Bill Ackman Biography
Bill Ackman (William Albert Ackman) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is considered by some to be a contrarian investor but considers himself an activist investor. Ackman is the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management
Some research published at the University of Oxford characterizes his activities with Canadian Pacific Railway as paradigmatic of “engaged activism”. It is longer-term in nature with correlated benefits to the real economy, as distinct from shorter-term “financial activism”.
His investing style has been praised and criticized by U.S. government officials, heads of other hedge funds, various retail investors, and also the general public. Ackman’s most notable market plays include shorting MBIA’s bonds during the 2008 financial crisis, his proxy battle with Canadian Pacific Railway, and his stakes in the Target Corporation, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and Chipotle Mexican Grill.
He held a US$1 billion short against the nutrition company Herbalife from 2012 to 2018. It is a company he has claimed is a pyramid scheme designed as a multi-level marketing firm. Ackman’s efforts were documented in the documentary film Betting on Zero.
Bill Ackman Education
He received a bachelor of arts magna cum laude in history from Harvard College in 1988. Ackman’s thesis was “Scaling the Ivy Wall: the Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions.” He then received an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Bill Ackman Age
William Albert Ackman was born on May 11, 1966. He is 52 years old as of 2018.
Bill Ackman Family
Bill was born to Ronnie I. (née Posner) and Lawrence David Ackman, chairman of a New York real estate financing firm, Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group and his family is Jewish.
Bill Ackman Wife | Bill Ackman Divorce
On July 10, 1994, he married Karen Ann Herskovitz, a landscape architect. It was reported on December 22, 2016 that the couple had separated.
Bill Ackman Children
Bill and Karen have three children.
Bill Ackman Gotham Partners
Bill founded the investment firm Gotham Partners with fellow Harvard graduate David P. Berkowitz in 1992. The firm then made small investments in public companies. He partnered with the insurance and real estate firm Leucadia National to bid for Rockefeller Center in 1995. Although the firm did not win the deal, it caused increased interest in Gotham from investors leading to $500 million in assets by 1998. The firm had become entrenched in litigation with various outside shareholders who also owned an interest in the companies in which Gotham invested by 2002.
Despite an ongoing probe of Ackman’s trading by New York State and federal authorities, he began research challenging MBIA’s AAA rating in 2002. He was then charged fees for copying 725,000 pages of statements regarding the financial services company in his law firm’s compliance with a subpoena. Bill called for a division between MBIA’s bond insurers’ structured finance business and also its municipal bond insurance business.
Ackman argued that MBIA was legally restricted from trading billions of dollars of credit default swap (CDS) protection MBIA had also sold against various mortgage backed CDOs, and was also using a second corporation, LaCrosse Financial Products, which MBIA described as an “orphaned transformer”. He bought credit default swaps against MBIA corporate debt and then sold them for a large profit during the financial crisis of 2008. Ackman reported covering his short position on MBIA on January 16, 2009, according to the 13D filed with the SEC.
Carl Icahn Bill Ackman
A feud developed between Ackman and Carl Icahn over a deal involving Hallwood Realty in 2003. They both agreed to a “schmuck insurance”, under which, if Carl were to sell the shares within 3 years and made a profit of 10% or more, he and Bill would split the proceeds. Carl then paid $80 per share. HRPT Property Trust acquired Hallwood, paying $136.16 per share in April 2004. Under the terms, Carl owed Ackman investors about $4.5 million, but he refused to pay and Ackman sued him. Eight years later, the Court forced Carl to pay $4.5 million, plus 9% interest per year since the date of the sale.
Bill Ackman Pershing Square
With $54 million from his personal funds and from his former business partner Leucadia National, Ackman started Pershing Square Capital Management in 2004. The firm bought a significant share in the fast food chain Wendy’s International and successfully pressured it to sell its Tim Hortons doughnut chain in 2005. In 2006, Wendy’s spun off Tim Hortons through an IPO and raised $670 million for Wendy’s investors. After Bill sold his shares at a substantial profit after a dispute over executive succession, and the stock price collapsed. This raised criticism that the sale of Wendy’s fastest-growing unit left the company in a weaker market position. Bill blamed the poor performance on their new CEO.
His funds owned a 10% stake in Target Corporation in December 2007, valued at $4.2 billion through the purchase of stock and derivatives.
His funds then held a 38% stake in Borders Group in December 2010, and on December 6, 2010, Bill indicated he would finance a buyout of Barnes & Noble for US$900M.
In January 2009, at a panel meeting discussing Bernie Madoff, Bill defended his longtime friend Ezra Merkin, saying, “Has Ezra committed a crime? I don’t think so,” and “I think [Merkin] is an honest person, an intelligent person, an interesting person, a smart investor.” Ezra was charged with civil fraud in April 2009 by the State of New York for “secretly steering $2.4 billion in client money into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi fraud without their permission.” On June 2012, a settlement was reached requiring Merkin to pay $405 million to victims including the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.
Pershing Square Capital Management launched a new closed-end fund called Pershing Square Holdings in December 2012. It raised $3 billion in an October 2014 IPO on Amsterdam’s Euronext stock market.
Bill started buying J. C. Penney shares in 2010, paying an average of $22 for 39 million shares or 18% of Penney’s stock. In August 2013, Bill’s two-year campaign to transform the department store came to an abrupt end after he then decided to step down from the board following an argument with fellow board members.
Bill Ackman Hedge Fund
In January 2015, LCH Investments named Bill one of the world’s top 20 hedge fund managers in January 2015 after Pershing Square delivered $4.5 billion in net gains for investors in 2014. It brought the fund’s lifetime gains to $11.6 billion since its launch in 2004 through year-end 2014.
