General Growth Properties Success

So media Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that we're all listening to right now You're listening to it as a recorded thing that's been turned into an ear product for your ear gestion, ear digestion. And I'm listening to it because I can't help but listen to my own voice. It's a curse Here to be cursed with me on this glorious week, obviously my producer, Sophie and the great Kim Kelly author of the book, Fight Like Hell. Kim, you are a wonderful journalist. You focus a lot on the labor movement and you have a new special edition of your book coming out soon, don't you? I do. It just came out, the Young Readers' edition of Fight Like Hell, which is called Fight to win Heroes of American Labor I thought it would be really funny to call it fight like heck, but they did not agree with me. No So that is pretty good bit So it's fight to win, but it' out. It's like really cheap. it's in paperback. It's summer reading time. tellell your teacher friends, tell your little radical children, it's, you know. What's out? Hi like, fight like heck. In the summertime when the weather is hot, you get labor, you get labor on your mind Always This is an IiHart podcast Guaranteed human This is George Sverres and Sam Tagger from Stradio Lab. Let's be real, home comes with a lot of odors. cooking, pets, everyday life. That's where Fabrize comes in. Fabrie helps fight household odors and leaves behind freshness that lasts. And with over thirty cents to choose from, you'll always find one that feels like you. Fabriz. freshness that fits your life, your space, your style Fabrie is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy, and unwavering commitment to equality. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast available on june first on the IiHart Radio app and everyverywhere podcast are heard. Air Tasker knows your to do list can be a little varied Mount shelves in the garage, mow the lawn before the in law's visit, bathe the dog, and somehow learn conversational Spanish before my trip to Madrid With Air Tasker, you only have one thing to do. Post a task. Our local taskers take care of the rest. You study the verbs, we'll handle the chores.asir Tasker. Go to airtasker. com or download the app Air Tasker. Get anything done And When it comes to looking your best, Beachbum tanning does it better. Beeachbum delivers advanced sun and spray tanning, luxury skincare, and an elevated salon experience designed around you. It's why so many guests trust Beachbum for flawless color and real confidence. And now Beachbum is expanding wellness services to many locations, with red light therapy and infrared sauna, with more on the way, recharge your body, refresh your skin, reset your day. Beachbum isn't just tanning. It's full spectrum wellness. Visit beachbum dot com to find a location near you Ready to finally clean out your closet? With trashy, you can donate your clothes, reduce waste, and earn cash rewards. all in one simple step Just fill a take back bag, send it in, and get rewards cash back for every bag. And now, with trrashy Unlimited, you get unlimited bags for just forty eight dollars your first year Clean out, donate, earn rewards Visit trashy. io to get started You know who else is a hero of American labor camp? Oh no. Oh no. I'm kind of the opposite. I'm so curious about where you're gonna hit me with, man Yeah, you know, we we used to back when the show was newer and we were like more on the fly with everything. there was a degree to which like I'd be like, okay, I definitely am doing this topic this week. Sophie would rack her brain. try to figure out like, okay, what guest, you know, is the is the like should we pair with this and we still do that sometimes but also just because of the size of the show we're booked so far in advance that sometimes I'm like, oh, okay. we'll see how this topic goes with this guess. this wasn't something I would have like artificially done, but this pairing of topic and guest is exactly like its it's perfect because this week We are talking about activist investors slash activist shareholders. Oh boy. specifically one of these guys. We're talking about one specific kind of these guys. who's he's sort of the avatar of the activist shareholder, right? And if do you know what that term means? Kim, I'm sure you do. Activist. It's, I mean, it sounds sort of self Explanatory, right? Like shareholder with a lot of fucking opinions Yeah, yeah, basically, right? Like it's it's someone or a group because these are often like a term for like a hedge fund basically will be an activist shareholder in a situation where they're going into a company and they very suddenly buy up a sizable chunk of that business, enough that they're able to put somebody on the board or maybe even force the company to take a new CEO And they're called activists because this individual or this group that buys their way into having influence in a company this way does so because they have some sort of plan, right? Generally they see, okay, this company's someone's making these really obvious mistakes. And I think if I fix just this couple of mistakes, the company will become rapidly more valuable. And then we can make a really quick profit, right? Because we buy in when the stock's twenty dollars a share, we fix a bunch of problems. The stock goes up to thirty bucks a share. We cash out and we make a fuck load of money. right? That's kind of like the the most basic version of what this is, right? Um And this is this is not like a super new thing, but the term is on the newer end of things, right? too some extent, this is a term we've created to kind of replace the old term that we were using for people who were doing similar things. And the theory is is that like an activist investor or an activist shareholder Should the fact that this exists is a good thing, right? L That's the theory that because these individuals or groups that are quote unquote, the activist investors make companies stronger, right? Like they go in and they fix these kind of like low hanging fruit problems, sometimes they do much more extensive fixes, and the company comes out the other side of it more profitable, right? That's the idea. That's how this is supposed to work Right this this term was trending like a few years back when with the Disney when like what's his name Pelz tried to take over the Disney board and do a hostile takeover and then they were calling him an activist investor. And I was like Yeah, kind of just sounds like a billionaire that's like trying to get richer. like I don't really understand the activist part of it. your explanation now makes makes more sense. I didn't look into it enough becausecause I don't care about this man, you know? They're literally activist because they literally have a change or changees. No, it literally makesense. Yeah ye. Yeah Iing. And this Again, this is a term that's kind of become more common since the nineties but there's a way in which it's It's kind of an evolution of the old corporate rider. in a lot of ways, some people will say that basically the term activist investor is plastering over the term corporate raaider because that has a lot of bad connotations. But if you remember on Jack Welch Right Like the former monster CEO Jack Welch Like that these are the guys who in like the eighties they got really famous for like they'd come in and they buy up a company or buy their way into a company that was struggling or even that just like wasn't as profitable as they thought it should be. and then they would start selling off assets, spinning off, you know whatever