YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Ackman

lines on the record: 257
first: 2024-02-20
most recent: 2024-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And then when the Congress, led by Lis Stefanic, announced an investigation of anti-Semitism on campus and concern about violations of law. The President was called to testify along with two other president of MIT, the president of University of Pennsylvania. We're having similar issues on campus. I reached out to the President of Harvard and said, well, one, the Israeli government had gotten in touch and offered the opportunity for me to see the Hamas, if you will, GoPro film. And I said, you know what? I'd love to show it at Harvard. And they thought that would be a great idea. And so I partnered with the head of Harvard Chabad named Rabbi Hershey. And we were putting the film up on campus. And I thought, you know, if the president were to see this, it would give her a lot of perspective on what happened and she should see it before her testimony.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was, as I described, one of the more disappointing conversations in my life, and it did not seem, she seemed a bit like, if you will, deer in the headlights, they couldn't do this. They couldn't do that. The law was preventing them from doing various things. And that led to my first letter to the university. And I sort of ended the letter, you know, sort of giving this president of Harvard a daredebe great speech. This is your opportunity. You can fix this. This could be your legacy. And I sent it to the, I emailed it to the president and the board members whose email addresses I had, I posted it on Twitter. And I got no response, no acknowledgement, nothing. And in fact, the open dialogue I had with a couple of people on the board basically got shut down after that. And that led to letter number two”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was really the beginning. And that, you know, I reached out to the president, reached out to the board of Harvard. I said, look, this thing is heading in the wrong direction and you need to fix it. And I have some ideas love to share. And I got the Heisman, as they say. You know, they just kept pushing off the opportunity for me to meet with the president and meet with the board. And at a certain point in time, I pushed. I'm kind of an activist when you push me. It reminded me of, you know, early days of activism, where I couldn't get the CEO of Wendy Easter to return my call. I couldn't get the CEO of Harvard to take a meeting. And then finally, I spoke to the chairman of the board, a woman by the name of Penny Pritzker, who I knew from on a business school board with her.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that ultimately, you know, she was sort of forced by the board or the pressure to make more public statement. But it was clear that it was hard for her to come to an understanding of this terrorist act. And then the protests erupted on campus. And they started out recently benign. And then the protesters got more and more aggressive in terms of violating university rules on things like bullying. And the university did nothing. And that obviously for the Jewish students, the Israeli students, the Israeli faculty, Jewish faculty created an incredibly uncomfortable environment. And the present seemed indifferent. And I went up to campus and I met with hundreds of students in small groups, in larger groups. And they're like, Bill, why is the president doing nothing? Why is the administration doing nothing?”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Family borrows the money, or you borrow the money as a student, and your learning is disrupted by constant protest, and the university does nothing. You know, when George Floyd died, you know, the Harvard president wrote a very strong letter denouncing what had taken place and calling this an important moment in American history and took it incredibly seriously. Her first letter about October 7th was not that, let's put it that way. And then her second letter was not that.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It begins on October 8th, probably. You can do a compare and contrast with how Dartmouth managed the events of October 7th and the aftermath and how Harvard did. And October 8th or shortly thereafter, the Dartmouth president, who had been in her job for precisely the same number of months that the Harvard president had been in her job, the first thing she did is she got the most important professors of Middle East studies who were Arab and who were Jews and convened them and held an open session, Q&A for students to talk about what's going on in the Middle East and began an opportunity for common understanding among the student body. And Dartmouth has been a relatively benign environment on this issue, and students are able to do work, and there aren't disruptive protests with people with bullhorns walking into classrooms, interfering with people pay today $82,000 a year, which itself is crazy to go to Harvard. But imagine your family.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. I mean, look at what Dubai has accomplished with nomads in the desert, right? And that's become a major, it's a tourist destination. Gaza could have been a tourist destination.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And missiles and rockets going into Israel. And I do think a consortium of the Gulf states, the Saudis and others, have to ultimately oversee the governance of this region. I think if that can happen, I think you can have peace, you can have prosperity. And I'm fundamentally an optimist.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comes with prosperity. People are under the leadership of terrorists. You're not going to have prosperity and you're not going to have peace. And I think the Israelis withdrew in 2005 and fairly quickly Hamas took control of the situation. That should never have been allowed to happen. And I think, you know, if you think about, I have the opportunity to spend, what I call it an hour with Henry Kissinger a few months before he passed away. And we were talking about Gaza or in the early stage of the war. He said, look, you know, this is not, you could think about Gaza as a test of a two-state solution. It's not looking good. These were his words. So the next time around, the Palestinian people should have their own state, but it can't be a state where 40 billion resources goes in and is spent on weaponry.