Bill Ackman's takes on Mamdani, Trump and investing in the AI era

25:02So one of the things we're going to do is we're going to share the equity value that's created from the businesses that come out of the Institute with the people who work there in a very broad way in the same way that we've done at Pershing Square. So I'd hopefully be the best of a nonprofit model. There's certain people, certain things you can achieve if you're a nonprofit that if you were a for-profit, you might not be able to hire certain people or you may not be able to interact with certain institutions that will only interact with a nonprofit as opposed to they might, if it's a for-profit, it might make it more challenging.

25:35So I've learned over 20 years of philanthropy, what works, what doesn't work. I'm sure there's still more lessons to learn, but the goal is to focus on things where there's a gap in the capital markets, where there isn't yet a for-profit solution to a problem. And there has not yet been invested effectively enough in helping people deal with traumatic brain issues or strokes. And I've been very close to that issue in the last almost six months. And so this is something, you know, historically we've been, you know, Buffett says diversification is protection against ignorance. And so if you look at the Persian Square Foundation, we were extremely diversified, certainly in the earlier years.

26:19We started focusing more on scientific research in the last period. And part of that is, you know, that's an area where we've seen a gap in the capital markets. While there is venture money available for startups in healthcare, there's, you know, a lot of the basic science research is not research. We're just too far away from revenue or a company for it to be funded by a venture capitalist. So it either has to be government funding or philanthropy. So that's an area we've focused on. But in doing that, we've learned a fair bit. We've built a couple of scientific advisory boards. We learned some of the good and bad.

26:51And we're going to apply all those learnings to this institute. I mentioned today because we actually today just closed on the building that will be the initial building for the institute. Congratulations. Thanks. Bill's career has been defined by conviction. Raised in an accomplished entrepreneurial family, he learned from a young age the value of earning his own way. That drive carried him from Harvard to launching his first hedge fund, partially funded by cold calling some of America's wealthiest investors. It all culminated in Pershing Square, an influential investment firm with major stakes in Amazon, Uber, and Microsoft, where Bill and his small team pick only a dozen or so companies to back.

27:30He's a Warren Buffett devotee and has bold ambitions to eventually best Buffett's 60-year investment career. Before we get into all of what Pershing Square is, I want to have people understand how you became the person that you are a little bit and kind of going back into the archives of Bill Ackman. So even going back to your upbringing, there was a couple of things in my research that stood out about you. One is that like your dad instilled in you, you are not going to get a penny in my inheritance, so you better earn your own money. That was one thing that stood out. And you set these ambitious milestones for yourself financially that you actually wound up hitting, partly as a result, I assume.

28:05And now there was a yearbook quote, I think, one where you were called very verbose. And two, your friend said, closed mouth gathers no foot. Gathers no foot, yes. And so clearly never shy and never afraid to speak your mind. That's true. And so I'm curious, when you think about your foundational upbringing, what created the Bill Ackman today? I think my parents obviously played a very important role, and I don't want to underestimate undermentioned mom. My mom was an activist. I grew up in Chappaqua, New York. We had diesel locomotives from the 1950s that took dad back and forth to work. We weren't allowed to start dinner until dad got home, and very often he'd get home after 8 o 'clock because the train was delayed.

28:47And mom ended up joining this grassroots organization called the Upper Harlem Line Commuter Council. She became head of it. She ran a petition drive, and they redid the railroads to our hometown, which massively accelerated the time dad got home for dinner. So I certainly saw activism at work. And my mother, I counted the signatures on the petition drive. I was supposed to go through all the signatures and count them. And mom delivered them to Albany. So I would say that was a significant moment. And then dad was in the real estate mortgage brokerage business and kind of an eat what you kill business.

29:22And I watched him have some very successful years. and there were periods of time he went a couple years without making money, which I was not really closely aware of. But Dad was very big on, you know, Bill, you need to stand on your own two feet, and you never got an allowance, and if you want to make money, you know, start a business. I had a little car waxing business. I had various kinds of businesses, and I did various projects around the house, or the lawn care, tree care, ditch digging, things like this, which was great. And so then when you were a teenager, you said to your dad, I'm going to be a millionaire by 30, have$100 million by 40, and a billion dollars by 50.