big business unit they could into a separate company to do an IPO to get quick cash. But just everybody your original company to the bone. Eactly, exactly. Cool. I'm a vice refugee like so many other journalists out here. I remember how that works. At a certain point We went from calling these people corporate raiders to calling them activist investors. Now, theoretically it's because they got nice the activist investors are nicer than corporate raiders. They're trying to leave something better behind and that's kind of the there's a bunch of different studies, all of which are kind of similarly I don't trust the language that they use to sort of like make the claims that they're making, but there's a number of studies that will all argue like, no, these leave Activistic shareholders leave, you know afterwards, the companies that we're working on much stronger. is very different from corporate raiders. They're not just laying off tons of people and like causing, you, spinning off business units and doing all this causing all of this chaos that makes them personally make a profit and fucks up a bunch of people's lives. They're also creating stronger companies And that's extremely debatable, whether or not that's a real change or if people just started calling corporate raiders activist investors? Like that's kind of a big Big debate So to speak Um And I think there's a degree to which I think we started using the term activist investor because in the nineties corporate raaiders were like the bad guy in a half of the movie. Like if you remember the fucking movie hook Robin Williams' character is is doing that job. He's like a corporate raider. and the whole point is that the film compares that to piracy because like Peter he's become a bad person as he's entered the real world. So they they they were like, we got to we got to get better PR. Like we're the bad guys in every movie in the mid nineties. We have to like make a change Everyone saw all the space, they were not rooting for the bobbs. Yeah, yeah, they're not it just it wasn't a cool thing to be anymore, right? So come the late nineties and the internet age, the business guys don't wantan to be called raiders anymore. So the sexy thing is to find yourself at a stressed business and do like the business equivalent of like renovate with a goal of unlocking value by getting rid of old failed management and pivoting away from outdated business practices. And again, the reality is they're still usually doing the same thing. They're like selling off, or spinning off assets and conducting vass layoffs, but it sounds unlocking values sounds a lot better in a press release Yeah. Unlocking value. That just sound. manan, where do the where's like the evil school where people learn to say R Like evil PR school it's probably not journalism. They're somewhere. They're learning these linguistic tricks I wonder Kim, because you know, like in our field of work, periodically, you're writing an artle, your editor would be like, oh, that was a great turn of phrase. You did a really good job here. Maybe you'll even like share it around in like a work slack if like somebody you know, one of your colleagues puts out an article and you're really proud of it. And everyone's like, Wow, look at that, That was a really good sory. That paragraph was really beautiful. That phrase you used was perfect I wonder if there's that kind of thing for like monsters where they're like, holy shit, unlocking value. That's okay. Fucking mike, you nailed it, man. Dude. I think that's just what LinkedIn is. Like that's where this is happening. Yeah. that's their slack. Yeah, that's today the workshop for it, right? Yeah, that's out in public they where they pride each other on coming up with new goulish ways to talk about destroying people's lives. It's awesome. is Yeah, it's you know, I love it. You love to see it. It's great. It pretty nice society Of how like rapidly activist investors take over and kind of like push over that It sounds great. Aplane food In nineteen ninety eight, according to Star Tribune reporter Chris Seres, in nineteen ninety eight, fewer than twenty hedge funds in the US described themselves as activists The first of these guys got so much good PR though and made so much money that the idea spread rapidly. and by two thousand eight, there were more than two hundred hedge funds that describbe themselves as activists. Today, more than forty five percent of companies on the S and P five hundred have been targeted by activist investors in one former activist shareholders, activist hedge funds in one form or another. And one study I found suggested that about sixty percent of the time when an activist shareholder like buys their way in a company. businesses make changes in response to demands from that activist shareholder or investor Now why does this all matter, right This matters because while a lot of these activists, sometimes they do like make like some of these things do work out. We're talking about a couple of these cases where the company does wind up stronger, where it was a situation where some smart guy was like, oh, these people are making a really dumb one really dumb mistake. And if I buy my wayM and en force them to stop, they'll be worth more. That does happen sometimes, but it's at least as common for these activist investors to just kind of slash and burn a functioning business for quick money The problem is this whole thing, this idea of being seen as an activist investor is really appealing to a specific sort of narcissistic tech guy who number one has an infinite pile of money and number two is pretty sure he knows how to do everything better than the people currently doing it, right? Like have we heard it think can we think of any of those guys in the world right now You have fucked things up recently. And yeah, they're just they're pumping them out in factories somewhere Yeah, yeah. and it's a deep, deep sickness that runs through our society at this point. So obviously, the guys who think this way, as we've all seen living through this in the United States are wrong a huge percentage of the time Again, you can find a suspicious number of studies that will show activist investing is good, but it's always because like, well, if you average it out on the long term, overall, there's like a technically a long term gains in stock price for a majority of these companies and kind of leaves out the fact that Looking at it that way is a very incomplete measure of success. Speaking of averages makes this process sound like less of a roll of the dice than it is for people in the companies being affected by these kind of takeovers. And I'm going to quote now from a twenty fifteen study by David Binois and Vipaul Muna published the Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal examined that question with a comprehensive look at what happens to large US companies after an activist arrives. The conclusion, activism often improves a company's operational results, and nearly as often doesn't. Slightly more than half or thirty eight of the situations in the journal' study led to better shareholder returns than industry peers for the period studied after the activist went public In the end, the median campaign beat peers by just under five percentage points At the same time, companies in the study slightly underperformed industry peers in terms of growth and earnings and slightly beat them on profit margins. As for capital spending is a percent of operating cash flow, seen as a measure of reinvestment. Of the forty eight companies in the study with good data for that measure, twenty five