Transcript
0:00 One of the most provocative and [music] interesting investors in the country, >> a legendary activist investor, >> Persing Square CEO and founder, Bill Aman. >> Taking [music] a short position and going public with it is a pretty serious business. Interestingly, [music] some of the best businesses in the world are trading at the lowest multiples. >> We're kind of the rebirth of the closed [music] end investment company universe. >> What did you think of Zara, the CEO of OpenAI? I'm sorry, CFO. Felt like the CEO. Yeah, I I was >> stop with that stuff.
0:31 >> Uh, actually I was super impressed. Uh, made me a lot more bullish on Open AI and I thought >> right >> I thought she should be CEO of OpenAI. [laughter] >> 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 three hours in a documentary. [laughter] >> 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 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 uh 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 has kind of changed over over time.
1:28 >> Sure. So I would say the biggest change over time is an appreciation for the importance of I call business quality long-term durable protected non-disruptible 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. Uh [snorts] and over time you learn the importance of durable kind of growth. That's the most important factor. Uh I would say I'm as activist as I've ever been. Um but more of it's on uh Twitter than than uh I would say in the corporate context. And the reason for that is when I started in uh Persing 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.
2:20 So we had this very simple idea. Buy Wendy's spin-off Tim Horton's double our money. And uh 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. That was the beginning. Uh so we actually called a friend who worked at Blackstone and Steve Schwarzman agreed to write a fairness opinion on what Wendy's would be worth if we spun off Tim Hortons. We kind of mailed it in and filed it publicly and 6 weeks later they spun off. Wow.
2:48 >> And then the CEO finally called me back and uh he thanked me um and he had gotten fired. Um and and uh but he thanked me cuz he had a huge exit package and [laughter] and he was very happy. But so in the beginning we couldn't get a return phone call so we had to and we were small so we had to go to a conference and we had to you know do presentations and go on CNBC. What happens over time is you join boards of directors you become known as an investor. you know, we're kind of a constructive shareholder. Um, I know pretty much every CEO in the S&P 500 either directly or one person removed and, you know, maybe I age, we've aged a bit. Um, but you build kind of a reputation and today we buy a stake in a company. Sometimes they'll put out a tweet saying, you know, we welcome Purging Square as a shareholder, but they open the door for us. You know, in the beginning, we had to bang down the door and today so we we get very deeply involved in our companies if it's [snorts] needed. uh other companies we own. There's no nothing for us to do just be to you know just clap.
3:46 >> So you aren't you aren't considered a value ad investor at this point. >> Yeah. But we only want to add value. I the conversation last night was kind of an interesting one. You know the best investments are one where you don't need to join the board and do anything. Well, that may be in a startup, but in a mature business, it may be. >> No, I think in in the public company context, one of the valuable things we can do that, you know, the problem of being a public company today is kind of the the very short-term nature of markets, analysts, etc. And obviously to run a business, a business is a, you know, a good one is a forever thing. And you want to make decisions in the context of decades sometimes or certainly three, five years. And how can you do that when someone's asking about the tax rate in the second quarter? Um, and having a big shareholder on the board where you can kind of test ideas out with the big shareholder before you expose them to the public or the big shareholder can say, "I'm supportive of this initiative even though it's going to hurt earnings in the next few quarters is a helpful thing."
4:38 >> I just want to connect this last conversation with Sarah to this. Um, are you an investor in the AI complex and how do you underwrite business model quality from what you see on the outside in in the entire complex? >> I mean, yes, effectively we're an investor. Actually today we own Microsoft, we own Meta, we own Amazon. Uh actually I think you're either directly or indirectly you're invested in AI. >> Yeah. >> Or it's a threat. So you have to you have to understand it.
5:05 >> Um how do I think about AI in a business model context? >> Business model quality. Yeah. >> Look, when you're a concentrated investor or investor generally and your long-term investor, the most important and most challenging thing to do is determine what's the risk of disruption. What's the risk of two guys, two women from Stanford in a garage, you know, coming up with something? That risk, I think, has gone up uh dramatically. This is the greatest era in history to to build a business, right? There's unlimited access to compute, you know, certainly for a startup, uh unlimited access to capital, uh and a lot of incredible talent, which means that the probability of your being disrupted has gone up enormously. So the hardest thing you have to do as an investor is understand you know and and that's really where we spend most of our time.