30:00And you hit them, I think, ahead of schedule. I'm curious, what are the things that, going back, you look through those decades that you think most moved the needle for you to hit those? So I was a super motivated kid. And my sister went to Harvard a year before me. So at that point, I thought that was the best school. So I was good academically and motivated and pretty involved in whether it was sports or clubs or things. I guess I wrote a decent essay. So I think getting into a good school was obviously helpful. One of my early significant experiences is at Harvard. I took a job at Harvard student agencies selling advertising for something called Let's Go Travel Guides, which I don't even know if they exist online, but this was a series of books where Harvard students would write reviews about hotels and stuff around the world.

30:51We sold advertising, and it was a commission-based business, and I guess I was a good salesman, and I made$14 ,000, which seemed like a huge amount of money. And then I went to work for my father, actually, in his business, which I was not particularly excited about. I actually liked real estate a lot, but I didn't like the service side of the business. I liked the people on the other side of the phone and I thought we were having more fun, the entrepreneurs, the developers. And I said, you know, I want to be an investor. And my dad introduced me to a guy named Leonard Marks, recommended The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham.

31:22That led me to Warren Buffett. I decided to go to business school to learn how to be an investor. And I just sort of followed down that path. And I was fortunate in finding something that I was excited about. And then I did a lot of reading. You can learn a lot by reading. And then I started investing. And the first stock I bought went up. If it had gone down, maybe I'd do something else. Well, when you started Gotham, I understand you looked at the Forbes 400 list, and that's a list of American billionaires. It wasn't necessarily billionaires back then. The richest people in America. You had to have like a$400 million net worth to be on the list or so back then.

31:57And you cold called them? Yes. And some of them actually invested? Yes. So how did you - Four of the six were on the list. basically I figured if I want to raise you know 10 million dollars which was you know the goal but the minimum was was 3 million why not go to the richest people in the world and ask them for a really small amount of money you know you have no tracker that was my theory you don't know them at all okay yeah it's a crazy idea but no one else probably had done it before so and and basically really successful people particularly entrepreneurially successful people admire entrepreneurship in young people.

32:30I think it's just natural. It makes sense. And so knocked on a lot of doors, basically, and got a huge amount of rejection. 90 plus percent of the people turned us down. Probably 95 or 96 percent of the people turned us down. But five or six people gave us the three million to start the business. And then from there, you grew a lot of assets under management. There was a bid for Rockefeller that I think you ultimately didn't get, but really put you on the map in a big way. And then ultimately it had to be unwound. What was the lesson you took from the 10 years at Gotham when you were launching Pershing Square?

33:04We started Gotham Partners with no experience, David Berkowitz and I, and we got a lot of experience. And we did a lot of things well, and we did some things that were a mistake. One of the mistakes we made is five years in, we decided to expand the mandate to include private assets. And mixing private assets in a hedge fund where people can redeem capital, even with side pockets and these other mechanisms, creates a lot of complexity. So one of the things I did at Persian Square was Persian Square doesn't make private investments. And I had the benefit of doing a 2.0. I think a big part of the reason why Persian Square has been successful is the case I made when I was raising money when I launched Persian Square.

33:40I said I'm the most experienced hedge fund manager in America at 37 because I've already started a hedge fund, had a lot of success, had some mistakes. And so that was part of my pitch. I think that if I look over the course of my life, I think one thing I've been good at is learning from mistakes that I've made over time. And a lot of people just don't want to talk about mistakes. They want to shove them to the side. And as we say at Purdue, it's where we study them and we treasure them. Because there's not a business person that's not made meaningful mistakes over time or not had very significant setbacks.

34:14And it's how you deal with the setbacks, how you learn from the mistakes that increases your probability of success long term. Yeah, and I think it's how you prove yourself as a business person through the good times and the hard. And what struck me, too, was I think you launched Pershing with about$54 million. And 50 of it came from the partner you had early in Gotham who also did the Rockefeller bid with you that ultimately wasn't successful. Yeah, it was Joe Stomberg incoming of Lucadia National gave me the$50 million. That was the difference between our launching and not. And it wasn't just the$50 million.

34:47And Lucadia, they are. Ian is no longer, but he's passed away. But Joe Steinberg, still one of the most respected investors. So the endorsement of brand name investor group giving us capital, obviously, is what helped us start. So you've had some fantastic wins, some epic failures as well. But some of the wins I want to talk about first. General growth properties, a huge gamble you took, but calculated, of course, a huge outcome. Canadian Pacific Railroad. They did not give you an easy time getting infiltrated in the company and helping turn it around, but you did. What are the characteristics you notice when the bets have been good?