raised spending or left it at the same level while twenty three lowered it. In other words, It's a flip of the coin. Like there's it's certainly there's not strong evidence that this is like a good thing or that this usually works out. And when it does it is just because like, well, there's a long term stock price benefit. That doesn't say anything about what life is like for the workers, you know? No. All all those benefits going, not to all people that got laid off. Yeah, exactly. So' just weaponizing math. It also leaves out the fact that like there's some situations that go really well. And there's some situations that go fucking catastrophically wrong because some activist sticks their proverbial money dick into into a situation that they don't understand and makes everyone's life worse. And probably no single man better embodies that whole picture of the activist investor, both as success and as fuck up Bill Ackman. That's who we're talking about really this week, everybody. Oh man, the Twitter guy. the Twitter guy. That's right, everybody. That'll be his legacy. Vveeen a Dickad on Twitter I needed to dress this up a little bit. I wanted to do just an episode of Bill Ackman because he's a huge dick and he's really annoying, right? And I think He was kind of wavering as to whether or not I thought he was like a full bastard. like somebody who really deserved, like someone who's bad enough, not just bad but entertainingly bad and deserved to be covered, you know, the way we do on the show And one of the things that kept me from doing it is that Bill is incredibly online and super petty. And I just don't want to deal with a fucking social media fight with this fucking weirdo billionaire freak. It's just not worth the hassle So I figured What I'll do is I'll broaden the scope of the episodes a little bit to make this be about activist investors, and I'll try and keep Bill's name out of the title so that if he does like a find and replace thing, he won't notice it immediately. and I won't have to deal with an annoying guy on the other.. Or me. Oh my Godd. You ruined my life, Rob. Right, right So we'll see we'll see how long it takes Bill to realize or if he ever I think we're probably well under his threshold of giving a f do you think he Googles himself He must have people for that I think he does it himself a lot, but also I think he's got a lot of fires to put out.. So I don't know that I think we're high up on his his list. We'll see. We'll see if we kind of slide through the flack here or if we wind up having to deal with an annoying fucking guy on social media. It's not the worst thing in the world. I just wanted to makeake it a little bit less obvious that we're just doing Bill Ackman episodes. Yeah. right I mean, it works with the whole obfuscation of activist investors. It's an episode about them, not this one specific guy. Yeah. Yeah, not this one specific guy who's the most annoying of the breed. Yes. William Albert Ackman was born on may eleventh, nineteen sixty six in Chippqua, New York. I think that's how it's said somethingomet like Hillaryville, probably doing it a little wrong. Yeah, Hillaryville. Right. It's a little hamlet about thirty miles north of the big city And today it's got about twenty thousand five hundred, twenty thousand six hundred people live there. You know, it's not a big town. But it also the fact that Bill grows up here doesn't mean that he's like a small town boy growing up close to the land, right? This is an affluent area that he grows up in. and he grows up very affluent, right? His family is very comfortable from the jump Chris Series describes Bill as coming up, quote, The younger of two children born to a family steeped in the commercial real estate business. His father, Lawrence Ackman, is chairman of Ackman Zif Real Estate Group, a New York based real estate financing firm So He's got not just does he come from like money, but like to call dad's Bill's dad Larry a major figure in finance would be putting it like mildly. Larry is a significant guy, right He himself is the son of Herman Ackman who is the founding partner of the real estate group that makes the Ackmans rich. So Bill is like a third generation ich guy, right? His grandpa starts this real estate company that his dad runs and they are both very successful doing this. Larry becomes president of his dad's business in nineteen sixty eight two years after Bill was born. He was made CEO in nineteen seventy seven when Bill would have been ten or eleven years old Simon Zif Larry's protege, describes Bill's father this way. He lived his deals and knew them better than his clients often did. He was an animal and never failed So you might see like kind of take from this. Bill grows up with like something to he's going to grow up with something to prove to his dad, right? His dad is a u like a legendary figure And you can kind of tell that Bill grows up in awe of his father a little bit is sort of my interpretation of things Yeah Family business. like family business of exploitation and making money, like You can't can't fuck it up. You can't be the Eckman that ruins the whole line that sellies the bloodline And you also, you know, my dad, my grandpa, like my dad made money in my in my grandpa's business, right? So my dad is a Nppo baby. I'm a Npo baby, but I don't necessarily want to be an Nppo baby in the same industry, right? Maybe I want to like break out and try to prove that I'm like you know, special too that like it's I'm not just a rich kid, you know. I I really see a lot of that in Bill's Binging Sure. You' a little rich the classic Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now by all accounts, Bill is really close to his dad. He and Larry have a good relationship, basically, you know, Larry's the entire remainder of Larry's life. I think he dies in twenty twenty two. And Larry talks like a lot of Bill's childhood, he's hearing stories from his dad about their family and about like his dad's dad and great grandfather who was like Abraham Ackman, the first member of the family to move to America. He' steeped in these stories about like how hard his family members, his ancestors had to work. to like become rich and successful an article in Forward, which is the website of a Jewish nonprofit, here's how Larry tells that story My grandfather came to this country at eighteen in eighteen eighty seven. He left Russia to avoid conscription into the Tsar' army, a twenty five year service. My father used a little cart and rode across the border on a horse to Austria. He learned to sew and took a boat to the castle Garden in eighteen eighty seven, right? Like that's the we were going to be conscription to the Tsar' army and we fled the country dad learned how to sew and he gradually like made his way to the United States where he started a business. You know, that's like the family legend of the story, rightight? And it is a very classic like immigrant story Now that article I quoted from in forward was written about an event this like big dinner that Bill and his dad, Larry hosted in twenty fifteen at the Center for Jewish History in New York City And based on some of the things Larry said that night, because they talk a lot about their know Bill's upbringing and Larry talks a lot about the family. So this is a lot of my information on kind of what I assume Bill is raised hearing. I think these stories that Larry is telling this group about his family have are a lot in part because they say that this is like the kind of shit that I was telling Bill when he was growing up right I raised them on these stories app Here's a quote from