Bill Ackman On Markets Ai And Concentrated Investing

TITLE: Special Guest Bill Ackman on Markets, AI and Concentrated Investing CHANNEL: Hargreaves Lansdown DATE: 2026-06-16 ---TRANSCRIPT--- The views expressed during this episode were those of the trust manager and not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any investment, nor do they necessarily reflect the views of Hargreaves Lansdown. Hello and welcome to the Switch Your Money On podcast from Hargreaves Lansdown. I’m Anna Macdonald. And I’m Matt Britzman. Today, which is Thursday, the 11th of June, Matt and I are joined by Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, one of the best-known active investors of the last couple of decades. Pershing Square runs a very focused strategy, typically around 8 to 12 high conviction investments, mainly in large US companies. It’s very deliberately not a diversified index-like approach. In the UK, many investors will be familiar with the listed vehicle Pershing Square Holdings, a £7 billion market cap investment trust which gives access to that strategy. Yeah, Anna, so one of the important features of the trust is this idea of permanent capital, and it’s something that we’re going to talk to to Bill about in terms of why he likes that structure. But just for a bit of kind of background, unlike an open-ended fund where investors are redeeming day to day, that doesn’t happen with a closed-end investment trust. And typically that can give a manager the ability to take a longer-term approach. Again, hopefully something that we’ll get Bill to talk about. We’re also going to talk to Bill about markets more broadly. We’re going to cover AI. There’ll likely be some chatter on SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, some of the big IPOs that we’re seeing. So Tune in, I think this is going to be a good one. Good morning, Bill, and welcome to our podcast. I’m Anna McDonald, Investment Strategy Director, and I’m Matt Britzman, Senior Equity Analyst. Bill, thanks for joining us today. Of course. Right, so let’s get started. Before we get into the individual stocks, can we start on why having a closed-end vehicle is So important to you? Well, look, the markets have become increasingly short-term. More and more capital is controlled by what some people call pod shops, firms where capital is deployed among a large number of small teams, where the teams are compensated based on relatively short-term performance, and where they’re very tight with what they call risk limits, meaning if there’s any degree of downside volatility, they’re sort of forced out of names. The market’s also characterized by index funds that are owning an increasing percentage of companies. And that money takes capital out of the float, which means the marginal buyer and seller has bigger influence. The result of that is a lot more volatility. And in that kind of environment, you can go through periods of time where very high-quality businesses are trading at very deeply discounted prices. But if your capital is short-term, effectively, those investors have short-term capital. They’re forced to sell. When things are even slightly worse than anticipated. And that creates an opportunity as long as your capital base can sustain that sort of short-term volatility. And that’s what gives us the advantage. And that’s why we’ve really gone to a model where nearly 100% of our capital is in these sort of permanent structures. So it enables us to be a long-term investor. And if you think about what is a company, a company is, if you pick a good one, it’s an infinite life entity. And the value of that business is the present value of the cash you can you can generate from it to value that business. I mean, to own that business for a month or two, really, you’re going to miss out on significant opportunities. Okay. You’re forced to own that business for such a short period of time. Yeah. So does that mean that you are, I mean, in terms of the, you have a concentrated portfolio that you are sitting and thinking, right, if the market moves, you know, for example, if there’s a sell-off, we are ready to go with a couple of ideas in the sort of, in the stable that we can bring them out and bring them onto the field. Is that how you think about it? We call it a library as opposed to a stable, but yes, we do. Okay. We’ve built a library of very high quality companies that we’d love to own. And actually we’re going through a period right now where those kind of businesses are available at very attractive prices, the kind of companies we like. Okay. So do you think over the last 5 years, for example, that the way that the markets behaved with increasing passive funds and more and more high-frequency trading, that that is somehow, you know, it’s providing these opportunities for you. But at some stage, do you think that that balance shifts, or do you think this is going to be a feature going forwards? That, Amy, at what point does this active management style really come back into delivering index-beating performance, if this is what we’re going to measure ourselves against? Yeah, look, I think it’s not possible for the substantial majority of active managers to beat the market, but it is possible for a minority of them to. I don’t know if it’s a trend-based thing, but I do think the opportunity set becomes greater as long as your clients don’t leave during a— I mean, our performance is going to be different from the market because we’re highly concentrated. What that’s meant over the last 22 years is actually massive outperformance, you know, approaching, you