35:27What do they share? And what are the things that you look for when you're going to decide to kind of put your chips in? I think the most important thing for us initially is that the underlying business is a good, ideally great business. I think that's really important. And each of the cases you mentioned were cases where a otherwise great business fell upon kind of hard times, and we were in a pretty unique position to help the company address its various problems. You know, general growth - Sometimes by force. Well, you know, the - Or highly encouraging. The world has changed in terms of the receptivity of companies to ideas that didn't come from the boardroom or from management.

36:00You know, when I entered this business, you know, boards would, if, you know, not invented here, you know, they didn't want to hear about it. I think the, and we played a role, and others have done the same, in really restoring the balance of power between owners of the shareholders of companies and the managers and the boards that oversee them. The whole history of shareholder activism, I think, has done that. The big opportunity we've had in many cases, we've really done two things that have driven a lot of value. Cases where the shareholders have kind of given up on management. In general growth, the stock was down 99.5%.

36:31The company had debt it couldn't refinance. And every other public bankruptcy of consequence, the shareholders lost all their money. We bought from people selling because they rationally believed that this would be no different. We bought 25 % of the company. I was able to get on the board. It wasn't easy. Goldman Sachs actually was advising against it. Got on the board of directors of the company and then led a restructuring where all of the creditors got their money back, power plus accrued interest. Chipotle was a food safety crisis and management was really having a tough time dealing with it.

36:59And we bought 10%. We were invited to join the board. We convinced Steve Ells, then CEO, to step up to chair and recruited Brian Nickel, a great CEO. So a big part of our success has come from stocks really beaten down because they've screwed up, perhaps, or bad things or otherwise happen, and we can come in and make changes to management strategy, cost structure, capital structure. I would say more recent days, we've made a lot of money in cases where the market has just overreacted to something that we think has a shortish-term impact. As markets have become shorter term, people sell stocks and they can drop dramatically in value and that creates the opportunity for us to buy them.

37:37We don't really need to make, we bought a big stake in Hilton when the market responded to kind of negative macro effects. It was run by Chris Nassetta, who still is today, and he's by far the best operator in the hotel industry. Hilton is the dominant company. I think no one would argue those facts, but the stock was still incredibly cheap because of inherent short-termism. So I think part of our strategy, you know, Microsoft were buying, we believe, at a very attractive price. You know, Amazon, you know, one of the most dominant, obviously, retailers in the world and dominant cloud companies in the world.

38:11And when the president introduced tariffs, you know, stock was, you know, obliterated. So the volatility of markets creates opportunities, not just for investors like us, but for retail investors. Because retail investors, you know, as long as they're putting aside enough money to live on, they can also have permanent capital. They can say, look, this is what I'm going to invest in markets. And they're not exposed to someone pulling their money. And so they can buy when others are selling. And again, you don't want to be a lemming in markets. You want to be the person looking in the other direction.

38:40I mean, it might make sense to run. But you should reassess. You should look at the facts and then make a kind of emotionally independent decision. To me, another thing that stands out is you really look at governance structures. and I've heard you say, you know, like when a company is failing, it's often the board's fault, not necessarily even the CEO, although sure, the CEO is a decision maker within, but it's really the board has responsibility. What do you think makes up a really strong board? And is there anyone that you're like, God, I want them on my board every time. They're so good. What are the characteristics?

39:12You want some people on the board who actually really understand the industry. You don't want a board of entirely railroad executives on a railroad company, because then they're going to constantly second guess the CEO. You don't want that, But you want some domain expertise. I would say most importantly, you want people who are prepared to speak the truth and to do so directly to the CEO without regard to worrying about whether they're going to keep their seat on the board. There are lots of examples, and I've experienced them even recently, where people will say things outside the boardroom, but in prime time in the boardroom, they're afraid to challenge the CEO because this part of their career is dependent on them staying on boards.