5:50 >> What's your tendency in a moment like this then? Do you swing towards the chaos or do you reposition to things that are maybe more durable and defensible from AI where the disruptibility is less >> what's interesting about markets is people always bring their eye to the new new thing. Um and the new new thing is sort of chips and semiconductors and energy and that's where you know uh the shorter term capital's going what tends to happen is really high quality things get left behind. Um, and the same thing really happened, you know, I was I was there in 2000, you know, when the in the in in that sort of bubble. This is, you know, this is different. I'm not saying this is um, but there's some analogies and the analogies are people got excited about internet stocks and Bergkshire Hathway traded at the lowest valuation I think it ever traded out of it history is people said, "Okay, that's all old stuff." I think a similar thing is happening today in a in a sense to Amazon and Meta, Microsoft. Those are the ones that >> these are these are old-fashioned companies in kind of this, you know, the open AI.
6:51 >> So, they're undervalued in your mind. >> Yes. >> What else is undervalued? >> What about the SAS apocalypse? So, is it oversold at this point? >> Uh, again, I think it's a careful analysis. I worry more about a Salesforce um than I do about your kind of um I think you got to do the work. I think it's one company at a time, but I think if you know, if you're a software company today, you have to be as AI enabled as you can. you can't I I think there have been sort of monopolistic type profit taking off of customers when someone had a kind of a niche software product they're charging you know 30,000 a year or something like this I think those companies are really at risk uh you know Microsoft when the average customer is paying I don't know 50 bucks a seat or some small number uh that platform is worth a lot more uh less of risk >> I want to go back um to co because you had an incredibly ly viral moment where you were on CNBC at that moment and you pounded the table and you said this is what's going to happen and literally the market just ripped and you you were well first it went traded massively down you were right on that side of the trade and then you were on the right side of the trade when it ripped back up and then I think it was maybe a month or two ago I think publicly you basically pounded the table and said this market's going way higher can you just put us in your head like where does that desire to be so active and you know it it gives you so much room to be wrong but then when you're right it does add to the lore of Bill Aman of which you have a lot. So how do you balance that? Where does it come from?
8:28 Like why in these moments do you just get so convicted that the that the conviction just has to spill out and then you're just so out there? >> So I've always been like uh my high school yearbook epithet was most verbose. Uh, and [laughter] >> and that and actually my my friend uh actually lives around here. Uh, he his quote that he put next to my name in my yearbook. It says, "A closed mouth gathers no foot." That was his. And so that's kind of what I've lived by. I've always had this sort of desire to speak the truth about things. And um, you know, was just talking with Jake actually. We had breakfast this morning uh, and we're talking about my Rhonda uh, post. You remember that one? So like you know there's just certain things that need to be shared and discussed but with respect to markets I actually what happened was I was concerned about the country because I felt we needed to have basically a twoe pause you know this is March of uh or February I guess it was March of 2020 and I assumed we were going to just do a short-term shutdown let the virus cool down as hospitals were kind of getting overwhelmed and uh the president hadn't done that yet. I was kind of surprised by this and that that was what inspired me to go on TV as a way to reach uh President Trump and say, "Look, we need to shut down the country just for two weeks." You know, my uh and I said, "Look, you do this, okay? The virus will blow over. Stocks are at an incredibly cheap valuation. If we handle this correctly, you're going to make a ton of money." And we're buying. You know, valuation is like a tether on the market, right? When it gets too high, it's like this rubber band that's stretching and inevitably it bounces back. But it works the other way as well. When stocks get too cheap, there's this, you know, the the rubber bands actually pulling valuations up >> and and so there there are certain moments where it gets to that place. And sometimes actually if you call that out, it causes people to have kind of a psychological reset.
10:20 >> What happened recently that caused you to call that out? >> Stocks just got crazy cheap. Just incredibly cheap of really high quality companies, >> right? what you find extremely cheap in fundamentals. fundamentals based on you know what's the value of a financial assets the present value of the cash it generates over it life on that basis stocks of really high quality companies are really cheap >> is there any way to underwrite and you know I don't want to pick on specific companies but we have the three that are going public and then you have like a palunteer let's say and these things have become very popular in pop culture in maxing on subreddits on you know the public's consciousness high netw worth individuals wanting to buy into SPVS that are double loaded and then getting wiped off the cap tables. Is there any way to underwrite 100 times revenue, 50 times revenue, 150 times revenue in these companies or are these just tremendously overvalued because of the demand side?