know, 600, 700 basis points per annum of outperformance. But we go through periods where we dramatically outperform the index. You know, just even the last few months is a period like that. You know, S&P’s up something like 7 or 8% for the year. I have to check. I think it’s about, I looked this morning, I think it’s about 6.5% and you’re like, you know, you’re in negative territory. So, and imagine a world in which all your clients pulled your money at precisely the time that you should be deploying it. And we’re deploying capital in a very attractively priced market. The market’s excited about, I would say, the shiny new thing, which today is sort of semiconductors, you know, the whole sort of AI infrastructure play. And then, you know, perhaps SpaceX. I think a lot of money is coming out of the market as, actually heard an interesting anecdote, which I think is likely true. You know, the SpaceX IPO, which happens, I think, basically today, I think the stock starts trading. I think it’s tomorrow. I think it’s closed today and then it starts, I think it starts tomorrow. So imagine you’re an endowment that has an investment in SpaceX, which now is going to come, go from your private portfolio to your public portfolio. And because of its tremendous success, it’s going to be, going to give you overweight, if you will, your allocation to publics. You’re forced to sell. To bring things sort of back into line. And so, yeah, that’s interesting. And actually, when we think about it from an index point of view, the S&P were quite, it was quite interesting that they decided they wouldn’t fast-track SpaceX or other mega IPOs. They won’t be fast-tracking them if they’ve still got that very, you know, low free float, which is going to lead to some, yeah, I mean, that very low free float will lead to probably some quite dramatic share price movements. I should give credit to S&P. You know, I think sort of NASDAQ caved to the marketing opportunity. Winning the business from New York Stock Exchange. I think S&P is thinking kind of longer term. Yeah, no, I was quite pleased to hear about that. So when investors think about your, yeah, they should be thinking about it as this is a very concentrated, is a very concentrated vehicle that knows what it wants to achieve over the longer term, but perhaps benchmarking it to something like an index is not the right way to think about it. No, I think benchmarking it to an index is the right way to think about it, but I think the time horizon with which you should do the comparison is several years as opposed to several months. Okay, great. Bill, can you just— you mentioned this idea that you run this concentrated portfolio. Can you just touch on how you came to the idea of having, you know, 8 to 12 stocks in the portfolio and why you prefer that concentration? Sure. So actually, many people in our industry say to us, Bill, you know, I would manage money exactly the way you do. For myself, but my clients don’t let me. And the benefit of concentration, I think, is pretty obvious, which is that you can select among your group of interesting ideas to own only the best ones. Why own more of idea 20 when you can own more of idea 1, 2, or 3? And the reason why people operate in a less concentrated fashion, diversification will give you a smoother outcome. You know, the way to get fired in asset management is to have performance that’s adverse to others, and you’re guaranteed to have differentiated performance, i.e., occasional periods where you underperform others. And if your money can disappear overnight, then it’s a much more prudent strategy to not hug the index, right? Yeah. We talked before about how much capital is passively managed according to the index. That’s the contractually passively managed capital, the money actually in index funds. But the vast majority of other investors hug the index and only on the margin do they deploy capital. Because if the stock market is down and you’re down, you’re less likely to be fired, right? If the stock market’s up and you’re underperforming, then people generally take the money elsewhere unless, you know, their method of doing so is selling an interest in a closed-end fund as opposed to the underlying, forcing you to sell the underlying companies. Yeah. Bill, let’s shift a little bit to your, I mean, you have a reputation historically of being an activist investor, right? Looking for companies where you can potentially instill change. Has your strategy on that shifted over time? You know, are you now more looking for companies where you don’t have to, you know, go and force the board to try and sell half the company or write open letters to investors, etc. I know you were on the Liquidity All In recently. You talk about a company where back in the day you took a 10% stake and couldn’t get the CEO to call you back. Have you shifted that mindset now to kind of less fighting and more kind of finding the businesses where you don’t have to take that activist approach? We were always looking for businesses where we didn’t have to take— do less work and get a successful outcome. Obviously, we’d love to own the great the greatest durable growth companies, which are, management’s already doing all the right things. That’s always been our preference. You know, it’s generally hard, or it has been historically hard to find a very high quality business run extremely well, trading at a very attractive valuation. However, what I would say is, you know, as I spoke before, the sort of introduced short-term volatility in markets has made that a much more common occurrence. So we