39:52and they know the next board they're being considered for, the CEO is going to check with this guy and say, hey, is he a good director, right? And a bad CEO will say a good director is one who's never going to challenge anything. I have to say he's just going to support what I want. And what you really want is you want people who are going to challenge you. And we've tried to do that. And from the Pershing Square board, we have five independent directors and we pick people who we had confidence would tell us what they actually believed and who have skin in the game. All of our directors are meaningful shareholders in the company.

40:22So I think you want skin in the game. I think you want people with very good experience, good judgment, all the obvious intelligence, character. But I think most importantly, they can't be shy. You had two IPOs recently of your own. Congratulations. Thank you. I wanted to ask you about the process of taking those public and why. How has it built into your long-term strategy? I know you've followed the Buffett playbook. You've said, Warren Buffett had a great 60-year career, and I want to best him. So how does this all fit in, and what was that process like? So Pershing Square is an asset management business.

40:55Some people call it an alternative asset management business. So one of the companies we took public is Pershing Square, Pershing Square Inc., right, the business of managing money. And it's a company that has pretty unique attributes when you compare it to other asset managers in that effectively all, 98 % of our capital, is in public companies. in many cases where we're the largest, the employees of Pershing Square are the largest shareholders. And what that does for us is it gives us what Mr. Buffett would call permanent capital. You know, Berkshire is a corporation. When people want their money, they sell the Berkshire shares, but the capital stays in the enterprise.

41:29And Mr. Buffett's done a remarkable job investing that money kind of over time. The business of asset management very often conflicts with the investment of assets. It's sort of this interesting kind of paradox. Many times the best time to invest capital and we've made a lot of money being able to invest at a time when people want their money out of the market you know this you know human beings you know were uh if you go back to caveman days right you know then when the when uh everyone was running in that direction you probably should be running in that direction because something very bad right the herd mentality thing saved a lot of lives in in economics or in markets the herd mentality has cost you a lot of money okay so you very often you want to be looking at a direction but it's very hard to do so if the capital that you manage is coming from people where they can redeem it when the herd is running in a certain direction.

42:15So we've built a business model around capital that can't leave the system, and that's given us an advantage. And it allows us, you know, the vast majority of hedge fund capital today and many other investors in the markets is very short term. If you think about the pod shops, you know, the more famous ones, the Citadels, Millenniums, they've made a lot of money. but with not by betting on future of an enterprise, you know, over the next decade, betting on a stock price, you know, over the next 90 days. And that's not that interesting to me. You know, we like helping companies become more successful and that's a, you know, many, many year process and it's very important to have assets that match liabilities.

42:55Now, Pershing Square, why do we take the management company public? The answer is I think we want the business to exist well beyond the existing, you know, I'd like it to survive me. And the public markets are a way to increase the likelihood that a business survives for the very long term. So it was not a liquidity event. You know, no employee received any cash as part of this. In fact, I actually invested in the IPO, you know, after the stock started trading, but we set up the business so that I think it has a higher likelihood of existing forever. And also we've done it at a time where unlike it's not at a trillion dollar valuation.

43:30There's still plenty of room for kind of growth. The other company we took public was another permanent capital vehicle, a US one called Pershing Square USA. I would say our failure here to date is we haven't done a good job telling the world about it. But it is, I would argue, one of the best opportunities, certainly in the hedge fund space. It's a liquid hedge fund that has an excellent 19 % compounded record for the last 22 years. And it charges the lowest fees of any hedge fund in the world. A 2 % fee, typical hedge fund might be 2 % plus 20 % of the profits every year. Trading as a result of our not having done a good job marketing yet, although that's going to be a full court press for us, at about a 20 plus percent discount at the underlying value of the assets.

44:11So if you like Uber today at$71 a share, you'd like it more at a 20 % discount to that price, you can buy Uber in effect through this vehicle. So we're going to be announcing earnings in mid-August. And as part of that, we're going to take people through the portfolio or logic. But I think that's an interesting company. But the thesis behind doing two IPOs is as an incentive to invest in this new permanent capital vehicle, we gave people for free a piece of the management company. Bill's success didn't come without setbacks. In the mid 2010s, a series of high profile misplaced bets, including investments in valiant pharmaceuticals, a nutrition company, Herbalife, erased billions, marking one of the toughest stretches in his career.