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30 years, a number like that. And a lot of it's disappeared into some combination of corruption or tunnels or weapons. And the tragedy is, you know, you look at what Singapore has achieved in the last 30 years, right?”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They want to be able to feed their family. They want a job that generates the resources to feed their family. They want their kids to have a better life than they've had. They want peace. I think these are basic human things. I'm sure the vast majority of Palestinians share these views. But it's such an embedded situation with hatred and, as I say, indoctrination. And then going back to incentives, terrorists generate their resources by committing terrorism. And that's how they get funding. And that's, you know, there's a lot of graft. It's a plutocracy, right? The top of the terrorist pyramid, if you accept the numbers that are in the press, the top leaders have billions of dollars, you know, 40 billion or so has gone into Gaza over the last and the West Bank over the last”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, the problem, of course, is when Hamas controls for the last almost 20 years has controlled Gaza, including the education system, they're educating, you see these training videos of kindergartners indoctrinating them into hating Jews and Israel. So it's, and of course, you don't like to see Palestinians celebrating some of those early videos of October 7th with dead bodies in the back of trucks and people cheering. So it's a really unfortunate situation. But I think about a Palestinian life is important and as valuable as a Jewish life, as an American life. And what do people really want? I want a home.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I generally take the side of people who've been disadvantaged. Almost all of our philanthropic work has been in that capacity. So that's sort of my natural. Perspective, but I don't take the side of terrorists ever, obviously. And the whole thing is just a tragedy.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was pretty early in my life, a guy named Marty Peretz, who's been important to me over the course of my life, a professor or first investor in my fund, introduced me to Nary, asked me when I was right out of school to join this nonprofit called the Jerusalem Foundation, which was a charitable foundation that supported Teddy Collick when he was mayor of Jerusalem. I ended up becoming the youngest chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation in my 30s, and I spent some time in Israel. The early philanthropic stuff I did with the Jerusalem Foundation, the thing I was most interested in was kind of the Palestinian, the plight of the Palestinians and kind of peaceful coexistence. And so I had kind of an early kind of perspective. And, you know, as chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation, I would go into Arab communities. I would meet the families in their homes. You know, you get a sense of the humanity of a people and I care about humanity.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With all of my posts about Israel, I'm obviously very supportive of the country of Israel, Israel's right to exist, Israel's right to defend itself. My Arab friends, my Palestinian friends, you know, were kind of saying, hey, Bill, where are you? What about Palestinian lives?”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a sad world that we live in that one, we have terrorists, and two, that we could have such barbaric terrorism. And yeah, just a reminder of that.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's possible, but again, I try to be extremely economically rational. And actually, the last seven years have been quite peaceful. I really have not been an activist in the old. For many years. And the vast majority of even our activist investments historically were very polite at respectful cases. The press, of course, focuses on the more interesting ones. Like Chipotle is one of the best investments we ever made. We got four of eight board seats and we worked with management. It was a great outcome. I don't think it's ever been a story about it. And the stock's up almost 10 times from the time we hired Brian Nicholas, CEO. But it's not interesting because there was no battle. Whereas Herbalife, of course, was like an epic battle, even Canadian Pacific. So, you know, for a period there, most people, when they meet me in person, they're like, wow, you seem like a really nice guy.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem was that it wasn't my money, it was my investor's money, so I couldn't settle with him on that basis. But I had the chance to spend real time with him at dinner. He's funny. He's charismatic. He's got incredible stories. And, you know, actually I made peace with him over time. We had a little hugout on CNBC, even had him to my house, believe it or not. I hosted something called the Finance Cup, which is a tennis tournament between people in finance in Europe and the US. And we had the event at my house. And one guy thought to invite Carl Icon. And so we had Carl Icon there to present awards. And again, I have to say, I kind of like the guy. But I didn't like him much during this.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's a very charming guy. So in the midst of all this, the Hollywood one, he took me out for dinner to his favorite Italian restaurant. When we're in the middle of the litigation, see if you could resolve it. And he offered $10 million to my favorite charity”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We sold Valiant, we covered Herbalife. That was the resetting moment for the firm because it would just psychologically. And, you know, the beauty of investing is you don't need to make it back the way you lost it, right? You can just take your loss. By the way, losses are valuable in that the government allows you to take a tax loss and that can shelter other gains. And we just refocused.