저자: BillAckman · 외국인
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Ackman과 Tenev가 Pershing Square USA(PSUS) 상장과 Pershing Square Inc.(관리보수 법인) 구조를 설명. PSUS는 $50/주, 5주 매수 시 Pershing Square Inc. 보너스 1주, 약 100억달러 규모 공모 예정. 자금은 수주 내 대형주 12개 안팎에 집중 투자하는 구조이며 영구자본 구조로 장기 운용. 이란 전쟁 이후 우량 기업들이 역사적 저밸류에이션에 나왔다고 평가하고, AI·인프라·에너지 투자 붐과 감세를 근거로 지금이 자본 투입에 좋은 시점이라고 주장. 과거 CDS·금리스왑 헤지로 큰 수익을 낸 사례를 언급.
다듬은 글
All right, we are here with the legendary Bill Ackman. Uh Bill Ackman, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Nice to see you. Yeah, good to see you again. You know, last time we speak, um you know, you interviewed me and and Shiv, our CFO, about the launch of Robinhood Ventures Fund I, which is also a closed-end fund, and now we're here talking about uh Pershing Square and Pershing Square U.S., also a closed-end fund structure.
So, it seems like closed-end funds are having a bit of a moment, a bit of a resurgence. Maybe uh what are your thoughts on that? Why do you think that's the case right now? Uh sure. So, I'm not sure I would say it's a resurgence at this point. I wouldn't count two [clears throat] offerings as that. I would say what's interesting is the closed-end fund structure is a great corporate structure.
It's a corporation that has a very favorable tax structure, that gives you a lot of flexibility to do various kinds of investing. So, for us, it's the ability to buy minority stakes in companies, it's an ability to buy controlling stakes in companies, it offers an ability to hedge risk. Um but no one's really taken advantage of the structure.
You know, historically, the closed-end fund has been used for a very not particularly interesting purpose. I would say, you know, uh kind of the big fund complexes would sort of launch them in a fairly undifferentiated way. You know, they weren't run by Robinhood, they didn't have a particular niche.
Uh the person running them, you you know, generally was a computer as opposed to a person. But it's a structure that's very interesting, and uh we it's not something I followed closely until a few years ago. And the more I learned, I said, "Wow, it's a great vehicle to uh do something interesting." Great.
And maybe just explain the vision for this IPO, how investors uh should understand it. And and in particular, you know, since there's two components, PS and PSUS, what what what's uh what's going on there? So, let me give you just like a a 30-second overview of what we're doing in this offering. We're We're launching a new investment company.
It's going to be listed on your stock exchange. It's called Pershing Square USA. Each share costs $50. And that will put $50 of cash into the entity, minus a small amount of underwriting fees. We're going to invest that money in a dozen great companies, and we're going to work to compound that money over the very long term.
Uh as kind of a a bonus for investing in this new fund, for every five shares you buy for $50, you get one free share in something called Pershing Square Inc. Pershing Square Inc. is the company that I work for. Uh it's a business that collects management fees and incentive fees, or promotes as some people call them, from the funds that we manage.
It's a very good business. It's a good business that grows without capital. It's a business that grows with the kind of high-return nature of the strategy, and it grows every time we raise more assets by launching a new fund. In fact, you know, the the launch of PSUS will probably grow our assets by about 50% overnight.
So, what we're doing is we're giving a gift, if you will, the lawyers like us to call bonus shares in something called Pershing Square Inc. And that's the investment proposition. So, your IPO pop comes in the form of a separate share of stock, as opposed to, you know, betting that you know, a closed-end fund trades up on the first day.
Okay. And for for Pershing Square Inc., which is the the bonus shares that you'll be getting, half of the half of the assets that it's managing will be PSUS, the closed-end fund that's IPOing today, and half of it are existing about a third of its assets. So, it will increase our assets from about 20 billion to 30.
So, that assuming a 10 billion-dollar offering, the new PSUS will be about a third of the total asset base of Pershing Square Inc. Yeah, but Pershing Square Inc. also gets exposure to the existing portfolio. That's correct. It It Pershing Square Inc. receives fees from something called Pershing Square Holdings, from a company called Howard Hughes, and now Pershing Square USA, and over time we're going to launch some other uh closed-end investment companies, and that entity will get fees uh from those new funds that we launch.
So, there'll be other things similar structure to PSUS. PSUS is kind of uh the the first one. But you anticipate PS Inc. to have to to collect fees from all of the subsequent ones as well. That's right. Super interesting. Um I also saw you mentioned that uh you rely on permanent capital for for the fund.
