For several decades, William (Bill) Ackman has been one of the most influential and best-known figures on Wall Street. The Jewish-American billionaire, founder and CEO of investment fund Pershing Square, has built a reputation as an activist investor who is not afraid to make large investments, influence the management of public companies, or take the lead on unlocking value for shareholders.
Over the years, Ackman has been behind some of the most prominent investments in the US market, while at the same time becoming one of the most widely covered figures in the world of finance, thanks to audacious investments, high-profile confrontations, and bold public positions.
In recent months, Ackman has again been a focus of Wall Street's attention following one of the year’s most talked about IPOs. In April, Pershing Square completed a combined IPO of management company Pershing Square Inc. and public investment fund Pershing Square USA, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, raising about $5 billion. As Ackman sees it, the move opens Pershing Square's investment strategy not only to investment institutions investors and wealthy private investors but to the general public as well.
In a special interview with "Globes," conducted against the backdrop of growing security tensions in the Middle East, Ackman provides a rare glimpse into his financial and political viewpoints, speaks with extraordinary openness about everything from the business strategy that made him a Wall Street legend to market bubbles, and his concerns about the future of the Democratic Party in the United States.
Enthusiastic about investing in Israel - "Well positioned economically and militarily."
In addition to his activity in the capital market, Ackman has also become one a prominent figure in US public discourse in recent years. He frequently speaks on political and economic issues, especially freedom of expression, the higher education system, antisemitism, and US foreign policy.
Ackman's connection to Israel has grown especially close since the October 7 massacre. He was among the most prominent American businessmen defending Israel in the subsequent international public opinion backlash. He sharply criticized manifestations of antisemitism on US campuses, and called on academic institutions to take a harder line against anti-Jewish hatred.
At the same time, his business activity in Israel has also expanded. In early 2024, Ackman and his wife, Israeli-American architect and former MIT professor Neri Oxman, purchased about 5% of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, an approximately $25 million investment. The two termed the deal an expression of confidence in the Israeli economy during the war, and Ackman later said he intended to expand his investments in Israel. In a previous interview with "Globes," Ackman said he hoped to invest up to $1 billion in Israeli companies in the future, mainly in technologies, and expressed interest in helping an Israeli company reach an IPO through Pershing Square's investment platform.
You invested money in Israel at a very volatile time. Iran could respond by firing at us at any moment, should the US continue to attack. Are you still convinced investing in Israel is worthwhile?
"I think Israel has proven itself to be one of the most resilient countries in the world, militarily and economically. What is driving value in the world right now, it's sort of technology and AI and cyber and defense, right? Defense-tech. I don't think there's a country better positioned in each of those spaces than Israel. And I think you're going to see more and more startups scaling incredibly quickly in Israel. Human life is not [about] the size of the army anymore. It's the quality of the technology. So, I feel like Israel is extremely well positioned economically and militarily. And I think we are heading to a safer Middle East because of Israel and very importantly, because of President Trump, and someone finally taking the Iran threat seriously, other than Israel."
Ackman regards fact that a large part of the Israeli workforce spent hundreds of days in the reserves as a "100% advantage" from the employer's perspective. "Good military training is about the best leadership training, resilience training, grit - all these things that are important in in life and in business, you learn in the military. And so, the last couple of years here have been a very good training ground for the next generation of talent."
"Talking about a massive oil surplus"
I want to go back to current events here. The MOU between Iran and the US is falling apart before our eyes. Where do you think we're going from here?
"Well, let me start by saying I think this is a very, if you will, just war and an important war. And I think everything from taking out Iran's nuclear capability and also setting the regime back militarily is critically important for the world. There have been multiple regime changes. The problem is that each successive regime is part of the same evil ideology. But I think it's very difficult without boots on the ground to have real regime change. And I think that is a no-go for the United States.
"I think the president clearly thought that there was a deal that could be made. And also, I think he does not want this war to go on into the midterms. Politically, life gets more difficult for the president and the Republican party, obviously, in the event that the Congress switches direction.
"So, I think that is certainly on his mind, but ultimately, he's dealing with a party that is not capable of keeping their word. The only thing they seem to respond to is force."
Oil prices are climbing due to the current tensions, but they did so in the early part of the war, then fell back again as soon as hostilities were halted. Maybe we shouldn't get overexcited about the price hikes?
"I do think any increase in oil prices is temporary as opposed to a permanent phenomenon or a longer-term phenomenon. In fact, people were talking about a massive, massive oil surplus. All of the places in the world other than Iran have kind of kicked into gear their productive capability. I don't think that's going to go away. And so, the closure of the Strait has kind of proven to people that you cannot rely on the oil that comes through the Strait. We have to find other ways to deliver and we have to find other sources of oil. The fear now is that oil prices are going to go too low. That's what people are concerned about."
