value he created at

Berkshire was through it actually the

ownership of insurance operation.

And what's interesting about insurance

is that

you know, running an insurance company

you have two jobs. One is you you know,

write business, right? You take risk. Um

you collect premiums in exchange for the

obligation to pay future claims. And

then you get that you get money up

front, and your responsibility is to

invest that money. Uh

the vast majority of insurance companies

focus only on the liability side of the

balance sheet. Buffett was really the

first to do focus on actually more on

the asset side of the balance sheet than

on the liability side. And over time

on the liability side, if you if you

manage the assets of an insurance

company well and the liabilities well,

you can build this enormously profitable

compounding tax-efficient machine over

time. And the question is why haven't

other people done this?

And the answer is if you're really good

at investing, you go work for a hedge

fund, you go work for Fidelity, you go

work for Wellington,

but you don't go work for an insurance

company. So the insurance company's

ability to recruit investment talent is

very limited. Buffett owned half the

company, he was really good at

investing, which is why it worked. So

what we're doing is we're you know,

Buffett started with a crappy textile

company. He effectively liquidated it

over time, reinvested in insurance, and

then invested the assets well.

Howard Hughes is actually really

interesting company, but it's a business

that Wall Street has not cared about for

a long period of time. We created it out

of the bankruptcy of of General Growth,

it was a spin-off of all the other

assets.

And it's a company that owns these small

cities. So I bet a lot of people here

have heard of Summerlin because a lot of

the tech community has moved from

California to Las Vegas,

but we own a this small city, 26,000

acres of land.

We own all the commercial land, we own

all the residential land, we sell lots

of home builders, we build a downtown,

we build buildings.

It's a bit like the Irvine company. You

know, Don Bren created probably a

hundred billion dollars of personal

wealth managing a small city. It's a

super cool company, but the time frame

is decades as opposed to quarters.

So, Wall Street's never cared, it's

always traded at a huge discount. So,

Buffett bought into a textile business

at a discount to liquidation value. At

$63 a share, you're owning Howard Hughes

at a discount to liquidation value. What

we're doing is instead of reinvesting

all the cash the business generates into

real estate, we're going to reinvest all

the cash into insurance.

We're going to next within the next week

or so.

>> You're in the business of building this

flywheel.

>> We're going to build this into a

compounding machine over the next 50

years. It's something I've always wanted

to do. We have the benefit of

understanding both the insurance side of

the business and we can manage the

assets well. You can buy it at, you

know, whatever, 60 cents on the dollar.

>> How do you think about investing the

assets of this insurance company? So,

>> So, what Buffett did is he took 100% of

the insurance float and put the money in

short-term treasuries. So, he took no

risk on kind of policy holder funds.

He took 100% of the surplus of the

insurer, the equity, and invested in

common stocks. And that's what we're

going to do.

And I think we can build a really

profitable insurance company. We're

starting at a very small scale. The

company's got like a four billion dollar

market cap. And the goal is to build it

into a trillion dollar thing over time.

Compounding. The other thing Buffett did

well is that he didn't issue any stock

or not for a very long time. So, they,

you know, he started with a million

shares and today is effectively like a

million and a half.

>> this is the future for very talented

managers like yourself versus the

traditional long short fund or do you

think they sit side by side?

>> I think it's hard to do this cuz you

need control of a public company and you

have to be not in a get-rich-quick

mindset. And there, if you're in the

get-rich-quick, it's easy to go to

Citadel and Millennium or one of these.

>> Why does it have to be public?

>> Why does it have to be public? It

doesn't. It doesn't have to be public.

>> Why did you choose to take it?

>> Uh you know, we we got here by accident,

right? So, the most successful equity

investment we've ever made is we bought

this company called General Growth. We

bought the stock of a company going

bankrupt. Sort of the most contrarian

investment you can make. Stock [snorts]

went from, you know, uh $20 market cap

to $100 million, and we bought

a basically a

uh a third of the company or 27% of the

company at uh $200 million market cap,

and there was $27 billion of debt. And

the bankruptcy emerged, and the strategy

we said is, "Look, the assets are worth

more than the liabilities. We're going

to do the first uh

restructuring where the equity gets to

keep their investment in the company."

Two years later, we emerged from Chapter

11. The stock went from $0.34 to $34.

But, part of the restructuring was

spinning off this thing called Howard

Hughes. It was really all of the junk

that didn't belong in the company that

the analysts hated. Um and so, we we did

it

uh with sort of an inverted investment.

And you know, 15 years later, we haven't

really created much value with it. So,

we said, "Look, we've got to you know,

the market doesn't like this thing. The

market A company has to earn a return in

excess of its cost of capital in order

for a stock to go up.

And the you know, Elon's done an amazing

job keeping the cost of capital of his

companies really low. You know, if

SpaceX goes public at a trillion $750

billion,

it'll probably be the lowest cost of

capital

equity capital transaction in the

history of the world. The problem with

this company, cuz it's real estate, cuz

it's development, cuz it's land

ownership, the market says, "The cost of

capital is really high, and you can only

earn a certain return on real estate."