can build a portfolio I would say more recently of very high quality businesses where our go-forward estimate of return is something in the mid to high 20s. You know, we can do that today. And basically these businesses are already operated correctly. So you always choose that first. The second point I’d make is, you know, we entered this business 20-odd years ago. We did not have a track record or reputation. We had not had a successful activist investment. After you’ve done it for 20 years, people know who we are and their response to us, activism is only needed if you can’t get into the boardroom, or at least they don’t respect what you have to say. And that’s really changed. And so the result today is we still make investments in companies which there are opportunities for the businesses to be improved, but we can have those conversations behind closed doors as opposed to, you know, hosting people in a conference, in a hotel ballroom. Yeah. I mean, certainly I’ve noticed since I started investing that the I mean, you do get unusually, because of the aspects that you mentioned about pension funds and about high-frequency trading, you can actually get these incredible moves in what were very large companies that just wouldn’t have happened on that kind of, you wouldn’t have had that magnitude of the move before. So you do have, as you say, those options to get in at some, you know, and to see pretty quick price appreciation or price depreciation in holdings. I was wondering about what you said about these companies are already very well managed. And I’m interested, given that, you know, you’re a prolific tweeter, we hear about your views. Do you think the companies that you’re investing, I mean, some of these big companies, do you think they need to, they’ve had to become more political in themselves? I mean, do you think they have to deal with deal with what we see in the US or in other countries, but particularly in the US to get ahead? Well, I would say we have a more interventionist president in the capital markets. You know, you’ve seen President Trump, you know, Biden, for example, if you look at the Intel case, you know, in order to kind of help the US competitive position, made a grant to the Intel Corporation to to help what was kind of a struggling— think of it as a chipmaker. And Trump’s response was, well, I want ownership in exchange for that taxpayer investment. So he, you know, you don’t want to get adverse to the president these days. And so I think corporate America is definitely paying attention to politics from that perspective. Are you surprised by what’s going on at the moment? It’s hard to know what Trump expected when he went into Iran, or do you think that there’s going to be much change ahead of, ahead of the midterms and ahead of, you know, how he’s going to respond to affordability? That was meant to be the big watchword of this year. Look, I think it’s a credit to the president that he did something that I think will have a generationally positive impact at the cost of, you know, short-term political risk. Right. You knew going into Iran that the impact would be higher oil prices and therefore higher gasoline prices. And that is, you know, it’s certainly, it’s the one thing that you can very clearly see, you know, when you fill up the tank every few days and the price, you know, moves 20, 30%. That’s something that hits the pocketbook of the consumer. And politically, it’s always something that people respond to. However, a bigger risk to the United States than short-term energy prices is a nuclear Iran. And so I think he made the long-term political decision with the cost, with short-term political consequences. I give him credit for that. I think, look, I think we’re moving toward the end. I think we’re more in the endgame with respect to the Iran war. I think it will be resolved before midterms. I think energy prices will, you know, you could see a big reversion obviously in energy prices, shipping rates, all this stuff. Yeah, it can come back quite quickly. I mean, some people say that we’re going to be at some kind of tipping point soon where, you know, reserves have all been used up. And, but hopefully, yeah, hopefully it gets resolved before then. But I think you were more outspoken about the tariff policy, I think. Look, I’ve been supportive of the president when I think he’s doing the right thing. And I’ve been, I would say cautious to concerned when I felt that, you know, I thought the tariff approach was very, very high risk the way it was sort of initially implemented. I agreed with the president that, you know, over time we’ve allowed other countries to, quote unquote, take advantage of the United States with unfair trade relationships and that tariffs are a good way to resolve them. But, you know, the introduction of massive tariffs in a kind of overnight fashion, I was, you know, I was the I initiated this 90-day pause idea and the president kind of took it up. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. I mean, do you have thoughts about what you think is going to happen in the— if it were to swing back and the Democrats would win the next election, do you think they would keep that kind of more America-first policy and want to keep tariffs in place? Well, the Supreme Court has kind of had its view on tariffs, so it’s hard the president to use that as a tool without the support of the Congress. You know, again, our system’s a little bit different from yours. President’s still going to be president after midterm election. Oh yeah, no, sorry, I meant in 2028. That just seems like in this era, far, very far away. Okay. Phil, let’s switch to markets and AI more broadly, and I want to get your take on this. So It feels like every few months we have a kind of swing in the narrative with a bit of worry about AI. I know that in the US AI is very unpopular with consumers. Do you think that AI has an image problem in the US at the moment, to some extent potentially caused by companies like Anthropic who are coming out and saying that the models are too good, they have to be, you know, held back before they go out? And how do you think that’s going to help or hinder the proliferation of AI through more than just the hyperscalers, but down to end consumers and enterprises? Actually, I disagree with what you said. I think consumers have had an incredibly favorable reaction to AI in terms of they actually use the product, right? The adoption of AI is, you know, the original OpenAI rollout is the fastest adoption of any product, you know, in, in, in history in terms of number of users in a relatively short period of time. And a lot of people are integrating AI into their daily life, whether they’re using it for health, you know, checking, you know, issues they’ve identified or, or they’re using it to help them in their jobs. I think, yes, there’s also a fear among, you know, people generally about, about job loss. And I would say more so than any, any other technology development, certainly in my lifetime. So I think there’s sort of this sort of interesting balance and it will be disruptive to certain kinds of jobs. But I’m increasingly confident it’s going to be a big boom economically to job growth generally. And as long as people are, you know, adapt, I think would be very, very positive for, for job growth. What do you— where do you sit on the AI bubble, no bubble debate? This is something that seems to come up quite often, at least in the news flow in the UK. I don’t know about in the US. Are you happy with the amount of spending that’s going on AI infrastructure? Are you seeing the returns you want to see from the companies in your portfolio that are some of the biggest investors in this space? Kind of like, Help us think about how you kind of frame that in your mind. So I think very differently, you know, Microsoft, you know, Google, you know, pick your meta, for example, in terms of these are companies that are not risking their balance sheets to, you know, enter into this massive period of capital expenditure and they’re doing so in response to enormous demand.— and they’re doing so in response to, you know, you don’t— the first person to superintelligence obviously has an enormous competitive advantage in the world. You don’t want to lose that race. So that race is what’s driving competition and this sort of massive spending. I would say it’s too early to know precisely what the returns will be from that spending. You get some interesting kind of like if you want real-time data points, You look at the SpaceX prospectus or the recent announcements from SpaceX. You know, Elon, you know, well known for his manufacturing and hardware capability, right? Built out a data center. And then he’s rented it on a short-term basis, apparently his choice, where the payback period is, you know, like less, very, very, very short. So I think, you know, I don’t question the enormous amounts of demand. For compute driven by AI and the power of the tool. Where I think, you know, there’s going to be lots of money lost is not every private company that’s AI adjacent is going to turn into the next Anthropic. And, you know, it’s also, if you think about the sort of frontier AI models, it doesn’t, you know, OpenAI was the frontier. And, you know, Anthropic seems to, you know, have pulled ahead here. And, you know, Gemini. So it’s a race. And not every— I would say the vast majority of people won’t need the best model in order to implement, you know, the vast majority of things that they do. So I think the— I worry more about the LLM business model than I do about the people building the infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, I think that what we’re seeing at the moment is there’s actually quite, you know, there are tensions now around the pricing, about how much it costs to run, you know, for example, for Uber to use LLMs. And we’re seeing that, well, I’ve read that quite a lot of Silicon Valley startups are now using China’s models, which are considerably cheaper. So I suppose there is that question about how, If you don’t need the very cutting edge, is it going to be, and actually, is there just generally going to be some downward pricing on the return and therefore question about the returns that you can get on that investment? You know, it’s a bit like, and some make the comparison to the early days of internet. You know, there was a lot of, there was a company called Webvan, you know, which was, you know, I would say like Amazon today, where you get everything delivered in a relatively short period, food delivered in a relatively short period of time. But the consumer subsidy was massive because they didn’t have an economic model that worked and that could only run as long as they could raise capital. You know, the early OpenAI adoption was driven by, you know, the all-you-can-eat pricing and we’re now moving to a, you know, per token based pricing, particularly for, you know, the enterprise, you know, customer. And as that’s happened, and the tools become really powerful, you have seen departments use up their budgets, and if there wasn’t a budget, burn through massive amounts of money in a