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A personal decision to pursue it, but he was waiting for an opportunity where he could make money at our expense and was kind of a brilliant. Now, the irony is well, first of all, the FTC found a few interesting facts. So one, the government launched an investigation. They ended up settling with the company and the company paid $220 million in fines. I met a professor from Berkeley a couple years ago who told me that he had been hired by the government as their expert on herbalife, and he got access to all their data, was able to prove that their appearance scheme. But the government ultimately settled with Carl because they were afraid they could possibly lose in court so they settled with him. But if you look at the stock, if we had been able to stay short the entire time, we would have made a bunch of money because the stock had a $6 billion market cap and we shorted it today. It's probably a billion and a half.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he thought he could make money doing this. He wouldn't have done it if he did otherwise. He thought his bully pulpit, his ability to create a short squeeze, his control over the company would enable him to achieve this. And he made a billion, we lost a billion.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he did is he got on the board of the company and used the company's financial resources plus his stake in the business to squeeze us. A squeeze in short selling is where you restrict the supply of the securities so that there's a scarcity and then you encourage people to buy the stock and you drive the stock up. And as I explained before, you short those coins at 10, they go to 100. You can lose a theoretically an unlimited amount of money. That's scary. That's why we don't short stocks. That's why I didn't short stocks before this, but this was unfortunately I had to have the personal lesson.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I generally have no regrets because I'm very happy with where I am now. And I feel like It's a bit like you step on the butterfly in the forest and the world changes because every action has a reaction. If you're happy with who you are, where you are in life, every decision you've made, good or bad over the course of your life, got you to precisely where you are. I wouldn't change anything.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have kind of an interesting conversation where he calls me all kinds of names and stuff. So it was a moment. It was a moment in my life.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not that kind of person generally, but he made eight years to pay me, not me, even me. My investors money they owed. So So he probably didn't like that. So he kind of hung around in the weeds waiting for an opportunity. And then from there, I started purging. We had a kind of straight line up. The first 12 years we could do nothing wrong, then valiant. Life, right? He sees an opportunity and he buys the stock. Figures he's going to run me off the road. And so that was the beginning of that. And kind of the moment, and I think it's the, I'm told by CMBC, it's the most watched segment in business television history. They're interviewing me about the Herbalife investment on CNBC, and then Carl Icon calls into the show.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he owed me $9 million, which to Krawl Icon, who had probably a $20 billion net worth at the time. This was nothing. But to me, it was like, okay, it's my investor's money. I'm going to get it back. And so eventually we won. Eventually, he paid And then he called me. He said, Bill, congratulations. Now we can be friends. We can invest, do some investing together. And like, Carl.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tiny. Now, it was material to my investors, so my first fund, I wound it down, but I wanted to maximize everything for my investors, right? These are the people back me at 26 years old. I was right out of business school and no experience. And they supported me, so I'm going to go to the end of the earth for them. And four and a half million relative to our fund at the end was maybe 400 million, so it wasn't a huge number, but it was a big percentage of what was left after I sold all our liquid security. So I was fighting for it. So we got 4.5 million plus interest for eight years or something. That's how long the litigation took. So we got about double.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I sued him. And the legal system in America can take some time. And what he would do is we sued and then we won in the whatever New York Supreme Court. And then he appealed. And you can appeal like six months after the case. We waited 179th day, and then he would appeal. We fought at the next level, and then he would peel. And he peeled all the way to the Supreme Court. Of course, the Supreme Court wouldn't take the case. It took years. Now, as part of our agreement, we got 9% interest on the money that he owed us. So I viewed it as my Carl icon money market account with a much higher interest rate. Eventually, I won.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the deal closes and he's supposed to pay us in two business days or three business days. I waited a few business days. No money comes in. I call Carl. I'm like, Carl, congratulations on the Hollywood Realty. Thanks, Bill. I said, Carl, just want to remind you, I know it's been a few years, but we have this agreement. Remember the Schmuck insurance? It's like, yeah. I said, well, you owe us our Schmuck insurance. He said, what do you mean? I didn't sell my shares. I said, Do you still have the shares? He says, no. I said, what happened to them? Well, the company did a merger for cash and they took away my shares, but I didn't sell them. Understand what happens. So I had to, I said, Carl, I'm going to have to sue you. Sue me, I'm going to sue you.