Bill Ackman: Investment Strategy, What the Market is Missing, How AI Breaks Businesses

One of the most provocative and interesting investors in the country. A legendary activist investor. Pershing Square CEO and founder, Bill Ackman. Taking a short position and going public with it is a pretty serious business. Interestingly, some of the best businesses in the world are trading at the lowest multiples. We're kind of the rebirth of the closed end investment company universe. What did you think of Sara, the CEO of OpenAI? I'm sorry. CFO. Felt like the CEO. Yeah. I I was Stop with that stuff. Actually, I was super impressed. Made me a lot more bullish on OpenAI. And I thought Right? I thought she should be CEO of OpenAI. That's what I thought. I think Sam should be I think Sam should be chair. I think he's much better. There was 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, super super documentary. I wanted to kick this off. 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 that 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 and your investment model have kind of changed over over time. Sure. So I would say the biggest change over time is an appreciation for the importance of what we 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. And over time, you learn the importance of durable kind of growth. That's the most important factor. I would say I'm as activist as I've ever been, but more of it's on, Twitter than it, than, I would say in the corporate context. And the reason for that is when I started in, at 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. So we had this very simple idea, buy Wendy's, spin off Tim Hortons, double our money. And, 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 …