Uh can you talk bit about permanent capital and how important that is for you? Sure. So, we started out in the I would describe as the hedge fund business. A typical hedge fund is a private entity. We're only allowed to make raise money from basically rich people. Uh you know, there's an onshore We had an onshore fund and an offshore fund.
Um but the nature of our strategy, uh which is concentrated, so we invest in, you know, a dozen companies. We get pretty deeply involved in those companies. We join boards of directors. We work closely with management teams. We often recruit a new CEO to one of our companies. We make commitments to people.
Right? We make commitments about being long-term. When you have money that can leave, let's say there's a pandemic and people panic, and they pull their money, it's hard for us to make commitments. We had a strategy that long-term we knew required a stable capital base. What is permanent capital? It's really Instead of raising a fund where people invest money in a private fund, here you buy shares in a corporation, and then the cash goes in the corporation, and we use those cash to make investments.
So, when investors want their money, they sell the stock. If they want to add to their investment, they can buy the stock. And for us, the money stays. And the permanency of that allows us to be a long-term investor and to get do get execute a strategy of getting deeply involved in companies. And that's why that structure is important.
And we're really unique in our industry. Um after this offering, about 98% of our capital will be in permanent capital vehicles, and there will be three of them. And that's very good from an investment perspective, cuz we're in a world in which investors are increasingly short-term. Uh and if you have the ability to be longer-term, uh that gives you a a significant, you know, competitive advantage.
It's also good from a business standpoint. If you think about this management company, our general partner or GP as I called it, that business receives fees from these funds. So, if the capital is permanent, as we generate returns over time, our assets under management grow, and the fees grow. So, the business, the economic substance of the business, it's like owning a royalty, uh like this annuity-like fees on a portfolio of these closed-end or permanent capital vehicles, that grow because of the high-performance nature uh or the high-return nature of the strategy.
And so, it's a very good business, and we're sharing a piece of that business with the public shareholders. Why? Because they're helping us um by um launching this what we expect to be the largest closed-end IPO ever. And what about capital return? Um how are you thinking about it on the PS level? Is Do you anticipate paying a dividend?
Pershing Square Inc., the management company, one of the great things about this business, it does not require capital to grow. Right? It's really a in some sense an intellectual property business. It's about our ability to make investments, and the capital is outside of the enterprise, right? It's in these various funds.
So, we can pay out the substantial majority of our uh profits as dividends. So, we will be What's interesting, it can be a rapidly growing company, because it will grow as fast The business grows organically with a compounding of the assets in the funds. It grows in a step-change fashion as we launch new funds.
So, you know, this entity will be between 5 and 10 billion in size, this IPO we're doing. If we do If the next one is 10 billion, it will overnight grow our assets by a third. And so, this will be a very rapidly growing company, but it doesn't require the reinvestment of capital, which means we're we're going to send back the substantial majority or nearly all of the cash we generate, we're going to return to shareholders.
And so, Pershing Square Inc., as we call it the GP, will be uh pretty nice uh yielding company. But it's also usually companies that can pay out most of their earnings, utilities, REITs, things like this. They don't have the potential to grow at high rates. This is a business that combines the ability to grow at very high rates with the ability to pay a very significant dividend.
Got it. And, you know, Pershing Square Inc. is operating in a somewhat competitive space. You've got, you know, the other publicly traded uh alternative asset managers. And I imagine at the end of the day, it just comes down to the quality of the team and the culture and and the repeatable engine for investing in in great assets.
Can you talk a little bit about that? How do you think about team and culture on the Pershing Square Inc. level? Uh sure. So, we do certainly have people in our industry, but in some sense, we don't think of them as competitors. The other companies in our industry are you know, private equity, uh real estate, uh private credit, um we're really an equity strategy.
Uh so, it's a different strategy. And the other different part of the model is we're the only firm in the industry that has permanent capital, which means we're we're not in the fundraising business. We're not constantly having to raise money for new funds. Um but one of the other things that unusual about our firm is our size.
A firm like Blackstone has over 5,000 people. We have 48. Uh a 48-person team enables a very different kind of culture than a 5,000-person organization. And we're able to operate with such a small team because we have permanent capital, so we're not constantly having to raise money, which requires armies of people.
And we own a dozen companies. So, we have nine investment professionals who are doing the work on a dozen companies, and obviously, you know, looking for other potential investments over time. But it's an incredibly efficient sort of lean model that enables a culture I'm talking to you from our office uh today.
We have 48 people uh you know, beautiful offices. Uh it's a great environment. It's kind of a family-oriented kind of culture. And I think unusually for our industry, we have really no unintended turnover. No one has left the firm since we've had Permanent Capital Real Estate years to go uh launch their own fund or to go to another firm.