11:19 >> I think you underwrite a SpaceX the way you underwrite a venture capital investment. >> Interesting. Explain that. Unpack it. >> So, everyone here invests in venture, right? you know, you bet on, you know, who's running it, right? The talent is enormous. Um, it's people. They taught me, I had a professor business school. He said, "People, opportunity, context, deal." So on people, SpaceX, >> one of one. >> Yeah. Opportunity, one of one context, you know, incredible. And actually, you know, feel bad for Blue Origin, but not harmful to SpaceX. The fact that, you know, they're their biggest way behind.
11:56 >> Then you get to deal. >> Okay. That's the more complicated question for SpaceX. Again, we don't know what the valuation is going to be, but if it's a billion, a trillion750 billion, then you say, okay, well, let's think 5 years out. What does this company look like? You know, what is Starlink? What's the trajectory of Starlink? You know, SpaceX is, you know, near monopoly in terms of lowcost space launch. That's going to become increasingly important. And even Amazon is going to have to become an even bigger customer because they're not, you know, Blue Origins, you know, and and time, I would say, has become increasingly valuable in the AI era, right? You you delay a model. We were talking, David and I were talking about the administration and and his kind of stepping in for the president not to sign that executive order to kind of slow us down.
12:40 >> Allegedly, >> you lose a month. You lose a couple of months today and it means a lot. So I think the only question I have and I haven't done the math. I you know I actually invested in X. I invested in XAI. I'm in an SPV. Ron Baron said Bill you got to invest in SpaceX. So So I'm I'm I'm in. So now I have So obviously I'm rooting for kind of a good outcome. I just does I haven't done the >> Yeah, you have to.
13:02 >> What about sorry >> uh enthropic open AI Palunteer also fall into this category. Do you underwrite those as venture investments as well? And have you done the the work on those? They're venture investments that do what what's helpful is they're not seed or series A, right? They're, you know, D or E, but they're still like venture investments. These companies have proven they can generate a lot of revenues. >> And actually, I was just saying on Sarah, I thought she had a very very thoughtful >> uh explanation on how they think about committing capital, right? And and that's the thing I haven't heard from on Open AI, which is why if I were Open AI, I would be getting that message out because, you know, from the outside, you're like, it's a pretty interesting business model. You got a company that's spending making capital commitments.
13:46 They're massively in excess of, you know, revenues and how do you do that and get, you know, it's it's degree of difficulty, I would say, is hard. >> Your perch um on the boards of let's call it these more traditional Fortune 500 type businesses and your conversations with those CEOs, how are they thinking about AI? Is it something that they're tipping into into with pilots? Are they doing transformation initiatives? Do they think this doesn't really apply to us? We'll deal with it later. What what's your sense of how they're adopting or embracing AI?
14:16 >> I would say every CEO in America today is like, how do I use AI? How how does it apply to my business? How is it a threat? Uh they got to find an internal champion. They maybe have to recruit someone from the outside. I would say it's on the hierarchy of things they worry about. It's probably number one as both an opportunity and a threat. So if you're not paying attention to it, you you'll I mean your board is going to be you know asking you first question every meeting about what you know what how we dealing with the AI threat, how are we dealing with the AI opportunity. So it's absolutely top of mind.
14:46 >> Are you seeing much early success? I mean are through your you know again through your visibility into these companies. I mean there's a lot of mixed signals that we get like McKenzie did a study and said that 95% of enterprise initiatives actually fail. Jamaath, you've made this point around 8090 that a lot of these enterprises don't really know how to deploy AI. The the um you know the fanciest title in Silicon Valley these days is a for deployed engineer which is basically a like an IT consultant who can close the gap between the promise of AI and the ROI of it. And I think people are just trying to figure out like how do we how do we use this thing? I mean have you seen much actual success? Is this the is this the question right now? house is how do we bridge this gap?
15:31 >> So I haven't seen much success >> uh other than I mean I give you the Persian square >> story you know we're tiny little company how we're using AI today the first use case is really on the legal side [snorts] um and um you know kind of almost almost we call it compliance back office type you know functionality I think we're still super super early in terms of big companies using AI effectively. >> Can I ask um or test a thesis with you?