the Persian Square phhilanthropy website Bill's grandfather Hermann initially tried to make a career as a songwriter, pedaling his tunes on Ten Pan Alley, said Larry. He'd get a hundred dollars a song and one hundred and fifty for a great song, and he sold maybe ten or fifteen songs in about five years until he could see this as no way to make a living, and went into his uncle's real estate services business, based on one hundred forty ninth street in the Bronx Biggest hit, putut your arms where they belong. sold seven hundred fifty thousand records So Very good. That's weird. I didn't expect that. Yeah. so his dad his dad does in between like, so the their great grandfather moves to the country, starts a clothes factory grandfather grows up in it but doesn't want to do that business for himself, becomes a songwriter, is weirdly successful for a while and then gives that up to get into the real estate business. And I did find that song, putut your arms where they belong I I sort of like It's not but I don't want to I was considering playing it because I think it isn't very good, but the only version of it I have is a recent recording from a lovely YouTube account called Sheet Music Singer. and it's just like a nice person who performs old sheet music, right? So you can hear all these like old songs that the original radio recordings probably don't still exist for. So I don't want to sh I don't want to shit on that person's musical stylings. They're just trying to fulfill a useful historical role. It's not their fault if the song is bad the song is bad, right?? And I wasn't going to spend a lot of time on it until I saw Words and music were by Lou Davis, Henry Santley and Herman Ackman. In other words, three dudes wrote this song together And now I gott to read to you how the song opens I dreamed alone, till alms unknown, embraced me and held me so sweetly. thrilled by your touch, they taught me much, and now I'm yours completely. They brought me love in a night, 'twas a love that is called loveve its sight And I don't know How you interpret that, but I read this as three men had a beautiful experience together and wrote a song about it And I think that's nice. I think that's love G me Love in a night. Lve in a night. I mean, close working relationship, lot of late nice. I mean, I really thought of ghosts, but I mean, I do listen to more heavy metal and Tin Pan Rally classics. Yeah, embraced me and held me so sweet. I dreamed alone till Arms Unknown embraced me. That couldn't be ghost. Right? L Maybe they got fucked by ghosts. In succus vibes. Like you don't know what was going on back then. That's right. Either way, I thought it was nice. It isice. Beautiful expression. you know, you gott toa express yourself again get men loneliness epidemic, you can't keep it all fucked up. That's right P put it out there, make it someone else's problem Instead of continuing to write beautiful songs about making love to ghosts, the patriarch of the Ackman family starts a real estate business and gets rich as shit. And we all have to deal with Bill Akman now as a result, which is a bummer What could have been, you know, He could have been part of a beutical family. He could have. he could have. He could have been the Bob Dylan of I don't I guess we al have Dyan. I don't know what he could have been. Yeah. Brux realal Eestate Bop Dylan So during that speech that I've quoted from Larry also talked about how when Bill was a kid, he worked hard to drill good business ethics into his son because his own father did the same to him. This is what Larry recalled, of you know his own father and how he was raised. Dad came home and told stories about interesting clients worthy of a documentary. He recalled Sarah Coran, an immigrant from Palestine and an entrepreneurial lady. When she was a little girl in Palestine and the Fishmongers would run out of paper, she took all of her schoolmates' workshop papers and sold it to the Fishmongers. Sarah came to the US and went into making second mortgages, owning properties i e, the Dlmonico building, which she ended up selling to Donald Trump These are the stories Larry grows up with and these are the stories that he tells Bill. Bill is hearing stories about like, yeah, the lady who sold the Delmonaco Hotel to Donald Trump, like all of these hard scrabbble tales of like refugees who come from nothing and get crazy rich. Um like these are the this is the mana that he is like raised with in his brain And as far as I can tell, Larry loves telling stories. And because he's also got ahead for business, these stories are always like business parables. And so that's just like Bill's We talk about kids who would grow up raised by like Star Wars or fucking Indiana Jones or whatever. Bill is raised on these like stories of entrepreneurs getting rich and successful and like changing their families' lives. Like that's his whole childhood milieu Right? Yeah, just ultra capitalist Groim's fairy tale vibes Exactly. That's a very good way ultra capitalist gims fairy talales. Now in comparison, I haven't found anything at all about his mom really. But like very little. That seems outright given the whole deal Yeah You don't hear a lot about Ronnie Posner, That's his mom's maiden name. One account that I did come across from Larry, so this is Larry talking about his wife, is that she once collected thousands of signatures and lobbied to convince their local government to extend a railroad line in their hometown. After telling the story, Larry quipped activism is genetic, referencing Bill So Again, I'm guessing that means that she had a personal way that she benefited from the radio or the railroad line being extended, I guess. what if she was just a real nice lady surrounded by all these demons trying to that nice. We'll never know. Maybe mayaybe she was. We'll never know But it is telling like that's the way they think about activism. and that's how Bill thinks about activism. Activism is like a thing you do so that you profit, right? onene way or the other. I think that is how he looks at activism is Right. Now you know who does love to profit, Kim Tell me Everyone, No one. B to this podcast I mean, Bill Ackman does love to profit and sponsors this podcast. It's our sponsor, whichich might be Bill Ackman. No way to know I hope not that That would be awkward. But posos. This is Dr. Joy from Therapy for Black Girls. If you could enjoy your spotless space without so much scrubbing, wouldn't you Of course you would. Well, I've got you Dawn Power wasash dish spray cuts through the mess and gets everything clean in half the time We're talking about both the toughest messes in everyday dishes Plus, its's work it goes beyond the sink, like to clean counters, stoves, grills, and to remove stains on laundry. And it's really good at getting those hard to clean dishes So basically, Dawn Powerwash cleans everything from dishes to grills, removing all the grease and grime and does it twice as fast. Not bad. 