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he sells his stock or loses or transfers his shares for $145 a share. So he owes actually our investors the difference between $145 and $80 times 50%. And I had like, you know, lawyers never like you to put like an arithmetic example. I put like a formula, you know, like out of a math book in the document so there can be no confusion. It was only an eight-page really simple agreement.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a pretty good deal So we made that deal. And because I was dealing with Carl Icon, who had a reputation for being difficult, I was very focused on the agreement. And we didn't want him to be able to be cute. So the agreement said, if he sells or otherwise transfers his shares, and we came up with a definition to include every version of sale, okay? Because, you know, it's Carl. Well, he then buys the steak and then makes a bid for the company. Plan is for him to get the company. And he bids like $120 a share. And the company hires Morgan Stanley to sell itself and he raises a bid to $125 and to $130, eventually gets sold. I don't remember the exact price. Let's say $145 a share. Carl's not the winning”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was really my deciding to wind up my former fund. And we owned a big stake and a company called Hallwood Realty Partners, which was a company that owned real estate assets. And it was worth a lot more than where it was trading. But it needed an activist to really unlock the value. And we were, in fact, going out of business and didn't have the time or the resources to pursue it. So I sold it to Carl Icon. And I sold it to him at a premium to where the stock was trading. I think the stock was like 66. I sold it to him for 80. But it was worth about $150. And I said, look, and part of the deal was Carl's like, look, I'll give you schmuck insurance. I'll make sure you don't look bad. And I had another deal at a higher price without schmuck insurance, but a deal with Carl at a lower price with schmuck insurance. And the way the schmuck insurance went, look, Bill, if I sell the stock in the next three years for a higher price, I'll give you 50% of my profit.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I mentioned that I had another period of time or significant business challenges. This was my first fund called Gotham Partners, and we had a court stop a transaction between some private company we owned and a public company. It's another long story, if you want to go through it. I would love to.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a little bit of a backstory, but his motivations here were not really principally driven by thinking herbal life was a good company. He thought it was a good way to hurt me. So he basically bought a bunch of stock and said it was a really great company. And, you know, Carl, at least at the time, threw his weight around a bit. It was a credible investor, had a lot of resources. And that began the saga.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The name for a legitimate company like this, or it's a pyramid scheme where basically your sales are really only coming from people who are you convinced to buy the product by getting them into the business. That's precisely what this company is. And I'm like, okay, shorting a pyramid scheme seems like one, we'll make a bunch of money, but two, the world will be behind us because they're harming poor people. Regulators will get interested in a company like this. And we said, you know, the FTC is going to shut this thing down. We did a ton of work, and I gave this sort of epic presentation, laying out all the facts. Stock got completely crushed. And we were on our way. And the government actually got interested early on, launched an investigation pretty early, SEC and otherwise. But then a guy named Carl Icon showed up.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Short selling is you kind of sell something and you have to buy it back at a higher price. Herbalife didn't have what's called credit default swaps that you could purchase. Not a big enough company. It didn't have enough debt outstanding to be able to implement it. You had to short the stock in order to make it as successful, to bet against the company. And the more work I did in the company, the more it was like, oh my God, this thing's an incredible scam. They purport to sell weight loss shakes. But in reality, they're selling kind of a fake business plan. And the people that adopted lose money and they go out. They go after actually in many cases undocumented immigrants who are pitched on the American dream opportunity. And because they have few other options, because they can't get legal employment, they become urban life distributors. And it's a business where you, so-called multi-level marketing or multi-level marketing is sort of the”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was. A big part of it was that we used a different kind of instrument to short it. Where we reversed that sort of, we made the investment asymmetric in our favor, meaning put up a small amount of money if it works and make a fortune.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure there are people who went bankrupt shorting Tesla. That's why we didn't short stocks. But I was presented with this actually a reporter that covered the other short investment we made early in the career, a company called MBIA, came to me and said, Bill, I found this incredible company. You've got to take a look at it. It's a total fraud. And they're scamming poor people.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with that is what if you sell them and they go from 100 to 1,000? Now you're going to have to go buy them back and you got to pay, you know, whatever, $10,000 to buy back coins that you would sold for 500. You're going to lose $9,500. And there's no limit to how high a stock price can go. Companies go to $3 trillion in value. Tesla, a lot of people short at Tesla saying, oh, it's overvalued. He's never going to be able to make a successful electric car.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You pay him interest while you're borrowing them. And then you go sell them in the market for $100. That's what they're worth. And then they go down in price to fifty. You go back in, you buy the silver dollars back at $50, and you give them back to your friend. Your friend is fine. You borrowed $10, you gave them the $10 back, and he got interest in the meantime. He's happy, he made money on his coin collection. You, however, made $50 times the 10 coins. You made $500. That's pretty good.