short period of time. So I think there’s going to be a lot more price sensitivity on the part of corporate customers. And to your point, you don’t need, as I said before, you don’t need to be running the, you know, the mythos Anthropic model when you’re looking for the best restaurant to eat in and when you’re on vacation. Exactly. And at this point, there’s been really no differentiation. You know, you just click on the most powerful model to do stuff. And I think that’s, you know, I think the open source models, the free models are for many, in many use cases, good enough. Yeah, I see what you say that, you know, they haven’t until now, they haven’t been sort of very indebted, these companies, they’ve been generating a lot of cash flow, which they’ve put towards this investment that they’re doing. But it does feel that that now is changing. You know, you’ve got Alphabet, for example, announcing a big equity raise. We’ve we’ve had, we can see now about 10 to 12% in investment grade and high yield is now sort of tech, AI related. So how tolerant are you going to be for continued levels of, or continued rounds of equity or debt raising by these companies? So if you look at, you know, the Alphabet example or the other sort of big companies, you know, these have been historically debt-free enterprises with a lot of cash on the balance sheet. And if anything, they’ve been buying back stock over time, returning capital to shareholders because they didn’t have an adequate use for that excess capital. And that’s in the last 6 months, certainly reverted where a lot of those buyback programs have stopped and they’re actually, you know, very good use for capital. You know, Amazon and others are spending whatever, $150 billion on or more on capital investment, but it’s capital I think very differently about, you know, if you have a business, I don’t know, a retailer that needs to upgrade all of its stores in order to be competitive, and therefore they have to spend a huge amount on CapEx versus previously, I think of that as maintenance CapEx. And, you know, that’s a diminution in the value of the company. This is not maintenance CapEx spending. This is investment into, for example, building the Azure cloud out to meet the demand, you know, buying servers, real estate, whatever is needed in order to be able to deliver compute that the market’s prepared to pay a price that enables them to earn a return well in excess of that, vastly in excess of their cost of capital. That’s good. You know, Warren Buffett always said the best business in the world is one that generates high returns on capital and you can reinvest that capital at high rates on new projects. These are clearly examples of that. Mm. What do you think it’s going to take for the market narrative to shift towards this idea that actually having somewhere to put your capital is a positive? And Meta is probably a perfect example of this, where it tends to get punished in the market every time it comes out with a new CapEx raise. If they were to come out next quarter and cut CapEx, it would probably be rewarded for the market. But from your kind of logic, that’s the wrong way to think about it. When do you think it’s going to be the inflection point where the markets catch up with that way of thinking? When the, when revenues and earnings growth reflects the high returns that are being earned on the capital spend, people are going to feel pretty good about it. And, you know, if all of a sudden every company in the world is borrowing a ton of money and issuing a ton of equity in order to grow, you know, that’s not going to be a good narrative on a sustained basis. But I don’t think we’re going to get there. And I think that I could be wrong, I was surprised that Alphabet issued $80 billion of stock. They didn’t really need to, but I think the way they thought about it— look, we were a big shareholder of Alphabet. It was a very successful investment for us. I think we made something approaching 3.5, 4 times our investment over a 3, 4-year period of time. But we exited in this quarter and we did so not because we don’t think Alphabet’s a great business, but it got to a valuation 31, 32 times earnings where we felt that capital could be better deployed. And we actually bought a big stake in Microsoft. Yeah. You know, I think Alphabet looked at their share price and their valuation and they said, look, this is not a, this is not a, this is a decent place for us to be issuing. Yeah. Particularly if you’re facing a wall of, of new money coming to the market, you know, you might as well get in there quicker than later. Now competitively, while all your competitors are having to raise, are going to, you know, you have Anthropic and others coming public, why not take away some of the froth in the public markets by issuing more stock so you can dig a little harder on your competition? I mean, it would be shocking to me to see, you know, the Googles of the world reduce their token prices, which is going to make life really hard for OpenAI and Anthropic. Yeah. Yeah. And they can do so because, you know, if you think about the competitive landscape, you’ve got Anthropic and in particular OpenAI that up until very recently for Anthropic apparently, but they’ve been burning huge amounts of cash. That’s a risky business model. You’re reliant on the capital markets giving you capital. This is why these companies are now going public. You know, if I were Alphabet and I wanted to, you know, with their balance sheet, advantage, you know, they could reduce token pricing significantly and really disrupt, make