Why? Cuz they can't replace the culture. They can't replace the permanent capital. And these are sort of unique attributes that makes us a very attractive place to work. Well, when you move on to uh let's let's talk a little bit about PSUS, you know, the the investment vehicle. Um maybe share a little bit about the philosophy there.
How many investments do you think you're going to hold at any given time? Um it you've you've described it as a concentrated portfolio. Um uh why a concentrated portfolio versus something a bit more diversified? Sure. So, it you know, I think Warren Buffett once said, you know, diversification is protection against ignorance.
If you don't know a lot about the companies that you're investing in, you want to invest in a lot of companies because the diversification will protect you from mistakes. If you have the ability to do deep due diligence on companies, and I would say as significantly, if you have the the nature of your strategy allows you to have a lot of influence over those companies, you really want to pick the best dozen or so companies as opposed to dilute the top 12 or the top 15 with ideas 16 17 20 25 50.
You know, I think it's very hard uh to outperform the market once you become a highly diversified portfolio. And so, our returns have come in part because of concentration, and our returns in part have come from the fact that we help our companies succeed. We help them uh drive, you know, improve their businesses and drive shareholder return.
And the number you have in mind is something in that 12 to 15 portfolio company range. Even within the dozen, we concentrate. So, the top three or four will likely be half the portfolio. You know, so we we concentrate even in the 12, and we pick our favorite uh ideas in terms of risk and reward. When you do your diligence, what what are you looking for specifically?
So, we describe our ideal business as a simple predictable free cash flow generative business that has very high barriers to entry. Uh we love businesses that are royalty-like, i.e., they bit like the Pershing Square business. We businesses that collect royalties uh you know, streams of income uh that come into the business.
Businesses that have very uh what Buffett would describe wide moats. You know, very hard for the business to be disrupted. You know, we're in a age of AI, which is probably the most disruptive technology ever. We want a business where you know, two people in a garage aren't going to come up with some technology that's going to disrupt us.
So, it's about minimizing disruption, what we call durable growth. And then we generally want companies that don't need to use a lot of leverage in their business because leverage uh creates a lot of risk. And then we want them run um by, you know, great people that have the right incentives uh to drive, you know, value for for the owners of the company.
So, these aren't these aren't predominantly technology companies necessarily. Like you're looking for big brands, companies that have been around for hundreds of years, that sort of thing. Uh actually not necessarily. Um so, we're very happy to own you know, a great dominant company. You know, every company today is a technology company.
Uh and uh it's really about the durability of the cash flows, the value of the platform. Uh what prevents somebody else from launching a business that will disrupt them. You know, these are the factors uh that we focus on uh in investing in companies. And you're already uh you're committing a a portfolio already to uh to PSUS.
It's not just completely starting out as cash. No, actually it's going to start out as cash. We're going to raise cash from investors. We're going to deploy the that cash in the next few weeks after the uh IPO is completed. Uh we think it's actually very good environment to be putting capital to work.
Some of the best Interestingly, since the Iran war started, at least since the beginning of the year, some of the best businesses in the world have come of you know, sort of become available at actually some of the lowest valuations in their history. Um so, it's a good environment to be deploying this capital.
But an investor investing in Pershing Square USA is buying in effect putting cash into the company. We're going to deploy that cash over the several weeks uh thereafter. Oh, so that how quickly do you anticipate the the deployment to be? So, we invest in basically large and mega cap companies. Um so, we think we can deploy the capital uh relatively quickly.
And we think the timing is quite good. I mean, I think there are a lot of tailwinds kind of going into the back half of the year that should be good for the economy and good for business. And I think when some of the you know, sort of the incremental risk premium that uh exists in the world because of the uncertainty around Iran, oil prices, I think that uncertainty uh will go down over time.
Um and then we have the benefit of, you know, we're in the middle of a massive AI infrastructure boom, a massive energy boom. We have infrastructure generally really started in the Biden administration where a big, you know, trillion-plus bill was approved that, you know, shovels are going into the ground.
As we speak, the president um got through Congress a very significant tax bill, which has a lot of incentives for investment. You know, the president talks about 18 trillion of deals. You know, people have made commitments to invest in the country. You know, whether it's 18 trillion or you could be a half that number.
You know, these are massive drivers of demand and should be meaningful drivers of jobs. And that will lead to economic growth. I think it's actually quite a good time to be deploying capital in in the stock market. Okay. So, that this isn't going to be like a 12-to-18-month gradual deployment. You're planning to deploy the capital in one shot.