So, what we're doing is we're

repurposing the real estate assets, and

we're transforming the company into a

much higher returning Well, the last few

years, you've become incredibly famous.

I mean, just to kind of put a fine point

on the word. How does that

change and influence the way that

markets work? Because like, you know,

your voice gets amplified now.

You also have other places where other

voices get heard, many people's whose

names you don't even know. You go into

Wall Street bets and every random Tom,

Dick, and Harry with an opinion. Tell us

the way the markets have changed with

notoriety, fame, social media influence,

not just yours, but in general.

>> Yeah, I don't think markets have changed

as a result of anything that's happened

with me or follower growth on on

Twitter. I think the Ryan Cohen guy, you

know, the GameStop guy.

>> Yeah.

>> You know, that is a change in markets

when

um you know, a stock can trade at a

valuation well above the its value

simply on the personality and the

ability to

>> Vibes.

>> Vibes.

>> To gather up, you know, armies of

followers. You know, the

fascinating thing about liquidity and

valuation is

the higher a stock price goes

and it's going to sound sort of

intuitive, but it's not.

The more valuable the company becomes.

You know, there's [snorts] actually the

increase in value the company increases

the value of the company, right? Because

it lowers the cost of capital, it gives

you more flexibility, gives you the

ability to issue stock, raise capital,

acquire other businesses. And so, you

know, getting back to the Elon example,

uh it's really his I mean, I would say

he's a better example of this. We've not

taken advantage of this at all. Maybe we

should. But he builds an army of

believers and followers

uh that enabled

uh Tesla to be built.

Um

You know, the

>> Let me maybe help Marcus.

>> And as we wrap up with a somewhat of a

pointed question, you're an incredible

investor. If there are people if we want

to be maximally aligned with Bill

Ackman,

is the best way to be an LP in Pershing

Square or is it best to go into the

market and buy

>> So, we have two I think there are three

ways you can invest with us that are all

different and a little cheap different

things. One is something I think called

Pershing Square, which is the management

company of Pershing Square. I think it's

one of the most interesting, kind of

intellectually, businesses because it's

a

uh it's the entity that receives fees on

these three permanent capital vehicles

we manage. So, it's a royalty on the

compounding of investments in these

entities. And there's no CapEx in the

business. So, we're going to pay out

basically all of our profits

and we're going to grow as quickly as

the underlying assets uh compound. So,

[snorts] if you invested a dollar in

Pershing Square, you know, 22 years ago,

that's that became

um

you know, uh

20 uh

I think

I should know this number. It's like 27

or 28 times net of all fees.

>> Wow.

>> Okay. Over over 22 years. Had we charged

the fees of this public vehicle, uh that

number would have been um you know, uh

37 times.

>> I'm sorry. No, more than something in

the mid-40s.

>> Okay.

>> What this means is we now have a public

vehicle that charges only a 2% fee.

We've got a one in London that charges

an incentive fee. If we compound at the

rates we have historically, we'll have

35 times the assets under management

uh in 22 years. So, we'll go from 25

billion of assets to something

approaching a trillion. We don't have to

hire another person.

Uh and we don't have to spend another

dollar, if you will, on overhead. That

That's a pretty interesting business.

So, I like that one. So, Pershing

Square.

You want to invest with us as an

investor, invest in something called

PSUS. And you own a portfolio of our

best ideas and it's trading at an 18%

discount to cash. You want to believe

that we can build the next Berkshire

Hathaway, you own Howard Hughes. We've

got three different ways.

>> Yeah, I'll put some Howard Hughes. I

think

following you on Twitter and going the

going direct movement

does allow you to communicate directly

your vision and and that actually makes

it much easier to to place the bet. And

so, I I do think it has a profound

impact cuz

prior to your

extremely long tweets that have been

parodied now, there's an incredible meme

of a Bill Ackman tweet coming in, which

is

>> you did that with your extended iPhone

that's a foot tall.

>> No, it was that was my Halloween

costume.

>> Yes.

You would have written something

shorter. You just didn't have the time,

yeah?

>> Yeah, I guess. I don't let other people

read, you know,

>> Do you do you do you like having a

lawyer or anybody read it?

>> On the the Ronda tweet, which had some

legal implications, I did have my

communications guy and a lawyer.

>> Yeah.

>> A friend who's a lawyer read it, but I

only gave him a few minutes cuz I was so

excited. Once I write something I really

like,

>> I just want to

I got to push it. Yes, I agree. I agree.

>> And the torpedoes.

>> I

>> Tom does this, too. He starts getting a

little bit frantic when he's writing

something and then he's like, "Fuck it."

He just hits send.

>> [laughter]

>> I just hit send.

>> By the way, it's a very powerful thing

to be able to share your view and push a

button and reach 2.2 million people. So,

I'll I'll I'll have to Why don't we just

take a picture on stage and I'll send it

out.

>> Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Let's do it.

>> Liquidate it.

>> Gone all in?

>> All right.

>> All right.

>> Relax. Thank you.