it much more challenging for the competition. I would say it’s probably even more challenging for OpenAI than Anthropic, who seem to be much more going towards the enterprise side and trying to grow there, which I think has helped them sort of overtake where OpenAI has got to. And Gemini has actually been very successful for Google, hasn’t it, in terms of defending their their market position. On Microsoft, how do you, do you feel that we had that sort of software sell-down at the beginning of this year? Microsoft’s a lot of software. How do you feel? Do you think that’s been overdone in terms of people’s fears about software, or do you think AI will actually help the dissemination of software and you will want to use Microsoft rather than making your own version of Excel or whatever? Yeah, I think it’s a company-by-company analysis. I think some companies, some software companies that have made sort of windfall profits charging a lot to each user in a world where they can, you know, companies themselves can, are highly incentivized to replace an expensive, you know, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 per annum or more software product with something they can develop internally. You know, the typical Microsoft 365, you know, enterprise user, they’re paying $20 a seat. And, you know, that’s for a, a basket of products that if you were to, you know, buy them, you know, by Zoom, by Gmail, you know, etc., you have to pay $50 or more. They’ve got, I think, something approaching half a billion users. And I think Microsoft’s been, you know, very smart about making, you know, sort of with Copilot. And I think Microsoft becomes a bit like a bit like Uber, the platform by which people access AI in the workplace. And, you know, the last thing a, you know, CIO wants to do now is, you know, create his own version of Word or Excel or Zoom or any of these other products. And even, you know, thinking that’s before you think through the, you know, the cybersecurity implications, you know, so you get a lot gets brought to the table with the Microsoft platform at a very small per user cost, and then that becomes the base for which they charge incremental dollars. You know, one of the really important roles Microsoft, I think, is going to play for the enterprise is you want technology that can point you to the model, the lowest cost model that you need to accomplish the objective. You don’t have to be at, you know, the cutting edge, you know, building out a spreadsheet. And so, you know, Microsoft becomes the gateway to AI in the enterprise, enterprise, and they do it in a manner that, you know, the CIO feels quite comfortable. So I think it’s a company-by-company analysis. Bill, you kind of mentioned a couple of times now this. Do you sit in this camp of language models, language model commoditization across the board, and that being broadly positive for your portfolio companies because you can, as you say, offer different versions of different models across the board. There will be some differentiation, but there’s going to be cheaper options. And it’s that idea of kind of funneling the user. You know, at the moment, you can kind of pick which model you want to use and different times, you know, broadly speaking, I think that most people don’t want to do that. They kind of just want to be able to use the auto switch and it switched through to the lowest cost to do their task. Is that a net benefit for the software companies that you think are going to be AI winners? I think it depends on the business model. Again, if you’re a high-cost kind of nichey type software product, you know, I think you’re at much greater risk than if you’re a company with half a, you know, approaching half a billion users at a very low cost that’s built into the enterprise. I mean, you know, the, so again, it’s a company-by-company analysis, but I do think the Microsofts of the world are going to be winners. Okay, great. So if we shift a little, you talked a bit about Berkshire Hathaway, and I thought that our listeners might like to know, can we really start with the basics actually on Howard Hughes? Because this is a bit of a strategic shift that our retail investors might not sort of fully understand yet. And so can you talk about the the motivations between buying the stake in Howard Hughes and then touch on Vantage and just tell us more about that and the approach and what you’re hoping to build here. Sure. So Howard Hughes is, if you look at our portfolio, it’s not a fit in the sense that, you know, the vast majority of the companies we own are large-cap, mega-cap, very high-quality, durable companies that earn very high returns on capital. You know, that’s the business model as opposed to, you know, small-cap real estate companies trading at big discounts to net asset value. You know, the reason for the existence of the stake is one of history, which is, you know, it’s now been almost, I guess, 17 years since we took a stake in Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes as a result of the financial crisis, lost the ability to access real estate debt financing. I’m sorry, not Howard Hughes, a company called General Growth. Excuse me. This was a company we bought 25% of the equity in a business that was, stock was down 99.5% during the financial crisis due to the, you know, the kind of shutdown in the capital markets. We led a bankruptcy restructuring plan, we bought 25% of the company. It turned into our most successful equity investment ever. But part of the bankruptcy restructuring plan was getting rid of assets inside of Howard