The IPO of a lifetime - and the letdown
We return to the subject of Pershing Square’s IPO on the New York Stock Exchange last April, one of the largest closed-end investment fund offerings seen in the US, and the largest of its kind to date. Ackman owns approximately 45% of Pershing Square USA and personally invested $250 million in the IPO. "It wasn't really a liquidity event," he says, " It was sort of an inverse liquidity event. This was a way for us to list the companies, raise some capital for this new fund, and make an additional investment in us."
What is it like to see your life's work reach such an important milestone?
"Amazing. In terms of the IPO itself, of course, building a business, taking it public, letting the market tell you what it thinks it's worth - a business you started really with no capital. Today, Pershing Square has a market cap of something like $13-14 billion, which is not the trillions of Nvidia, but we're on our way. And it's a company that I think can compound its value at a high rate over time, because the business will grow with the compounding of our funds."
Pershing Square currently has three public companies - Pershing Square Holdings Ltd., which is traded in London, Pershing Square on the New York Stock Exchange, and another company, Howard Hughes Holdings, which is also listed on the New York Stock Exchange "It’s a more traditional corporation, a real estate business that we're transforming, as we say, into a modern-day Berkshire Hathaway," says Ackman.
Ackman candidly acknowledges that he also felt a sense of letdown with the IPO. "The only disappointing part is that Pershing Square USA, our listed vehicle, is - for reasons I don't entirely understand - trading at a massive discount. It's trading at a 21% discount to the underlying value of its assets. We raised $5 billion capital, and we've been deploying that capital. And the volatility has been very helpful to us to buy stakes in a very attractive market. These are businesses we've admired for years, but that didn't get cheap enough until more recently. We built a portfolio of some of highest quality of durable growth companies in the world, businesses like Microsoft or Amazon or Uber, Meta, for example. We bought them at very attractive prices and you can buy them at a 21% discount to the price we paid by buying into our investment vehicles."
It started with Buffett: "A great mentor"
Many in the capital market compare Ackman to Warren Buffett, even wondering whether he is the heir apparent. For his part, Ackman says "Warren Buffett has been an important hero of mine. I describe him as an informal mentor. I got into this business largely due to my being inspired to learn about Warren Buffett in my early 20s. I've read pretty much everything he's ever written and I've watched probably every YouTube and or other video that he's appeared in. I've gone to many annual meetings and I've had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with him over the course of my career. And it's very helpful in life to have great mentors and he's been an amazing one for me.
"I said, look, what's my goal as an investor? Well, I'd like to have a better track record than Buffett. Now, one of the things he's done to make that challenging is he ran Berkshire for 60 years and he's 95. And I'm 60. So, just to match the record, I've got 35 years," Ackman says with a smile.
"I think the brilliance of Warren Buffett is he set forth kind of a list of principles that he stuck to through thick and thin. And he basically compounded the capital of Berkshire at 20% per annum over a 60-year period of time, which leads to a really remarkable kind of outcome. So, we've learned a lot from him. I would say our approach is not identical. There's certainly some similarities."
Ackman now wants to follow in Buffett's footsteps to create his own Berkshire Hathaway. "We're following the Berkshire playbook. What did Buffett do? Well, he bought a dying textile company. Over time, he liquidated that company, took the cash out of it, liquidated assets, sold off various aspects, the real estate, etc. And he took that capital and he bought an insurance company, a bank, some other businesses over time. And what he did that was different is he focused on running a very profitable insurance company, but he also focused on the asset side of the balance sheet, instead of investing just in fixed income securities, which is what the vast majority of insurance companies do. He invested in common stock and he was a good common stock investor."
Instead of a textile company to create the new Berkshire Hathaway, Ackman has real estate company Howard Hughes Holdings. "The real estate company itself, over time, kind of liquidates because we sell lots to home builders, a big part of the business. We generate cash from the net operating income of our properties. We build condominiums and we sell them. We generate cash from this. Instead of reinvesting all that cash in real estate, which is what the company's done historically, we're taking that cash, and the first asset we bought is an insurance company." (Vantage Group, acquired last month - A.W.)
The plan is to run this insurance company, Ackman says, in much the same way that Buffett manages his insurance business. "We're taking the float of the insurer and we're investing in very low risk investments, US treasuries, short-term treasuries, and we're taking the balance of the assets, the surplus, and investing in common stocks. And so, our goal is to build Howard Hughes into a compounding machine like Berkshire over time. We took a page from Mr. Buffett and we'll see how we do - but in 35 years, just to tie the duration of the track record."