44:53But Bill helped orchestrate a multi-billion dollar comeback, fueled in part by profitable COVID-19 credit hedges and a record-breaking unsecured personal loan from JPMorgan Chase. So it hasn't all been roses. And there was a two and a half year period where it really looked like you were done. You were toast. And for the people who work here, it might have felt the same. I don't know. It seems like it was a scary time. First, there was Valiant Pharmaceuticals. And then there was Herbalife and Carl Icahn. And all the while, you're dealing with a serious personal situation and going through a divorce.

45:29Your mind is spinning. You're thinking like, oh, my God, am I going to lose all my money? Could I even wind up in jail somehow? I haven't done anything illegal, but could it all amount to that? Can you walk me through that period of your life? How do you dig yourself out of something that sounds so deep? Everything was going along swimmingly, at least in the business. but we made a large investment, a passive investment in a company called Valiant Pharmaceuticals. And we had avoided healthcare and pharmaceuticals, really the entire firm, but we had gotten to know this management team in connection with the previous transaction where he made a lot of money, built confidence in the management team.

46:02Turned into a disastrous investment. There were actually questionable business practices that emerged and things you could certainly criticize management for. And they had constructed a business that was not sufficiently robust. They used too much leverage in their business model. And we were a passive shareholder, but I made the decision to join the board to try to fix the problem. The right answer probably would have been to sell. But by joining the board, now it became on our watch. But when you have an event like that, investors didn't actually initially kind of pull their money. But after 18 months of still dealing with that problem, and then the Herbalife short, people started redeeming their capital.

46:40And again, to the point of I made it at really the beginning of the show, so to speak, a manager is only as good as his investors. Once investors start heading for the hills, there is a bit of a lemming effect. Investors are like, look, I don't want to be the last man standing. And so you find yourself in a run of the bank type situation where you're sort of forced to sell things. People expect that you're going to be selling. So your stocks are going down, which hurts your performance. and you're a bit of a, I wouldn't quite call it a death spiral, but I'd say something pretty close, particularly for a concentrated manager.

47:14And so how do we deal with that? Well, about a third of our capital was in this permanent capital vehicle, Pershing Square Holdings. We had basically$4 billion in Pershing Square Holdings, even at the bottom being down 30 or so percent. And I said, look, if all of the investor capital leaves and our open-ended funds, now we have permanent capital. We'll have 100 % permanent capital. It's a much better base to build a building off of. So I brought all the employees together and I said, look, it's not permanent capital simply because it's a public company. It's permanent capital only when you own enough of the stock.

47:44So this was the time where I decided to borrow some money, which I did. Quite a bit. I borrowed$300 million. It was the biggest personal unsecured loan ever granted to an individual by JP Morgan. I believe that's the case. And I used that plus some capital I took out of the hedge fund to buy enough of a stake of our public vehicle so that it became permanent capital. And then I called all the employees together and I said, we are better positioned today than at any time in our history. We have the holy grail. We have permanent capital. All we need to do is stick to our core principles, work hard, and we're going to compound our way out of this mess.

48:20And then we also have to treat all our investors fairly. Everyone wants their money, you can have their money. And did you really believe that? Did you believe - 100 % believe that. And it was true. And while we were a much smaller firm, at the peak, We had, I think,$18 billion or so of capital, and we're down to, with all the money going back to our investors who could redeem, we had$4 billion of capital. And that was the bottom. And we've made a huge amount of – we've had the best eight years in our history since that time. And we were able to run the business much more efficiently because we didn't have to have armies of people constantly raising money without the distractions of – most people in our industry, the CEO spends a lot of time.

49:01out there raising capital. John Gray is an amazing CEO at Blackstone, great investor, but spends an awful lot of time having to meet with investors. Buffett, I think, made the decision to get out of the business of managing hedge funds because he didn't want to be in the investor relations business all day. And so that was a critical kind of junction. How I got through it personally was my little mantra is you just need to make a little progress every day. The bottom, you feel like you're never going to get out, and progress doesn't appear kind of quickly. But the progress of daily compounding and make 1 % progress every day adds up very quickly.

49:39They start out with a very small slope, and then they go vertical after a certain point in time. And that happens in your personal life, in your business life, as long as you make a little progress every day. So that's what I did. Missing from the story, though, is your, I want to say arch nemesis, but Carl Icahn, who bet against what you were making in Herbalife and kind of squeezed you into this tough position where you had to sell assets you didn't want to sell and ultimately borrow$300 million. I wouldn't blame all that on Carl. What we had there is, first of all, Pershing was never really in the business of shorting stocks.