We'll be largely largely fully invested in a matter of weeks. Okay. Okay. Um maybe we talk a little bit about risk management, too, something we emphasize heavily. I think one of the unique attributes of the strategy you have is this uh opportunistic asymmetric hedging. Um and you also have a specific approach to leverage.
Can you sort of translate that into plain English for the the retail audience? How how how does it work? How does it protect the portfolio? What we do, first of all, we try to invest in businesses where the stock market shut for 10 years, we'd be happy to own them. We want to invest in the most durable uh kind of growth companies in the world, companies with strong balance sheets, companies with very dominant market positions.
That in and then own a diversified collection, not too diversified, but diversified. So, let's say a dozen of some of the best businesses in the world that have, you know, long-term embedded uh durable growth. The other thing we do is we spend time thinking about geopolitics, politics, you know, macro events, what's going on in the economy, what's happening politically.
Um and this is something we've really done over the last 22 years since we started the firm. And periodically, we've identified what I would describe as a black swan risk. Beginning in 2005, we started to see AAA-rated companies, companies with the highest uh ratings for their, you know, supposed to be as good as the US government in terms of credit, starting to guarantee subprime mortgages and other risky assets.
And we viewed this as a risk to the world um cuz people were relying on these AAA companies. They were called bond insurers at the time uh to kind of head, you know, get offset risk by getting a guarantee from these companies. Well, they were guaranteeing very risky stuff. So, we made a bet uh in the sense we bought uh an instrument called a credit default swap.
What is it? It's a instrument that becomes more valuable when a company's credit quality deteriorates. Sort of a bet that a company's going to go bankrupt. And we made that bet on a number of these companies. And then about with within a couple of years, that bet paid off in a massive way. We made a little over a billion dollars.
We were managing about 4 billion at the time. At the time the great financial crisis happened. And the good thing here is one, it hedged some of the downside cuz we own we generally long, you know, these companies. Stocks go down when the market goes down. But it also gave us more cash to invest. We sold that hedge for a billion one.
We took the money, we bought stocks. And then we did nothing in terms of hedging for years until uh I started getting interested in this thing called COVID in January of 2020. Uh and first, my interest was health interest. You know, I had a father at the time uh you know, my dad was at had lung cancer.
You know, was overweight. He had a lot of as they called them comorbidities. And where COVID I thought was a real threat to him. So, I wanted to protect him. But the kind of deeper I got, the more I realized this was going to have a pretty significant economic effect. Uh In fact, we would have to shut the global economy in order to stop the spread of this pandemic.
And the markets were priced, both the equity markets and the credit markets, as if everything was fine. It's a bit like there was this massive storm coming. We could see the storm, but everyone else was just playing on the beach. And so, what we did is we bought [clears throat] same kind of instrument, a credit default swap.
We bought it on the index of all these various credits. And over a 10-day period, we bought about 74 billion dollar notional value of this insurance. It cost us only 27 million dollars. 10 days later, it became worth 2.6 billion. We took that money in March of 2020 with the market down 30%. We bought stocks.
And then 9 months later, we had another concern. And that concern was you had Trump spending trillions of dollars uh to keep the country from, you know, a falling into a depression during COVID. You had uh Powell keeping interest rates at zero. Uh you had a vaccine where people are going to start wanting to spend money again.
You had sort of animal spirits. And our view, this would create a demand shock uh at a time when supply chains were disrupted, and we thought this would lead inevitably to a large amount of inflation. And to protect our portfolio, we bought what's called an interest rate swap. option. bit like an option on interest rates.
So, the two-year Treasury two-year rates were at 12 basis points, 0.12%. We bought an out-of-the-money in effect almost like a call option struck at 94 basis points. So, imagine you bought a you know, had a call option on a stock and it was seven times the stock price. It was way out of the money, but it was still in our view a very low interest rate, 0.94%.
And those instruments ultimately turned into 2.6 billion of profit. And we took the profit and again we bought stocks. So, if you think about our strategy, it's about owning some of the best businesses in the world where we buy them opportunistically good prices. Sometimes we buy them when people have lost confidence in management and then we help that's kind of the day job.
That's the the driver of long-term profitability of the funds. But I would say opportunistically every once in a while there's a storm coming and what we try to do is get ahead of that uh by using sort of as we described an asymmetric instrument. It tend to be a very small percentage of the capital.
So, we're risking if we're wrong about the storm coming, it's a bit like you buy insurance on your home. Right? And anticipate cuz you have to cuz your lender your mortgage lender requires you to do so and you want to protect your valuable investment. But imagine if you only bought insurance when you knew that there was a storm coming.