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Visit beachbum dot com to find a location near you And we're back Bill grows up rich, he's got access to the best resources available, onene of which is just living in Chipaquua, right? This is a good place to grow up. He attends Horace Greey High School, which is a public high school. In two thousand eight, it was ranked the number forty six high school in the nation and the number seven high school among those with open enrollment Probably the best known story of Bill's young life comes from his junior year in high school, which is nineteen eighty four. And here's how it's explained in a twenty thirteen Vanity Fair article by William Cohen He wagered his father two thousand dollars that he would score a perfect eight hundred doll on the verbal section of the SAT. The gamble was everything Ackman had saved up from his Barmitzva gift money and his allowance for doing household chores. I was a little bit of a cocky kid, he admits, with uncharacteristic understatements Tall, athletic, handsome with sururulean eyes, he was the kind of hyper ambitious kid other kids love to hate, and just the type to make a big wager with no margin for error. But on the night before the SAT, his father took pity on him and cancellled the bet. I would have lost it, Ackman concedes. He got a seven hundred eighty on the verbal and a seven hundred fifty on the math One wrong on the verbal and three wrong on the math, he muses. I'm still convinced some of the questions were wrong That? Says a lot Man, these probably not doing any favors for the Therulean I community. No Like peopleeople already think we're soouless. We just got this guy just piling on Fucking narcissist. that's so like Everything you need to know about Bill Ackman as a person is that this is the kind of guy who's honest this is not a joke, honest to God reaction to hearing he got questions wrong on his standardized tests says, well, the questions must have been wrong Right Like that's Bill Ackman and you're going to see this from him over and over again this reality is wrong. If it's not working the way I said it was going to be, that's impossible. It has to work the way I said. The way I predicted is the only way things could go. And when things don't work out that way, he flips his fucking shit. It's very funny. and that's going be It's also this need he has to make these bets with no margin of error based on this like insane confidence of his. It's going work out more often than it should, but it also goes wrong a lot and usually his dad's not there to like let him off the hook. That's an important thing to kind of note I'm sure his dad, his dad was trying to be a responsible father here, but that's maybe the wrong lesson to teach him is that you can make stip shit bets all the time and nobody will like really call you on it if you're wrong in a way that will hurt you. Maybe that's not the right lesson for Bill to be learning at this point in his life. I don't know Oh my God. What a weird what a weird family. What a weird way to like, yeah. What a weird kid? Like I'm gonna bet my father who is an adult man the money I have that I might It is weird that you take that at all. That is bizarre parenting, right? Yeah, like think of if I tried to do my dad didn't even know what my dad didn't Barely finished high school we didn't know the fuck was going on in my school. like, Ohh, you got some numbers, right? Great, good for you, kid. Like Yeah I'll take all your money Yeah, taking your m like a bet is a really weird. It's one thing to be like, okay, you know, I'll give you you get this or you know I'll do this for your allowance or whatever. if you do if you improve on your test score. I don't know. I'm not against the idea of like trying to motivate a kid or whatever, but gambling with on the SATs with them is insane. Like that's a really strange thing to do with you, Ch your son. This's not even like I don't it doesn't seem like he's the kind of dad that was really from all I've learned, he was like, all right, make sure you go in there and study and like Yeah, you know, go be a bookworm kid. He seems like a straight lacace kind of guy, but he's a gambler You get that bit from him. Like none of the stories about Larryer and Larry loveved to gamble But I kind of think Larry was a gambler because Bill's a gambler And the fact that they're doing this when he's a kid says a lot about the relationship and about Larry, I think. Yeah Brandon nineteen eighties money, That's like a lot of money.. But still yeah L Wild U Bill graduates the year after this, and he winds up where you'd expect at Harvard Business School. I only had a couple fun anecdotes from that period of Bill's life, but one of them is pretty devastating. And it was posted on the webpage for the company that he owns. Like this is something Bill allowed to be put out as part of his like PR. basasically. this is from the Pershing square, that's his like hedge fund the Pershing Square phhilanthropy website. I can't believe he people he let this get published According to Bill, Larry helped set him up with the woman he married Women in business school had issues with dating men in business school, Bill said. Or maybe they just had issues with me There's more to the quote, but like holy shit, I I gotta take a second Lots of they just maybe, Bill, maybe n otherest thing he's ever said. Yeah, self aware Things improved the day he got a fax from Dad. onene of those curly things that was a forward of a fax from one of his dad's clients, containing the phone number of a graduate design student at Harvard. When Larry called later, Bill had already set up a date with Karen. A couple of years later, Bill's dad told him if he didn't propose soon, he'd find a nice guy who would. Dad's a good negotiator, Bill said That's how he meets his wife. his for life Beautiful love story. F Fr a boax. So his dad just bought him a lady? I was like, Son you're striking out. Let'sbe gota get you a girlfriend. him into a relationship. Pull some strings. Karen sounds like a nice gal. Just get it done I gotta say you hear about a lot of Nepppo babies. You don't hear about a lot of Nepo like husbands like you like nepotism got you married. Like that's that's something else. That's very that's very like vintage. That's very like Royal like nineteh century before the whole romantic love, very business arrangement. Marriage does business arrangements. L Larry was thinking, that's that old school old world mentality coming out like you mean We'll get you one. Yeah. And I I should probably have a little bit of like, okay, Bill was probably joking a little bit with or maybe they just had issues with me, but I can't help but read that as like him thinking about that for the first time. where he's like, yeah, you know, women in business school never date men in business school. And then he's like thinking back to all the guys and he saw like dating women in business school and was like, well, maybe it was just me, actually Mbe that's not a thing When afteris where you saw it, it was like, well, I'm too special. Like they just they couldn't handle me. No I'm a golden boy It's important to eventually self reflect on things. so I guess he did kind of. We'll give him a point for that U B way I don't have any I wish we had more good anecdotes from bills like youth and childhood, but yeah that does imply a lot. Anyway, he graduates Harvard with his BA in nineteen eighty eight. His undergraduate thesis is titled Scaling the Ivy Wall, the Jewish and Asian Experience in Harvard Admissions The paper starts with him comparing the experiences that Jews had trying to gain inmittance to Harvard in the twenties with the experience that Asian students had had trying to do the same in the nineteen eighties and We've talked a lot of the show about how like If you ever get a chance to like read a novel that a political pundit you dislike has written or like, I guess has written, you should do it because it's like a window into their soul. That's sort of the same with a thesis. You can tell a lot about where a young person's head is at with a paper like this. And I'm going start, here's a quote from Bill's thesis As one of the oldest and perhaps the most notable of this country's academic