15:57 you know the the venture underwriting model where you think about people you're underwriting a founder and their capacity to lead and redirect the organization in a changing environment and technology environment market environment and whatnot and we have seen repeatedly similar success at scale if the company is still founder where the founder feels like they have the authority to make all the radical decisions needed to make sure that that company persists and changes as needed in a changing environment. Have you looked at founder-led companies versus non-founder-led companies where perhaps the founders really do have an inherent advantage in being able to navigate this these changing environments and actually generate outsized returns over time? And I asked this particularly as it relates to the SAS apocalypse and if you take a look at the companies that are founder led today versus not. If you're not founder led, you have an incentive to not make a mistake and get fired. If you're founderled, you don't give a Your job is to make sure the company >> Yeah, I think the answer is exactly what you said. I think the problem is that the average life of an S&P 500 CEO is probably, I don't know, four years or three year, three and a half years or something like this and you're focused on, you know, kind of shorter term compensation. You don't generally don't have a big economic stake in the business. You're a founder. This is your entire life. It's your entire reputation. It's not like you're going to go get another job. You you got to kind of make it work. And also when you're in the boardroom, you have the authority of either being a major voting, you know, voice or or a u you've got a huge economic stake in the company. You know, when we join a board of a company, we're often the largest or sec the largest non index fund type shareholder. That kind of gives us, you know, a little bit of a disproportionate voice in the boardroom. Imagine if you have that and you're CEO of the company, right? So I think that does give you and and also if you've gotten to be a successful founder over time uh guaranteed that you've made a number of very challenging call calls over time that turned out to be right otherwise you wouldn't be there. And so you look at Mark Zuckerberg right when he bought I don't know Instagram everyone was like shocked at the price paid or WhatsApp you know these seemed like you know sort of outside the you know the company only had whatever 19 employees or something when he paid a billion something. Um but you make enough of those calls um and uh you can make the other challenging call.
18:04 >> Is this antithetical to a Ben Graham investing model like you have to have a different set of skills as an investor to to identify this talent for? >> Yes. I mean Ben Graham is a really important voice for investors and that he said look you got to think about a business a stock certificate is an interest in a business as opposed to just this piece of paper. That's probably one of his most important kind of apherisms. But he was investing for the most part in liquidations. He was invest you know in the days of Ben Graham where there weren't there's no Edgar system and in order to get a 10K filing you had to go to the headquarter of the company. there were a lot of stocks trading at, you know, basically the cash on the balance sheet and his business model was, you know, buying these things at stupidly cheap prices and eventually um but Bened Graham made most of his money investing in, I don't know, Geico or something uh you know, not >> tell us um a little bit about, you know, there's this sort of activist and significant shareholder, but then there's Howard Hughes and you've talked a little bit about Berkshire Hathaway 2.0 or just being inspired by that.
19:02 Chimapi, you were inspired by it for a long time. >> Oh, Bill just took Persian Square public. >> Yeah. But with with the Howard Hughes Corporation specifically, tell tell us about that effort because you're operating that business. >> There's a book uh I think it's called the financial history of Berkshire Hathway. That's for geeks. Um, basically this guy uh went back and read every 10 Q whatever he actually went through the filings, looked at every deal that Buffett ever did and you follow him over uh 60-year period of time and the vast majority of the value he created at Bergkshire was through it actually the ownership of an insurance operation and what's interesting about insurance is that uh you know running an insurance company you have two jobs one is you you know write business right you take risk um you collect premiums in exchange for the obligation to pay future claims and then you get that you get money up front and you responsibility is to invest that money. Uh the vast majority of insurance companies focus only on the liability side of the balance sheet. Buffett was really the first to do focus on actually more on the asset side of the balance sheet than on the liability side. And over time on the liability side if you if you manage the assets of an insurance company well and the liabilities well you can build this enormously profitable compounding taxefficient machine over time. And the question is, why haven't other people done this? And the answer is if you're really good at investing, you go work for a hedge fund, you go work for Fidelity, you go work for Wellington, but you don't go work for an insurance company. So the insurance company's ability to recruit investment talent is very limited. Buff Buffett owned half the company. He was really good at investing, which is why it worked. So what we're doing is we're, you know, Buffett started with a crappy textile company, effectively liquidated it over time, reinvested in insurance, and then invested the assets. Well, Howard Hughes is actually a really interesting company, but it's a business that Wall Street has not cared about for a long period of time. We created it out of the bankruptcy of of General Growth.