And imagine if you could buy insurance that was way more than the value of your home and there was no limit. You've been you've been pushing to catch the last two big crises, the the COVID crisis and the financial crisis which you know, if you catch those uh very few things matter besides that, right?
Sure. Well, look, part of my job is paying attention to what's going on in the world um as opposed to just looking at individual stocks. Well, maybe that's a good uh good follow-up is what do you think of the current environment? Are you seeing storm clouds forming again and you know, how should invest think about the macro?
I see a lot of storm clouds uh lifting actually. You know, I think there are a lot of forces that will drive the economy going forward. We're in a very kind of lucky to be alive at a period where the pace of technological change uh in a good way is going to be I think you know, massively uh life enhancing you know, in everything from health care to productivity.
I think we're going to see this incredible period of entrepreneurship where now you know, it used to be maybe you had to go to MIT to learn or some place or Stanford to learn how to be an you know, an engineer. Today anyone uh in a few minutes can learn how to you know, build an build an app, build a website uh you know, build these sort of interesting tools.
I think we're going to see an explosion in entrepreneurship and productivity. Uh you know, Elon talks about you know, 100% GDP growth. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but I do think we could see a pretty massive acceleration in growth. I do think you want to be thoughtful because there going to be some businesses that don't uh you know, adjust their their business models as quickly as they will need to uh and will be disrupted by a be disrupted by someone in a garage.
Um but putting that aside, uh I think this will be a very important time uh and a very successful time in economic history. So, interesting. So, uh you're not seeing storm clouds. You're very much seeing the opposite. I'd say the you know, the the vibe right now among a lot of retail investors is it feels like something's brewing.
We can't quite uh uh you know, we we we can't quite picture it clearly, but there's all the AI acceleration. There's geopolitical stress and uncertainty. Uh so, sort of pe- people are imagining storm clouds, but but you think that they're going to clear up and it's overblown. I do. I think that look, the stock market and a company the value of a business is the present value of the cash that business will generate over its life.
Um you've got to look into the future and you shouldn't get bogged down in the present. Right? If if you know, many great investment careers were great because of the year the manager started investing money. Right? If you started in October of uh '87 after the market you know, so to speak crash, you did very well from there.
Uh the single best time to invest is when it feels really uncomfortable to be investing money. When you're looking economically, what are what are the key indicators that you're looking at? Is it the inflation and CPI, the jobs or do do you have some more bespoke ones that you know, are unconventional?
So, we learn a lot by just following companies. You can learn more real-time data how the country is doing and how businesses are doing by reading a conference call transcript or sitting on an earnings call. Um hear the commentary from the CEOs listen to their conviction or lack thereof. You know, the government data always gets revised.
I don't know I'm sure you follow this with GDP growth here. You know, 90 days later it's you know, they use a different number. Inflation is um you know, uh there's a pop inflation because of a war and gas prices being up. But what matters for when you're valuing a business it's it's about the present value of the next 50 years.
It's not about what's happening in the next few weeks or few months. I guess my best advice to Robinhood investor is to think you know, that in a world where everyone's focused on the short term there's some really interesting opportunities for someone who's willing to take a longer-term view. You're absolutely right.
And you know, a lot of the professional money managers look at these macro indicators and sell off entire portfolios that you know, of great companies that you know, in some cases actually benefit from the macro because of a general view on interest rates or whatnot. You saw that a lot um last year when you know, you had the the the tariff shocks and companies that you know, were completely unaffected just got hit 30 to 50% and what you saw is retail investors saw that as an opportunity to actually idiosyncratically invest in those companies at low prices and then they kind of benefited when the the macro situation reversed.
Yeah, look, I totally agree with you. I think it's a great time to be a retail investor. What a retail investor has once he he or she has put aside some money to invest in the market, they have the same permanent capital that we have. Institutional investors have clients who are emotional and panic and pull their money at precisely the wrong time.
So, one of the big advantages of being a retail investor is you have way more liquidity cuz you're not moving around huge amounts of money and you uh don't have to have you don't have clients that you're trying to prove something to. Um and I think that's a huge advantage. Well, well with that why don't we close it out?
Uh thank you so much again for doing this talk and helping educate the retail community on Robinhood about uh Pershing Square PSUS and and the offering and uh yeah, I I uh thank you also for the optimistic tone. It's very I feel like I've learned a lot. Hopefully the retail investors uh who are watching this did as well. Awesome. Appreciate the interview. Thanks a lot. Great conversation.
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