institutions, Harvard represents the gateway to elite status and to making it in modern day American society. One need only look at the disproportionate numbers of presidents, noobel laureates, and chairmen of Fortune five hundred companies who have graduated from Harvard to understand the power of the Harvard degree. As a result, admission to Harvard has become the target of groups seeking upward mobility that you can really see That's why Bill goes to Harvard is because he wants to get guaranteed a spot in the elite, right? This isn't he's not and he never pretends that he has a particular like intellectual interest, right? that like this is always about access. It's always about making the right connections and friends to him, you know, whichich at least he's honest about that, I guess. And his thesis is comparing he outlines how back in the twenties, there's like this massive soar in the number of Jewish undergraduates admitted to Harvard and it causes a bunch of problems because like it pisses off the Gentiles. and Harvard's president changes admission requirements to restrict Jewish admission because he saw a lot of Jewish students as unassseimilable. And his argument was that like If we keep letting more of them m in, they'll break up the sense of elite identity among Harvard graduates. and there won't be this feeling of like we're all part of the upper crust together Right? And there's this attempt to talk about it in aw woke way where he's like, and that'll make people more anti Semitic Right? Like if we let too many Jewish people into Harvard, it'll ruin the upper class and that will make people even more racist against them, right So Ackman is laying all this out as hypocritical, right? And he accuses the administration of believing the image of the Harvard man would be diminished by the entfrance of too many Jews. He builds up to an incredible point Why does Harvard feel compelled to admit minorities? It appears that Harvard is more concerned with the campus mosaic than with what the colors of the campus spectrum actually represent. Considering the original intentions of affirmative action and other such programs to admit the societally disadvantaged, Harvard's policies do not seem to be directed to confirm the spirit of such legislation. Many of the minorities on campus are not disadvantaged If Harvard were truly concerned with a disadvantaged student, rather than with its desire to maintain a positive public image for the media, we would see recruitment of more students from disadvantaged backgrounds regardless of their color. Why is there no recruitment for disadvantaged Poles, Italians and underprivileged Jews for that matter? Whosese definition of diversity is Harvard apply So he's concerned about this from the beginning after getting into Harvard He's like Why aren't they letting it enough like poor white people And again, it's like a rich white kid getting admitted to Harvard. That's a fascinating to take issue with. it reallyays a lot about him. Yeah. Yeah Like that that's that's pretty it's it's such a weird grievance. like Well, you're literally just like a rich kid who got into Harvard. Why are you concerned that like They're not letting enough poor white kid They're letting too many like rich non white kids into Harvard. Where is this coming from? How many not rich white people does he even know Right What a strange thing to surface, like, I'll tell you what the real problem is s me that is hanging around a lot of kids who are complaining that there's too many non white kids at Harvard. That's what I guess from that. Why else would you take issue with that sort of thing specifically So Ackman concludes that Harvard admits different groups of people for different benefits, athletes because it makes the alumni happy, legacies because it gets them donations and minorities because they've been pressured by the government or public protest. So And he argues like Harvard this is entirely self interested morality by Harvard. And that's true. It is entirely self interested morality by Harvard, But Bill doesn't point this out to condemn it Here's how Puck newews writer William Cohen describes what Bill learns here, quote Change at Harvard all comes down to pressure, according to Ackman. So That's the the reason he lays this out is not The pointin's building two isn't and this is wrong. The point's building to is and so that's how you get Harvard to make changes. is you you you just like all you have to do is pressure them and you can get them to stop or start allowing members of a specific group So it's interesting. he's already thinking as an undergraduate, what would it take to stop Harvard from admitting as many people that I don't think should be here How can I alter who gets into Harvard? That's really interesting to me that he's thinking about that from this point. Yeah. It's like the genesis, the kernel of what he was gonna become. Yeah. This is gonna to be really relevant much later. But yeah, as you say Kim like that this is like decades later that he actually has a chance to do something about Harvard admissions. I mean, like I said, activism runs in the blood or runs in the family. Activism runs in the blood. Yeah Wow Maybe his mom was evil U I don't know. I found literally nothing else about her After graduation, Bill went to work briefly for his father's company. so he spends like a summer working you know at the family real estate firm. The Vanity Fair piece I quoted from earlier describes this as simply a stint working for his father at the family's commercial mortgage real estate business. But the article in Fward, describing that Ackman familyily dinner event, quotes Bill talking about this part of his life Bill Ackman recalled, I couldn't get a job when I graduated from Harvard, so I went to work for my dad. That makes it a little sadder. But at least Bill's admitting that, right? Like a little I don't know Geez While he's working on his MBA, Bill gets onto the rowing team for Harvard's Business School His team decides to pick shirts that year with dollar signs on the oars. According to Vanity Fair, at the annual head of the Charles race, spectators booed the HBS crew boats, causing Ackman to defend the decorations in an opinion column in the harvest, The businessiness school newspaper. Let's face up to what Harvard Business School represents, he wrote. We spend ninety percent of our studies at HBS pursuing the maximization of the dollar Why shouldn't our uniforms just be dollar signs? Because it's tacky Beause actually Bill, even when people are just kind of self interestedly concerned about money and don't have other interests, they feel bad about that at least like you should. Wild What it He really loves saying the quiet parts of things out loud. I mean like, why are people mad at me? And everyone thinks this. Why are people Why don't people like this? it's like because it's almost as if he feels like because he's so smart If somebody is like offended or thinks something bad that he did, it's just because they didn't think about it right. So if he explains how they ought to think about it, then they won't find it gross. And like, no, no, no. I know. like Bill, what you said there, I don't disagree with. Yes, Harvard Business School does represent Max soullessly maximizing the dollar. I agree I don't misunderstand that. It's just gross. And like, even if that's what you want to do for a living, you should aspire to be slightly more than that Like in your extracurricular life you know? The SHG answers were wrong Exactly. So one of Bill's best friends at Harvard was David Berkowitz. this David Berkowitz