20:56 It was a spin-off of all the other assets, and it's a company that owns these small cities. So, I bet a lot of people here have heard of Summerland because uh a lot of the tech community has moved from California to Las Vegas, but we own this small city, 26,000 acres of land. Uh we own all the commercial land, we own all the residential land, we sell lots of home builders, we build a downtown, we build buildings. Uh it's a bit like the Irvine company. You know, Don Brand created probably hundred billion dollars of personal wealth managing a small city. So super cool company, but the time frame is decades as opposed to quarters. So Wall Street's never cared. It's always traded at a huge discount. So Buffett bought into a textile business at a discount to liquidation value at $63 a share, you're owning Howard Hughes at a discount to liquidation value. What we're doing is instead of reinvesting all the cash the business generates into real estate, we're going to reinvest all the cash into insurance. Uh we're next within the next week or so, >> you're in the business of building this flywheel. We're going to build this into a compounding machine over the next 50 years. It's something I've always wanted to do. We have the benefit of understanding both the insurance side of the business and we can manage the assets well and you can buy it at, you know, whatever 60 cents on the dollar.
22:08 >> How do you think about investing the assets of this insurance company? So, >> so what Buffett did is he took 100% of the insurance float and put the money in short-term treasuries. So he took no risk on kind of policyholder funds and he took 100% of the surplus of the insurer the equity and invest in common stocks and that's what we're going to do. Um and I think we can build a really profitable insurance company. We're starting at a very small scale. The company's got like a $4 billion market cap and the goal is to build it into a trillion dollar thing over time compounding. The other thing Buffett did well is that he didn't issue any stock or not for a very long time. So they you know he started with a million shares and today he has effectively like a million. this is the future for very talented managers like yourself versus the traditional long short fund or do you think they sit side by side?
22:51 >> I think it's hard to do this because you need control of a public company and you have to be not in a get-richquick mindset and there if you're in the get-richqu it's easier to go to Citadel or Millennium or one of these. >> Why does it have to be public? >> Why does it have to be public? It doesn't doesn't have to be public. >> Why did you choose to take it? >> Uh you know we we got here by accident, right? So the most successful equity investment we've ever made is we bought this company called General Growth. We bought the stock of a company going bankrupt. Sort of the most contrarian investment you can make. Stock [snorts] went from you know uh $20 billion market cap to 100 million and we bought a basically uh a third of the company or 27% of the company at uh $200 million market cap and there was 27 billion of debt and the bankruptcy emerg and the strategy we said is look the assets are worth more than liabilities. we're going to do the first uh restructuring where the equity gets to keep their investment in the company. Two years later, we emerged from Chapter 11. The stock went from 34 cents to $34. But part of the restructuring was spinning off this thing called Howard Hughes. And it was really all of the junk that didn't belong in the company that the analysts hated. Um and so we did it uh sort of an inadvertent investment. And you know, 15 years later, we haven't really created much value with it. So we said, "Look, we've got to you know, the market doesn't like this thing. the market a company has to earn a return in excess of its cost of capital in order for a stock to go up and the you know Elon's done an amazing job keeping the cost of capital of his company's really low you know SpaceX goes public at a trillion 750 billion will probably be the lowest cost of capital equity capital transaction in the history of the world the problem with this company because it's real estate because it's development because it's land ownership the market says the cost of capital is really high and you can only earn a certain return of real estate so what we're doing is we're repurposing the real estate assets and we're transforming the company into a much higher returning kind of business.
24:40 >> The last few years you've become incredibly famous. I mean just to kind of put a fine point on the word. How does that change and influence the way that markets work because like you know your voice gets amplified now. You also have other places where other voices get heard many people's whose names you don't even know. You go into Wall Street bets it's every random Tom Dick and Harry with an opinion. tell us the way the markets have changed with notoriety, fame, social media influence, not just yours, but in general.
25:09 >> Yeah, I don't think markets have changed as a result of anything that's happened with me or follower growth on on Twitter. I think the Ryan Cohen guy, you know, the GameStop guy. >> Yeah. >> You know, that is a change in markets when um you know, a stock can trade at a valuation well above its value simply on the personality and the ability to >> vibes >> to to gather up, you know, armies of followers. You know, the the fascinating thing about liquidity and valuation is the higher a stock price goes, and it's going to sound sort of intuitive, but it's not, the more valuable the company becomes. You know, [snorts] there's actually the increase in value of the company increases the value of the company, right? Because it lowers the cost of capital, it gives you more flexibility, gives you the ability to issue stock, raise capital, acquire other businesses. And so, you know, getting back to the Elon example, uh it's really his I would say he's a better example of this. We've not taken advantage of this at all. Maybe we should, >> but he built an army of believers and followers >> uh that enabled uh Tesla to be built.
