How Bill Ackman Built Success on Cold-Calling Billionaires

Bill Ackman, it's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Thank you for spending the time.

Of

course.

The first thing I'd love to hear from you is your market update.

What are you looking at? What's interesting? What's going on? And some of the risks you're seeing.

So I guess markets are always interesting, but it seems like a particularly interesting time in history, midst of a couple of important wars.

At the same time, you know, major technological change.

I mean, AI, I think, is the story of the moment of really the next, you know, many, many years.

And thinking about implications for business, for the economy, for companies, for employees, I think the AI is really the story.

In terms of markets, it's a time where people are a fair amount of speculation.

So on the, you might say, negative side, we think about the growth of one-day options, these very kind of levered ETFs, all the money being spent, if you will, betting on sports.

When speculation increases, that's a time, I would say, to be a little more cautious.

At the same time, if you look at market indices, people point out that multiples are higher, but the S&P is a market cap weighted index, which means the biggest companies have the biggest impact on valuations.

And the biggest companies are really amazing businesses that have much higher growth trajectories than businesses of even a decade ago, 20, 30 years ago.

So it's a different market today than one that you would look at sort of average multiples.

And we're finding cheap stocks.

In fact, some of the best we call durable growth companies in the world are available at prices that we find compelling because they're not at the cutting edge, you know, and they're not dead center on, you know, the demand for chips or memory or even, you know, land and real estate for data centers.

Yeah, as you said, the new, new thing seems to be energy, of course, fueling this whole economy, but the chips and semiconductors and people are pouring into there.

Some of the recent big tech stocks you just bought, Uber, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta.

I'm curious for your strategy there.

And I have to admit, as someone who looks at the AI landscape a lot, that's not necessarily all those would be where I would put my AI bets, because I think you sold some Alphabet, which to me seems like that's a pretty good company to own.

I'm less interested in kind of the frontier.

I'm interested intellectually in frontier kind of AI companies and models.

But we try to find businesses that we can predict with a very high degree of confidence what they're going to look like over time.