is an engineering undergrant, not the son of Sam Killer. I was going to say. It's entirely different episode direction we're going in and I'm here for it I not going to say Bill Ackman isn't friends with this the real son of Samuel. No. I'm not going to say I can prove that this David Bergowitz do the son of Sam Killicks. I can't prove that. C you Sophie, could you kept? No Ily just don't know The burden of proof is on this David Berkowitz to prove that he did not shoot a bunch of people in parked cars in the seventies U I just I remember I watched the Spike Lee movie about the Son of Sam Killings recently Hell yeah. Pfectob. Shout out, Spike Yeah What a weird film. No one doesn't quite like Spike. That's true. U During that dinner event that Akman hosted, Larry and Bill talked about what happened after he gets his MBA, right? So at this event, Bill's talking through like he graduates from Harvard the second time he gets his MBA. I worked for you for two years, he said to his father across the stage, thenen went to business school and you wanted me to come back and I came back for one week, then chose to go on my own So that's what Bill claims this public event. But then his dad is like, that's not how it happened. And says you told me in your second year at Harvard, I'm coming back. I'm looking forward to it. And son I was looking forward to it. Then you met David Berkowitz at Harvard Businesschool and created hedge fund. So in his dad's version of events He like is set to come back to work and just sort of bounces to start this hedge fund It's It's weird to me. mayaybe Bill just forgot. mayaybe his dad had it wrong But I kind of think Bill felt the need to like craft a slightly different version of this story Right? whereerein he he comes back and he's working for his dad at the family business a second time and it just doesn't feel right And he has to like make the change because that's a little more cinematic. I kind of think that's what Bill is doing here. It makes him look a little bit more of like an autonomous being. likeike I came back no dad, I gott to go out on my own. I my own man now Yeah Yeah, it I think a little more convenient of a narrative for him. So anyway, after graduation, Ackman and Berkowitz created their first hedge fund, Gotham Partners Their first office was, according to William Cohen, a windowless office in midtown, Manhattan Despite that, this was not a scrappy startup running on fumes. These guys, their first business is not like hard up or anything. Per Cohen's piece Starting with two hundred fifty thousand dollars for Marty Perez, a college professor of Akman, and then the editor and owner of the new Republic, and the father of Vanity Fair contributing editor E Gina Peretz, they raised three million dollars. We did incredibly well for five years, Akman recalls. Most importantly, in two thousand two, Akman made a huge bet that MBIA Inc, the publicly traded municipal bond insurer, was fatally overvalued The company protested that Ackman was trying to manipulate its stock price, bothoth the SEC and Elliot Spitzer, then the New Yorks state atttorney general investigated. Not to put it too impolitely, Spitzer told the New York Observer in twenty eleven, but we put Ackman through the ringer So No charges are ever filed. But this isn't quite a nothing burger, right? There's never any like conviction here, but this is a little bit more than Cohen describes it as being. I want to read a different st. I just to I just wantan to say Elliot Spritzer S Bastter U He spits. We love him. We'll talk about Elliot one of these days on his own here U But again, this whole incident isn't quite as much of a nothing burger as that description by Coed makes it seem. And I'm going to read another description of what happened in the Minnesota Star Tbune The investment firm wrote an article praising a company, prepaid legal services, then sold its stock. Ackman said he liquidated prepaid stock, as well as all of its public investments because he was winding down his fund. The allegation is that His fund writes an article praising this company which then boosts its stock and he then immediately sells the stock and that that's like stock manipulation, right? Which Bill does a lot of similar stuff like this and it's not illegal, but it's kind of sketchy, right? But this is very much in line with how Bill Bill's whole thing is Putting a bunch of shit out into the media. to like start whatever kind of stock movement up or down, he needs to start happening in order to make his bets work, right? He L this is him starting to figure out if you're going to be this kind of guy who you're trying to like slide into a company and buy up a big chunk of it and then force it to make changes that you can make a profit. it's not enough. it's not just about aking being an activist investor and convincing the company to make changes. It's about putting stuff out into the media so that people buying stocks say, oh, someone has a brilliant idea and they're fixing this company that's probably undervalued because it's making a mistake. And Bill understands from the beginning It's just as important to what you can get people to believe in the media as what you're actually doing to the company. That's not entirely about how much you can make the company function better. It's about what can you get people to believe you're doing to this company because that can move the stock on its own and sometimes that's all you need to do is just push a narrative into the media so that folks start acting from there. And Bill is thinking about this from the start of his career He's from the beginning manipulating like media coverage in order to drive stock valuation in a way that helps him. And that's always going to be a thing that he does. It's a thing he's going to be good at and really bad at at varying points in his life, right? and the Again, he doesn't break any laws here, but the fact that he is in the crosshairs and being investigated for a while is tough on him. He would later say, peopleople look at you funny. I learned that it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and someone can destroy it in a few days. And we'll put a pin in that H he's ga. At this point, things are going well. the early two thousands, Bill has correctly predicted that MBIA is about to collapse and it does fall apart not long after he makes a big bet. He basically like shorts it, right? And he and his investors make about one point four billion dollars from this correct prediction that MBIA was about to fall apart This is a lot of money and Bill is going to just make more money from this point on, right? Like this is from here on out, his company and he are always going to have a huge amount of cash to play with. you know, whether or not he's like winning or losing like the kind of momentum that you get with a win like this right kind of makes it impossible to stop Or at least it means that he's going to have to fail a lot in order to stop having enough money to keep gambling, right? But Bill's initial relationship with his first partner, Berkowitz falls apart around this time and over the course of like two thousand two thousand four, he winds things up at Gotham and in two thousand four, he meets several men that he takes on as business partners and they start Pershing Square, a capital management firm or hedge fund based in New York City. and We'll talk about that and a lot more, but first Here's some ads. This is Dr. Joy from Therapy for Black Girls. If you could enjoy a spotless space without so much scrubbing, wouldn't you Of course you would. 