Highly successful activist hedge-fund bosses like Bill Ackman share one universal trait, says Felix Salmon for Axios. They all believe they know “how best to run a public company”. But when they try to do so themselves, it doesn’t always work out.
British investors will be most familiar with Wall Street billionaire Bill Ackman through Pershing Square Holdings, his London- and Amsterdam-listed investment vehicle. While returns have been good, for most of the past decade the fund has been trading well below its net asset value, a fact that recently helped sink Ackman’s grand plans for a $25 billion New York listing of Pershing Square USA.
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Bill Ackman's turn to the right
But Ackman is no stranger to fame. The listing plans are designed to cash in on his newfound clout on social media. Long experienced in launching stinging attacks on corporate leaders, he has recently turned his hand to politics. On social media site X (formerly Twitter) he has amassed 1.4 million followers.
Ackman first gained widespread notice beyond the world of finance last year when he used X to campaign against anti-Semitism on US college campuses, backing a push that ultimately forced Harvard’s president to step down. Though a registered Democrat, his online persona has taken a notably right-wing turn. He is supporting Donald Trump and has penned long critiques of US affirmative-action practices.
He has taken some stick for that, but criticism won’t faze him, says Reeves Wiedeman in New York Magazine. Shareholder activists are used to having a “fervent commitment” to their positions. Hedge funders are said to be “often wrong”, but “never in doubt”. Ackman, 58, has been both spectacularly right and crushingly wrong during his long career on Wall Street. In 1992, aged 26 and fresh out of Harvard Business School, he co-founded his first hedge fund with backing from a small group of investors, including his father, a well-to-do New York real estate broker.
In 2013 he waged an “infamous activist battle” against Herbalife, a dietary supplements business that he labelled a “pyramid scheme”. Later regulatory investigations partly “vindicated” his stance, but they came too late for him to make any money. Pershing Square has since sworn off “bombastic” campaigns in favour of taking stakes in “boring” blue chips like Starbucks and Hilton. Today the model is less a pugnacious corporate raider and more Warren Buffett.
Ackman's love-in with Twitter
Ackman joined Twitter in 2017 when he was reeling from the end of his marriage of more than two decades and “some of the most disastrous investments of his career” – he closed out the Herbalife position in 2018 at a roughly $1 billion loss, says Maureen Farrell in The New York Times. He has since re-married. Yet arguably it is his “relationship” with Twitter that really marked a new chapter in his life. Ackman credits social media with allowing him to “see around corners” during the pandemic.
In February 2020 he was early to see the writing on the wall as Covid spread, betting $27 million against the market and turning it into $2.7 billion in a matter of weeks. In the US, Ackman’s fame is such that Facebook is now “full of impersonators” pretending to be him and offering stock tips.
Having discovered a taste for political activism, is a move into elected office the next step? “I have no plans to run for president,” he says, “but I do like having an independent voice and having influence.”
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