26:22 >> Um you know, let me end as we wrap up with a somewhat of a pointed question. You're an incredible investor. If there are people, if we want to be maximally aligned with Bill Aman, is the best way to be an LP in Persing Square or is it best to go into the market and buy? >> So, we have two I think there are three ways you can invest with us that are all different and will achieve different things. One is something entity called Purging Square, which is the management company at Purging Square. I think it's one of the most interesting kind of intellectually businesses because it's a uh it's the entity that receives fees on these three permanent capital vehicles we manage. So, it's a royalty on the compounding of investments in these entities and there's no capex in the business. So, we're going to pay out basically all of our profits and we're going to grow as quickly as the underlying assets uh compound. So [snorts] if you invested a dollar in Persian Square, you know, 22 years ago, that's that became um you know uh 20 uh I think I should know this number. It's like 27 or 28 times net of all fees.
27:30 Wow. Okay. Over over 22 years. Had we charged the fees of this public vehicle, uh that number would have been um you know uh 37 times I'm sorry, no more in the something in the mid-40s. Okay. What this means is we now have a public vehicle that charges only a 2% fee. We've got a one in London that charges an incentive fee. If we compounded the rates we have historically, we'll have 35 times the assets under management uh in 22 years. So we'll go from 25 billion of assets to something approaching a trillion. We don't have to hire another person uh and we don't have to spend another dollar if you will on overhead.
28:04 That that's a pretty interesting business. So I like that one. So Persian Square, if you want to invest with us as a investor, invest in something called PSUS and you own a portfolio of our best ideas and it's trading at an 18% discount to cash. You want to believe that we can build the next Bergkshire Hathaway, you own Howard Hughes. We got three different ways. >> Yeah, I bought some Howard Hughes. I think following you on Twitter and going the going direct movement does allow you to communicate directly your vision and and that actually makes it much easier to to place the bet. And so I I do think it has a profound impact because prior to your extremely long tweets that have been parodyied now there's an incredible meme of a Bill Aman tweet coming in which is >> you did that extended iPhone that's a foot tall.
28:48 >> No it was that was my Halloween costume >> for last year. >> You would have written something shorter. You just didn't have the time. Yeah. >> Yeah. I guess uh I don't let other people read, you know, um my >> Do you do you like have anybody read it? >> On the uh the Rhonda tweet uh which had some legal implications, I did have my communications guy and a lawyer >> a friend who's a lawyer read it, but I only gave him a few minutes cuz I was so excited. Once I write something I really like, I just want >> Yeah. I agree. I agree. And the torpedoes does this too. He starts getting a little bit frantic when he's writing something and then he's like it and he just hits. [laughter] >> I just hit that.
29:27 >> By the way, it's a very powerful thing to be able to share your view and push a button and reach 2.2 million people. So, I I'll I'll have to Why don't we just a picture on stage and I'll send it out. >> Hell yeah. That's great. Let's do it. >> Liquidity. >> Gone all in. >> All right. Thank you. Hey,
Summary
- Ackman highlights a growing appreciation for long-term, durable business growth over short-term gains.
- He notes that while he remains an activist investor, his approach has shifted more towards constructive engagement rather than aggressive tactics.
- The conversation touches on the impact of AI on investment strategies, with Ackman acknowledging the increased risk of disruption in various sectors.
- He expresses belief in the undervaluation of established companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon amidst the hype surrounding newer tech firms.
- Ackman discusses the challenges traditional companies face in effectively deploying AI and the need for internal champions to drive these initiatives.
- He compares the investment approach for startups and venture capital to that of established companies, emphasizing the importance of founder-led businesses in navigating change.
- Ackman outlines his strategy for the Howard Hughes Corporation, aiming to transform it into a high-return business by leveraging its real estate assets and investing in insurance.
- He reflects on the influence of social media and public persona on market dynamics, noting that celebrity investors can significantly impact stock valuations.