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Head to trashy. io to get started today ust to say, it is incredible how these rich assholes decide to name their businesses Yeah. At Pershing Square, I guess it's like kind of a bland banal name, you know? It makes But Gotham You think you're Batman, littleittle on the nose, right? No, I mean, that's just a nickname for New York too, right? Yeah. But yeah, it's probably Batman for them Yeah, I feel like most people just in like the world they hear Gotham,' like, o, Batman. I don't think people are remembering the historic roots of it. There was like, Ohh, that's probably evil Yeah It probably was a bad man say. How many b I mean I'm think about Batman. Continue. Yeah For a time, success follows Bill. In two thousand five, his fund acquired enough of a stake in Wendy's that Bill got to do the activist thing in Wendy's. And he decides that like what Wendy's really needs to do is spin off Tim Hortonss, which is this like Canadian coffee house diner fast food style. Canadian an institution. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,all Yeah, very popular. little bit of like honestly, a little bit of like a waffle house vibes too. Yeah. It's like a whole thing in Canada. and he is successful in getting Wendy's to spin Tim Hortononss off into its own like independent company The board fights him at first, but they ultimately cave. And when Tim Hortons has its IPO, it's a huge success. and it nets six hundred seventy million dollars for his investors in two thousand six. So And this is where we talk about is are activist investors good or bad for companies There's certainly an argument to me that they're good for quote unquote the economy Right? depending on how you count that It's debatable It's like You know, obviously, this is a successful investment for him and his company. They make a lot of money. Is this good for Windyies in the long run? That's a lot more debatable for the Minnesota Star Tribune Though Akckman's investment in Wendy's nearly doubled in value, the stock has since slid to just twenty four dollars a share, below the thirty seven dollars a share price Akman paid. Some investors argue that by removing one of its fastest growing units, Ackman left Wendy's in worse shape, as little more than a second rate burger chain So together What is spinning off Tim Hortons really create in terms of value? It creates this short term because you're creating a new company doing an IPO. You can make a shitload of money if you're, you know, Bill Ackman in this, but Is there a game to the world in Tim Hortons's being a separate spun up company? U Or is it more maybe Tim Hortons does a little better, but Wendy's is doing worse and people are losing jobs as a result of that, right? And for his part There's no consideration of like humanity in all of this. all the investors, but like ye, what about like You probably had to close a lot of locations. That's a lot of people's jobs. Yeah, and Wendy's, again, their stock price collapses not long after they fucking cash out. And for his part, Akman blames the stock slide on the fact that the Wendy's board refused to take his advice on who to hire his CEO and instead picked a woman, Carrie Anderson. And he apparently disliked Carrie so much that he liquidated Pershing's entire stake after she got hired which is right before the stock value collapses. and may have, you know, helped to spark the stock collapse And by this point Bill is enough of a name that him on like selling a bunch of stock could spark a sell off and him investing can drive a stock to soar, right? So It's possible one One thing you could conclude from this is that he makes a bunch of money spinning this off. And then when the company makes a lady he doesn't like CEO, he sells off his shit Windy's is left in a much weaker position than they had been and it's just kind of a result of Bill's arbitrary nature, you know? And it just through a little tantrum Who's better off? shhareholders and fucking people invested in Pershing are Bills better off is the world? I don't think so. U thank God Yeah. Now, again, depending on your attitude, how you think about business, you could look at this as Bill being brilliant or Bill being a fuck up. you know, that's a moral question. What I can say for sure is that Bill does not stop and reflect on whether or not what he made was the right call. He made money and that means he gets to keep rolling more dice. Here's the Star Tribune describing one of Bill's next big activist investments One of Akman's next targets was Seridian Corporation, the Boomington Human Resources firm. Akman recalled his first meeting with Catherine Marinello, Sidian CEO as frightening and one of the worst meetings of my career. Ackman said that Marinello, who he noted, wore inexpensive jewelry and clothes to the meeting, spoke at length about her plans to grow the company through acquisitions, an idea he opposed He also recalls that Marineello said she already had enough money and that her strategy for growing the company was not driven by a desire for personal enrichment Bill is like offended by that. He's like, Can you believe she doesn't just want to make as much money as possible? And she's wearing cheap clothes and cheap jewelry L God, this is the worst meeting of my life. I had to sit next to a lady who wasn't dressed like a rich person is really how he kind of describes it L like an affront to everything he stands for. Yeah. Oh mys really And like how dar The level of fear, it like she says she has enough money. like for that moment, that deep bottomless pit inside of him, he glimpsed it and was like, o Oh, there's there's more. That's not that can't be right. That can't be right. Avoid staring back for a minute and he did not like that. No. No, no, I'm not going to stare into that void anymore. I should also note here, this is just the second case of this, but So far, we have in short order two specific instances of like Bill developing irreconcilable differences with female executives Might be worth making a note of that. I mean, the man who bought Wendy's is not a feminist icon. Right. It's not shocking, pooor Wendy Very funny. What did she do to him Yeah, here's what Bill said about Catherine. She was proud of the fact that she had no economic ambition That's disconcerting to a shareholder And I guess so. yeah, but I don't know that she had no economic ambition. She might just have not felt the need to like obsessed over maximizing short term profits and expens of like the long term health of her company, That might have been how she would have framed it. I don't know, Bill an owned about fifteen percent of the board and he pushed to get his people onto it. And his goal was, I think, to convince them to spin off the most profitable division into a separate company, right? Again, it's like they're people always say, oh, activist investors totally different from these like corporate raiders who just come in and like strip a company for parts. Okay, well, what do they do whenever they, you know, buy their way into a new company? Well, they strip it for parts. You know, they spin off the most profitable division into a separate company to make a bunch of money off the IPO. It's like, wow, really creative. You really you really identified a problem no one else could see They hadn't done the thing that everybody does when they're stripping a company for parts yet Oh Anyway It seems like from what I can tell, Bill loses the fight, right? He's trying to convince them to spin off the company's most profitable division. but this CEO that he hates because she's not money focused enough