The American Dream according to Bill Ackman

It’s a fine June day in New York City. Bill Ackman peels off his suit jacket in the afternoon sunshine, and hands it to a chauffeur parked outside his office in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. Wearing a crisp white shirt and a “Never Forget 9/11” blue cap, the 60-year-old billionaire sets out for a three-mile walk. He’s on a very personal errand, but Ackman is all business as he strides briskly through the city.

At a trim six-three, Ackman takes pride in his fit appearance, which he attributes to avoiding sugar and alcohol. He’s not shy about dispensing workout tips to his staff and discussing how many pull-ups he can do: “I’ll say 10,” he notes, adding, “I could do 100 if you give me enough time, though I’d have to rest between sets.” (If a pull-up bar had sprung up from the sidewalk, I have no doubt that he would have leaped upon it to make his point.)

If Ackman feels superhuman these days, it’s understandable: He has just turned his investment firm, Pershing Square, into a public company and simultaneously launched a publicly traded investment fund in an unusual double NYSE listing. The move caps a Wall Street odyssey that began in the 2000s, when he first made a name for himself making bold bets as a short-seller and an activist investor.

His early wins included exposing vulnerabilities in the bond insurer MBIA and anticipating the rise of Chipotle—contrarian investments that led Pershing in its first decade to outperform the S&P fivefold. He has also weathered dramatic stumbles, including a failed $1 billion short-selling campaign aimed at the supplement company Herbalife and a disastrous bet on Valeant Pharmaceuticals that cost Pershing $4 billion. Ackman’s misfires, though, have been offset by some prescient investments in the face of black swan events like the subprime mortgage crisis and COVID, cementing his reputation as one of the shrewdest and most daring risk-takers on Wall Street.

More recently, Ackman has flexed his influence across academic, cultural, and political realms, thanks in large part to his outsize X account, which boasts 2.5 million followers. Indeed, his rising profile as a pugnacious public commentator has arguably exceeded his influence on Wall Street. On X, Ackman banters with the likes of Elon Musk, and launches broadsides at targets such as the former president of his alma mater, Harvard University, whom he helped drive from her chair over the school’s handling of Gaza war protests. He has also been one of the loudest critics of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Ackman relishes financial and digital combat, but he also has an idealistic streak that separates him from some of the tech world billionaires. He is a longtime champion of an idea—government-supported retirement accounts for all Americans—that has gained traction with the Trump administration. He believes such accounts will make more people feel they are sharing in the country’s broader prosperity, and rebuild fading faith in capitalism, which Ackman sees as integral to the American Dream.

In business and in public life, Ackman comes across as a man riding an unstoppable winning streak. But fate recently delivered a painful personal reminder to this master of the universe who has so often bent the world to his will: There are some things that even a powerful billionaire can’t control.

How a short-seller became a culture‑war combatant

Most people have hobbies or interests. Bill Ackman has obsessions. The business world learned this in 2002 during his remorseless short-selling campaign against MBIA, in which Ackman faced down a fierce political and media retaliation campaign and was ultimately vindicated in his claims about the firm’s exposure to toxic mortgage-linked assets in its portfolio.

Ackman has compared the structure of his NYSE-listed fund, Pershing Square USA, to his hero Warren Buffett’s legendary Berkshire Hathaway empire, with its “permanent capital” model. It’s a typically bombastic comparison. The combined value of Pershing Square—the firm and fund—is some $16 billion on the NYSE, while Berkshire Hathaway is worth more than a trillion.

“When I grew up, if a guy in my neighborhood got a Corvette, no one resented the guy. Everyone was like, ‘Wow, that’s supercool.’ ”BIll........

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