"I don't think there's a bubble - there'll be infinite demand for compute"
Let's move from the insurance business to technology. One of the biggest debates these days revolves around the question of whether the AI industry is actually a bubble. What do you think?
"I think there are lots of different layers in the value chain, so to speak," Ackman answers cautiously. "There's the base layer, the technology layer, the hyper-scalers, the data centers. And it seems to me there's near infinite demand for compute. So, I think if you're Microsoft or you're Amazon or even Meta, SpaceX, and you own the infrastructure layer of AI, you're going to do very well. So, I don't think there's a bubble there. I think there'll be really infinite demand for compute because intelligence is something that people prepare to invest in."
And which layers could pose a problem?
"The frontier model companies, the OpenAI's of the world, the Anthropics of the world. The OpenAI story sounded like a story of unending losses. I'd worry more about a business that's going to generate massive losses that has to constantly raise capital than I will about one that is going to turn profitable. I worry a bit about the business model of the leading edge models, because with the open-source models becoming so good, a free model or an ad supported model will achieve everything you need. I think that's a more challenging kind of space.
"Is it a bubble? I don't think the investments that the Amazons and Microsofts and Metas are making in compute are going to end up being wasteful bets. I think they're going earn very attractive returns on those investments. In the private markets, you see companies where the valuations are going up massively quarter after quarter after quarter."
Every few weeks, I read a story in which an expert claims the markets are going to crash. What’s your general outlook on all these predictions?
"It's a fool's errand to predict what the stock market's going do in the short term, but that doesn't prevent lots of people from making those predictions, because people forget the prediction they made, and at some point, you'll end up being right. And you get to be the hero if you say the market's going to crash and next week it crashes. People have built a career over that."
Pershing Square, says Ackman, takes a fairly fundamental approach. "If you look at earnings revisions for the S&P 500 - the earnings trajectory of the market, the outperformance relative to original expectations at the beginning of the year. People look at the multiple today, that historically, let's say, the market has been typically 17 P/E and maybe now it's 21, so people say, 'Oh, it's overvalued.'
"But I would argue that the business mix, the composition of the S&P 500 is a very different business mix than it was 30 years ago. We have major companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, the biggest companies comprising a major portion of the index. And they're growing very, very quickly in both revenues and their profits. And they're deserving of much higher valuations. Actually, I think many of the Big Seven stocks are quite cheap. I think Microsoft is trading near its all-time lowest earnings multiples, same for Amazon. So I don't see a fundamental reason why there should be a stock market crash tomorrow. At the end of the day, stocks don't look particularly overvalued."
"The Democratic Party has been a catastrophe"
The conversation with Ackman shifts from Wall Street to the American street, especially the streets of New York, where he sees highly worrying trends.
In recent years, a series of Democratic primary victories have been won by candidates aligned with the party's progressive and social democratic wing. Many of them have advanced a sharply critical, and at times explicitly anti-Israel, agenda that has sparked deep concern within the Jewish community. How do you explain the surge in these candidates - and in New York of all places - and how worried should we be?
"The victories in New York are obviously very concerning. But the reason why they're able to happen is that these are elections with very low turnout and a relatively small percentage of the population gets sufficiently inspired. It's an educated white, kind of upper middle class, in some cases Jewish - believe it or not - population and I would describe them as disaffected college grads."
There are reasons for this frustration, Ackman says. "A major mistake we've made is where the whole student loan phenomenon led to. When you have the government subsidizing anything, like providing 100% financing for kids to go to college, there was no governor on colleges raising the cost of an education [and] the cost of a college education went up dramatically over time. Therefore, the borrowings required to attend a college went up dramatically over time. You graduate with $150,000 worth of debt; it could be $300,000 or something if you go to medical school.
When they graduate, Ackman explains, they enter a rapidly changing job market where AI threatens many jobs. "You're burdened by this debt and maybe you didn't get the job that you wanted. The system's not working for you. And so you have a charming candidate like Mamadani, who's a very good speaker, very charismatic. And he says, 'Hey, we've got an affordability problem in New York. Let's freeze rents, you know, let's have free buses. Let's have cheaper supermarkets.' And a lot of the universities educated their populations to believe that socialism is not actually a bad thing.
"The Democratic Party has been a catastrophe, and it's a shame. I think it's important for the country to have two - at least two, we should have more than two - parties, and they should be viable and they should be strong and they should put up compelling candidates. But Democrats are auguring in, as we say."
What do you think of the claim that Benjamin Netanyahu is responsible for the Democrats abandoning Israel?
"I think the issue for Netanyahu is the coalition includes people like Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, etc., and harms his reputation, harms Israel's reputation. If Netanyahu had a broad coalition that was more moderate, I think he could be more effective in terms of building a better relationship with a broader coalition of Americans."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 19, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.