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we at Pershing Square shorted very few stocks. And the reason for that is short selling is just inherently treacherous. So if you buy a stock, it's called going long, right? You're buying something. Your worst case scenario is you lose your whole investment. You buy a stock for $100, it goes to zero, you lose $100, right, per share. You buy one share, you lose $100. You short a stock at $100. What it means is you borrow the security from someone else. The analogy I gave made it easy for people to understand. It's a bit like you think, you know, silver coins are going to go down in value. And you have a friend who's got a whole pile of these 1880 US dollars. And you think it's going to go down a value. You say, hey, can I borrow 10 of those dollars from you? He's like, sure, but what are you going to pay me to borrow? I'm like, I'll pay you interest on the value of the dollars today. So you borrow the dollars that are worth $100 each today.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their son, their brother. You know, it was a moment. And also, by the way, the other thing to think about is when you recover from something like this, you really appreciate it. And also, as much of the media loves when some successful person falls, they love writing the story of success. They love even more the story of failure. But when you recover from that, it's kind of like the American story. America, you think of the great entrepreneurs and how many failures they had before they succeeded, how many rocket launches did SpaceX have explode on the pad, right? And then you look at success. I mean, that's why Musk is so admired.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one day you wake up and I'm like, wow, it's amazing how far I've come. And if you look at a chart of Pershing Square, our company, you can see the absolute bottom. You can see where we were. You can see the drop. And you can see where we are now. And that huge drop that felt like a complete unbelievable disaster looks like a little bump on the curve. And it really gives you perspective on these things. You just have to power through. And I think the key is, you know, I've always been fortunate from a mental health point of view. And nutrition, sleep, exercise, and a little progress every day. That's it. And, you know, good friends and family. Go take a walk with a friend every night and a sister who loves me and parents who are supportive. But they were all worried about their.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would meditate 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening, and I also, a big believer in exercise and weightlifting and I play tennis And I had been, this is not my first proximity to disaster. I had another moment in my career like 2002. And I learned this method for dealing with these kind of moments, which is you just make a little progress every day. So today I'm going to wake up. I'm going to make progress. I'll make progress in litigation. I'll make progress in the portfolio. I'll make progress with my life. And progress compounds a bit like money compounds. You don't see a lot of progress in the first few weeks, but like 30 days in, like, oh, okay. You can't look up the mountaintop where you used to be because then you'll give up. But you're just okay just makes step by step by step. And then 90 days in, you're like, okay, I was way down there. Okay, okay, I don't look up. Just keep making, you know, progress, progress, progress. And progress really does come.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a hard time, hard time because I was separated from my wife and my kids. I was living in, you know, not the greatest department at a beautiful home. And so I had to go find like a bachelor place. And I was, I didn't want to be away from my kids. I moved like 10 blocks away and I wasn't seeing them and they didn't like it. So I ended up buying an apartment I didn't like in the same building as my kids like with a different entrance so I could be near them. But I was home alone. I got a dog. That was a bar and we call them a bar, not the elephant. He's a black labradoodle. He was supposed to be a mini, but he's not as mini. But I got him at six weeks old, and he would keep me company. And I started meditating, actually. And a friend recommended TM.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brad pits your competition. This is great. So it was like a moment. That was sort of the bottom. And then sort of, you know, the motivational thing. I didn't want to lose to an activist. Didn't want to lose my girl to some other guy.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six o'clock, no response, eight o'clock, no response, 10 o'clock, no response. And, you know. Finally, calls me at 10 30 and tells me how great. So I had this scenario okay, I'm going to, a judge is going to find me, we're going to lose to the judge. All my assets will disappear And then Brad Pitt's going to take my girlfriend.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And apparently he's really interested in architecture. Okay. Now Nara and I were like, you know, we would WhatsApp all day, every day. We'd talk throughout the day. Brad Pitt shows up at the Media Lab at 10 o'clock. I talked to her in the morning. I kind of text her to see how things are going. Don't hear back. And on WhatsApp, you can see whether the other person's read it or not.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love helps. I literally met Narya the absolute bottom. Our first date was September 7th of 2017. That was very close to the bottom. Actually, there's one other element to the story. So this went on for a few months after I met her. Other element is that one day I get a call from Nary. She's like, Bill, guess what? I'm like, what? Brad Pitt is coming to the media lab. He wants to see my work. I'm like, that's beautiful, sweetheart. I didn't know Brad Pitt was interested in your work. As a man”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source