Hughes the market didn’t like. We put all those assets in this company now called Howard Hughes. And for 15 years, we’ve kind of sorted through those assets, went through a couple of management teams, but ultimately a core business that we really liked on a multi-decade basis, a business of owning basically these small cities, but not one that particularly in a shorter and shorter term Wall Street environment is going to be appealing to people. And a business that is quite complicated, that takes time to do due diligence. So the management company, they, the GP, as some people call it, at Pershing Square made an incremental investment in the company. And so we own a stake through Pershing Square Holdings of about 30% of Howard Hughes and through our other funds, some addition, another 2% of the company. We bought 15% of the company with the management company. Giving us 47% of the company. And we’re taking the business through a transformation. So we’re going from a pure-play real estate, you know, owner of these sort of small cities to a diversified holding company led by an investment company called Vantage. Vantage is a specialty insurer and reinsurer. We closed on this transaction actually last week. And the business plan is to take a page from what Mr. Buffett has done. You know, Mr. Buffett started with a very challenged company in the textile industry as textiles were moved, you know, increasingly being manufactured in Asia. And over time liquidated that core business, invested in insurance, in a bank, candy company. And you, everyone knows the story, but the vast majority of the value was created by the compounding of capital inside of insurer where Buffett managed the, took the assets of the insurance company, which were almost entirely invested in in bonds and took 100% of the float generated by insurance, invested in treasuries, and took the surplus or the equity invested in common stocks. And he was a good stock picker. That drove the value of Berkshire. We’re doing something quite similar. So with Vantage, we’re taking the float of the insurer and investing in short-term treasuries where we take effectively no risk. And the surplus, we’re investing in common stocks according to the Pershing Square strategy. If we do a good job and the management team does a good job writing taking on prudent risks and insurance, we’ll make a profit on the liability side of the balance sheet and we’ll earn a high return on the assets investing it the way we expect. That will compound the equity of this company at hopefully a high rate over a long period of time. So it’s a business, you know, one of the things that Buffett did so important is he earned high returns in his insurance operation and he issued no stock or very little stock over time. And so the per share value of the company was able to compound over 60 years at 20%. And that’s, you know, one of the great investment stories of all time. Why don’t you think others, other insurance companies, even themselves would think to sort of be more adventurous with their equity? Because the best investors don’t choose to take jobs at insurance companies. You’re a super talented investor, you’re going to go work for a hedge fund, or you’re going to go work for a more traditional long-only asset manager. You’re not going to sign up to go work for an insurance company. Just the pay scales that are offered are, you know, you know, at the, uh, at Harvard Business School, no one’s really talking about going to work for an insurance company. It’s, it’s, it’s something that’s not thought of as sexy, I guess, is the best way to describe it. So, okay, what Buffett brought to the table is that he was a great investor that owned an insurance company, and he could manage that portfolio, uh, for free, as opposed to putting it out to a hedge fund. We’re managing that Vantage portfolio for free. And so Vantage will have the advantage of Pershing Square’s investment acumen at no cost. And that’s what gives it a competitive advantage. And therefore we don’t need to recruit people to Vantage to manage the portfolio. We’re doing it on a third-party basis. And since we own so much of the company, it’s in our economic interest to make Vantage highly successful. Awesome. Thanks, Bill. We are out of time. So thank you very much for joining us today. That was really insightful. Thank you, Bill. Thank you. That’s been wonderful. Thank you for the opportunity. Have a great day. Thank you. That’s all for this week. This session was recorded on June 11th, 2026, and all information was correct at the time of recording. Next week, Helen Morrissey and Clara Stinton will be back. Nothing in this podcast is personal advice, and you should seek advice if you aren’t sure what’s right for you. Investments rise and fall in value, so you could get back less than you invest, and past performance is not a guide to the future. This isn’t a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any of the investments or companies we’ve discussed. And for the record, I have personal holdings in Microsoft and Meta. The Pershing Square Investment Trust can use derivatives and can use gearing, and this does increase the potential risk of the holding. Individual stocks mentioned aren’t recommendations, and it’s worth remembering that diversification is always your portfolio’s friend, particularly when the markets are volatile. Finally, thank you very much to our producer, Elizabeth Hodgson. And thank you very much for everyone watching and listening. That was Bill Ackman, Matt Britzman, and me, Anna MacDonald. Goodbye. Goodbye.