Bill Ackman: the billionaire who bet big on viral doom

Bill Ackman of hedge fund Pershing Square saw trouble coming early and placed a punt on the stockmarket outcome. His huge win may be followed by a second one.

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“Hell is coming,” Bill Ackman, the billionaire manager of hedge fund Pershing Square, told millions of Americans in a 28-minute, near-hysterical TV interview at the onset of the market meltdown in mid-March. He said the US had underestimated the severity of a virus that would kill millions and devastate the global economy.

Even as he spoke, that prediction was netting Ackman a $2.6bn fortune, says The Guardian. Having “quietly placed a bet that stockmarkets would tank”, his doom-mongering on CNBC – in which he revealed he had evacuated his family and colleagues from New York – was later described by Forbes as “the billionaire interview that tanked the stockmarket”. Within the week, Ackman had made a near 10,000% return on his $27m investment in “credit protection” hedges. He used the gains to buy “the shares we love at bargain prices”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.