50:09We did make some bets against companies using credit default swabs, which is a much better instrument. And we said, look, we can prove that this is a pyramid scheme. The government will investigate. How can this not be a good short investment? Well, Carl basically took the other side of the trade, bought a billion dollars for the stock. And you guys had a tiff before that, right, where you actually told him F you? Might this be a gather of a... When I told him that, it was appropriate. The only two words that were appropriate. We could get into that. But I had other dealings with him where I would say we were on the winning side of dealings.

50:42He did not keep his word. We had to sue him. We ended up winning. It took eight years. And afterwards, he said, now we can be friends. And that's when I used the term that you described. and I guess that upset him. And so we kind of sat in the weeds looking for a moment. And when we had a big short position in Herbalife, he knew nothing about the company, but figured, okay, I'll buy a bunch of the stock. I'll force a short squeeze, which ultimately he was successful at doing so. When the Valiant thing happened, that put more pressure on the firm. And that's when the pressure of being short a stock with Carl aggressively on the other side.

51:16So it was challenging days, but we're out of the business of short selling. So we'll never do that again. And have you buried the hatchet? And we have, yeah, we did. I guess you could say we hugged it out way back when. It's still not my first choice for a business partner, I would say. Yeah, fair enough. You had a lot of lessons learned coming out of that period. And actually in your office is a little stone that's on, I see, on a lot of the desks here that has some rules of the road. And I've heard you say, you wrote them down so that you would never stray. And if you tried to stray, someone should hit you over the head with a baseball bat because it's going to be a bad idea.

51:51Oh, hit me over the head with the little tombstones. It's actually quite heavy. Yeah. Could you talk through what did you decide your values were going to be that you were to rebuild Pershing under? Yeah, it wasn't a values-based chart. We've always kept to our values. It was more an investment checklist, things we're going to do and things we're not going to do. And it's really about business quality. Here are the characteristics we're looking for in a business, and here are things that we're not going to do. And it's actually very helpful in life to have checklists. At the end of the day, Bill believes a great company is built by a great team.

52:19He has fostered a company culture of in-person work, made more appealing by hiring good personality fits, as well as attractive in-office benefits. Compensation at Pershing is tied to how one's overall portfolio performs, not individual eat-what-you-kill P &Ls. And because the relatively slim staff has meaningful equity in the company, Bill says few people have left out of dissatisfaction. And so now the firm is about 48 people. I understand there's a culture, too, to which you're in office every day except for two months of the year. I'm curious how you're building the firm for a team that rallies around the mission, that is here for the long term.

52:56You said this is a longevity play for you here at Pershing Square. You want to go beyond your time. How are you building the culture of the firm to pick these bets? Sure. So first of all, I'm a big in-the-office believer. So it's actually five days a week, 10 months of the year. The summer, actually, the investment team all co-locates. The investment team is all in an office out east, as they say, in Bridgehampton. But the rest of the firm, you have a choice. You can come into the office or you can work from home unless there's something really important going on where we need to bring everyone in.

53:26I guess so, yes. So I think that's worked well. In terms of culture, it really starts with the people you recruit. Kind of big believer in only hiring people of the highest character, human qualities, people you want to hang out with, spend time with. You're going to spend more time in the office, spend more time with the people you work with very often than people that you, you know, your kids are in school. You know, you see them more, even little kids, you see them more in the evenings, maybe the weekends. You can spend more time, more likely spend more time with people in the office. So you want to choose who those people are.

53:56There are a lot of super talented people. But when you combine a super talented person with great human qualities, that's a great base to build a great culture. So very careful about the people we bring in here. We've always taken a very long-term approach, and even the model, the typical asset management firm and typical hedge fund is much more short-term oriented in how compensation works, much more eat what you kill, sort of individual P &Ls, people working to get their own idea in the portfolio. Here, it's always based on how the overall portfolio does, so there are no individual P &Ls. And one of the things I've conveyed repeatedly over time is this firm is not successful.

54:35if when you walk from the time you walk into the office, you have a positive impression by the women you meet at the front, the office, you know, the way the office looks. You know, Isabel, who helps clean the space during the day, you know, she's an important part of the organization. And, you know, whether it's accounting or finance, technology, you know, legal, it's a watch, you know, a very carefully wound watch where if any part breaks, it stops. And so I think everyone here feels accurately that they're a big contributor to our success. And the result is we can accomplish an enormous amount.