Bill Ackman Valeant | Valeant Bill Ackman
Bill along with Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ outgoing CEO, J. Michael Pearson, and the company’s former interim CEO, Howard Schiller, testified before the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging On April 27, 2016. The testifying panel then answered questions related to the Committee’s concerns about repercussions to patients and also the health care system posed by Valeant’s business model and controversial pricing practices.
In March 2017, Bill sold his remaining 27.2 million share position in Valeant to the Investment Bank Jefferies for about $300 million.
Bill Ackman Herbalife | Bill Ackman Herbalife Short
Bill issued a research report that was critical of Herbalife’s multi-level marketing business model, calling it a pyramid scheme in December 2012. He disclosed that his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, sold short the company’s shares directly (not with derivatives) starting in May 2012. This caused Herbalife’s stock price to drop. Bill spent $50 million on a public relations campaign against Herbalife in 2014, which was designed to hurt the company’s stock price.
His position on Herbalife led to a discussion on live television with Herbalife supporter Carl Icahn on January 25, 2013 for nearly half an hour on CNBC. During the segment, Carl called Ackman “a crybaby in the schoolyard” and claimed that going public with his short position would eventually force Bill into the “mother of all short squeezes.” Ackman admitted on Bloomberg Television on November 22, 2013 that Pershing Square’s open short position in Herbalife was “$400 million to $500 million” in the red, but that he wouldn’t be squeezed out and would hold the short “to the end of the earth”.
Bill told Reuters that he had covered his short-sell position in November 2017, but he would continue to bet against Herbalife using put options with no more than 3% of Pershing Square’s funds.
He exited his near billion-dollar bet against Herbalife on February 28, 2018 after the company’s stock price continued to rise, choosing to build his position in United Technology instead.
Bill Ackman Book
Bill makes his analysts read the following books;
- Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham
- The Warren Buffet Way by Robert G. Hagstrom
- Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street’s Bluff by Christine Richard
- Beating the Street by Peter Lynch
- Quality of Earnings by Thornton O’Glove
- Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor by Seth Klarman
- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
- One Up on Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild
- You Can Be a Stock Market Genius: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits by Joel Greenblatt
- The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Lawrence A. Cunningham and Warren Buffett
- Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, A Long Short (and Now Complete) Story, Updated with New Epilogue by David Einhorn and Joel Greenblatt
Bill Ackman Net Worth
According to Forbes Magazine, Bill has an estimated net worth of US$1.09 billion as of 2018.
Bill Ackman Philanthropy
Bill has given to charitable causes such as the Center for Jewish History, where he spearheaded a successful effort to retire $30 million in debt, personally contributing $6.8 million. The donation and those of Bruce Berkowitz, founder of Fairholme Capital Management, and Joseph Steinberg, president of Leucadia National, were also the three largest individual gifts the center has ever received.
His foundation donated $1.1 million to the Innocence Project in New York City and Centurion Ministries in Princeton, N.J. Bill is a signatory of The Giving Pledge, committing himself to give away at least 50% of his wealth to charitable causes.
He co-founded The Pershing Square Foundation in 2006, alongside his then wife Karen, to support innovation in economic development, education, healthcare, human rights, arts and urban development. Since its inception, Pershing Square Foundation has committed more than $400 million in grants and social investments. The Ackmans were on The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Philanthropy 50” list of the most generous donors in 2011.
Challenged Athletes Foundation, which provides sports equipment to those with physical disabilities, honored Ackman at a gala fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in July 2014 in New York City for helping raise a record $2.3 million.
Bill endorsed Michael Bloomberg as a prospective candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 presidential election. He is also a longtime donor to Democratic candidates and organizations, including Richard Blumenthal, Chuck Schumer, Robert Menendez, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Bill Ackman Height
Ackman’s height is not yet revealed.
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Bill Ackman makes more layoffs at his Pershing Square hedge fund
Published; 27 June 2018
Source; https://www.cnbc.com
Billionaire hedge fund manager William Ackman, whose investment assets have shrunk by more than half in the last three years, has made a second round of staff cuts and laid off three investor relations team members, two sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
The prominent manager cut one investor relations executive and two investor services executives at his New York-based Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund last week, the sources said. These layoffs come after Ackman cut his staff by 10 people in January, shrinking the firm to 46 employees from 56.
A spokesman for the firm declined to comment.
The fresh round of layoffs shows that Ackman, one of the industry’s most voluble activist investors, is moving forward with an overhaul that some had questioned but has so far been successful, involving both cost cuts and investment strategy changes.
Pershing Square now oversees roughly $8 billion in assets, less than half the amount it managed at its peak in 2015. Assets dwindled after three years of losses which prompted many investors to ask for some of their money back.
Unlike other managers who might try to replace departing capital, Ackman decided to re-tool his firm, telling clients that he wants to return to his roots by running a smaller firm and growing assets only through improved returns not by bringing in new investors.
In addition to the layoffs, key members of his team have voluntarily left.
Investment team member Ali Namvar retired and Vice Chairman Steve Fraidin returned to practicing law as a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.
Investment team member Brian Welch is leaving at the end of this month. The investment team has historically had between eight and 10 members.
In his early years, Ackman dazzled with double-digit returns, often delivering some of the industry’s best returns.
As part of the revamp, Ackman, one of the industry’s most visible managers, said he would stay out of the limelight to concentrate on investments, leaving the visiting with clients to others. So far this year the firm has made bets on Nike, United Technologies, and Lowe’s.
So far Ackman’s promises of delivering improved returns appear to be materializing. Through the middle of June, Pershing Square’s private hedge fund was up more than 9 percent while the publicly traded fund, Pershing Square, was up 11.4 percent since the start of the year.