55:13Most firms with 35 billion of assets don't have 48 people, particularly firms where we have a lot of public assets. So we do the accounting for multiple public companies. You might have a 40-person accounting finance team in a typical public company, perhaps just dealing with all the issues or legal and compliance issues associated with that. We're able to operate much more efficiently. When we went public, everyone here is a shareholder. And there's not a person at Pershing Square that doesn't own multiple millions of dollars of stock in the company, whether you're cleaning the space or at the front desk or another role in the company.

55:52So we, you know, believe in taking care of our people and we take care of people from a health perspective. We've got a very strong health orientation. You know, we have beautiful offices. You know, we like everything from the way we filter the air to the nature of the food we serve in the, in the, in the cafe, to the access to the gym, to healthcare. And, you know, we look after people. And so that, when you operate that way, you know, people don't think about going anyplace else. And, you know, we've not since we've in really the last decade, we've not had one person, an undesired departure from the firm.

56:33And that's very unusual in our industry. Yeah. You had those milestones for yourself growing up, right? It's like by 30, I'm going to do this, 40, 50. It was an offhand comment to my dad. But still, now you're 60. It's actually very helpful to set targets in life. So where are your targets going now? You're done with the old targets. What are the new targets? 60, 70, 80 beyond? Yeah. So one, you got to start focusing on longevity. So I've been personally interested in just staying healthy. No sugar, no alcohol, I understand. Yeah. I'm pretty close to zero. I want to be around for my family, kids.

57:06I have a daughter who's seven years old. So when I'm 80, she'll be 27. You want to be around a long time. And then, And of course, it helps on impact. It helps on investing, right? And why is Buffett one of the greatest investors of all time? He's done a good job. He's also lived a long time and he stayed at it. For anyone who wants to have a career where they feel like it's big, but they don't know how to do it, is there anything that you would say? Well, I think this is the era in which you can learn anything and you don't actually have to read books now. You can just ask your AI to teach you whatever it is that you need to learn.

57:43And so I think we are going to transform the two obvious things that will be transformed by AI are education and health care. Right. There's no better doctor today probably than a frontier AI model. You have a symptom. A good friend of mine, his father had some symptom. The hospital couldn't figure out what it was. And he was approaching, you know, a bad, really bad outcome. He put everything into, you know, ChatGPT. And they said, well, you know, does he have some infectious disease? And it turns out what he had. So I would go there first. And it's cheaper and takes less work than going to see a doctor.

58:22I think one of the things we're watching or I'm watching closely, too, is if you really think AI is as transformative or as big, really, an invention as even electricity. It's not like electricity is a business. What is actually the business model? I feel like that still a little bit remains to be seen. Anthropic is trying to corner the market in the enterprise space. It's clear OpenAI is trying to do that as well and also create a device. But some of these business models, it's not like Amazon where it's like, okay, this is e-commerce. We get what this is. This is kind of a new frontier and a lot of money in the meantime.

58:53I think the model is how much intelligence do you get per token or per dollar of investment and then what you can do with that. Yeah, intelligence. Now, the challenge for the frontier models is, as we've seen as recently as this last few days, is this Chinese model, the Kimi model, is pretty near the frontier and is an open-weight model as opposed to this sort of closed system. And I think that's a very positive thing for humanity for more and more of these lower-cost models become available to consumers. It's bringing down the cost of intelligence. I think we're heading to a world where superintelligence will be available to everyone.

59:32that's a pretty interesting world. And it won't only be, yes, the absolute frontier is going to be expensive and maybe only big corporations can afford it. But for the vast majority of things you need in your life, you're not going to need the absolute frontier of superintelligence, like where to go on vacation, or even a question about a medical procedure that you have coming up. These can be answered today basically for free. You go to the Google chat and put in your question, you get a free AI answer that's very good for vast majority of things. So a world in which intelligence is a very high level of intelligence is available basically for free is a pretty amazing world.

1:00:10Bill, thank you so much for sharing what your thoughts are today on so many different topics. We really appreciate you spending the time with Fortune. Thank you. Really enjoyed it.

1:00:31Thank you.