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By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON & JULIE CRESWELL OCT. 25, 2014
William A. Ackman, the silver-haired, silver-tongued hedge fund mogul, gestured out the window of a 42nd-floor conference room at Pershing Square Capital Management in Midtown Manhattan. The view was spectacular, but Mr. Ackman’s arm extended not downward, toward the vibrant fall foliage of Central Park, but skyward toward the top of a glittering glass building just around the corner on 57th Street.
He was pointing toward One57, a new 90-story, lavish hotel and condominium building described by one critic as “a luxury object for people who see the city as their private snow globe.” Specifically, Mr. Ackman was referring to the penthouse apartment. Named the Winter Garden, for a curved glass atrium that opens to the sky, it is a 13,500-square-foot duplex with an eagle’s-eye view of the park.
And it will belong to Mr. Ackman. When the sale closes, the reported USD 90 million price would be the highest ever paid for a Manhattan apartment. It is, he explained, “the Mona Lisa of apartments.” Never will there be another like it.
But Mr. Ackman, 48, doesn’t intend to live there. He lives at the Beresford, off Central Park, with his wife and daughters. The Winter Garden is just another investment opportunity for him and a few others. “I thought it would be fun,” he said, “so myself and a couple of very good friends bought into this idea that someday, someone will really want it and they’ll let me know.” Maybe he will hold some parties there in the meantime.
Whether it’s a top-of-the-world apartment, an attack on a company or even his annual vacations with friends (the next trip is Navy SEAL training), Bill Ackman does everything big.
And this may be his biggest year yet. Overseeing more than USD 17 billion, his hedge fund is up 32 percent in a year when many other hedge funds are just breaking even. He recently completed a public offering of stock in Europe of part of Pershing Square, and while the shares are trading below the offering price, he still raised USD 2.7 billion that he can use to make more big bets. He’s also a driving force behind one of the biggest — and certainly the most controversial — potential mergers of the year: Valeant’s USD 53 billion hostile takeover bid for Allergan, the maker of Botox.
His critics agree that he’s big. They say he stands out for his big mouth and oversize ego, an accomplishment in the hedge fund world. (Even back in high school, his tennis teammates presented him with a T-shirt that read: “A closed mouth gathers no foot.”) Others warn that his fund has a risk of blowing up. His portfolio is made up of bets on less than a dozen companies. (The Allergan stake alone made up 37 percent of his fund earlier this fall, according to filings.) That means when things go bad, they can go really bad. That’s what happened when his USD 2 billion bet on Target through a separate fund lost 90 percent of its value at one point.
He has wagered USD 1 billion that Herbalife, the nutritional supplement company, will fail. So far, that bet hasn’t panned out, and even one of his closest advisers has called his theatrics on the subject — including a teary, three-hour rant this summer in front of nearly 500 people — a mistake.
But on that crisp fall morning at Pershing Square, Mr. Ackman was uncharacteristically taciturn. Reserved, even. Or maybe he was just a bit annoyed.
When asked if he has had to make bigger, riskier bets as his fund has grown, he answered, a bit petulantly: “We certainly have to make bigger investments, that’s definitely true. But not riskier investments.” Asked about failures, like the Target bet, he sighed deeply. “Target was a bad investment,” he said, “but out of 30 investments, I don’t know of another investor with as high a batting average.”
He certainly has an enviable long-term record: His funds, excluding the Target and four other separate funds, have returned 21 percent net of fees over 10 years, annualized. He has achieved it by going on the offensive. Mr. Ackman’s role as an activist hedge fund investor is to persuade other shareholders that he knows how to run companies better than current management does. This involves research, argument and, perhaps most important, a sensitivity to how every pronouncement and gesture will be perceived.
“I was angry at Carl Icahn for many years, as you know,” Mr. Ackman said of the longtime activist investor, when asked if he holds grudges. He swiped at his eye and added, lest the movement be misinterpreted: “My eye is tearing. It’s not emotion. I have a clogged tear duct.”
His attention to detail and persuasive powers will be especially important come December, when Allergan shareholders hold a special meeting. Mr. Ackman will urge them to replace a majority of the company’s board and to pave the way for approving the takeover by Valeant.
It’s a high-stakes move. And Mr. Ackman is all in for a big win. He is intensely competitive about everything, from memorizing two-letter words for Scrabble games to, as it turns out, owning apartments.
“It’s one of a kind,” he said of his trophy penthouse. “By the way,” he added, nodding down the street where other luxury towers are expected to be built, “these other buildings are not going to be as good.”
Commanding the Room
All successful people have stories to tell about what allowed them to achieve fabulousness. There is usually a moral. In the story that Mr. Ackman likes to tell, the moral is this: Never doubt Bill Ackman.
During his freshman year at Harvard, Mr. Ackman happened to read the application essay of the guy in the room next door. It was about why he hated Smurfs. Mr. Ackman thought it was really good, and an idea formed. He would write a book on how to write a college essay, drawing on examples and interviews with Ivy League admissions officers. On the advice of a family friend, he broadened his book to include information on college admissions and sent it off to publishers. The rejection letters piled up. He dropped the idea.
Later, two guys from Yale wrote a similar book called “Essays That Worked,” which would be featured in a New York Times article.
“I suffered extreme psychological torture,” Mr. Ackman recalled. The advice that the family friend gave, he added, had been bad. “I said, the next time I have a really good idea, I’m not going to listen just because someone is older than me.” Mr. Ackman continued, “It’s not going to stop me from going forward.”
Fresh out of Harvard Business School in 1992, Mr. Ackman went to work for his father, Lawrence Ackman, at his commercial real estate brokerage firm, Ackman-Ziff. But the young man was impatient. After just one week, and shrugging off advice that he first work for a veteran hedge fund manager, Mr. Ackman convinced his Harvard buddy David P. Berkowitz to start a hedge fund.
Cobbling together USD 3 million, the two started Gotham Partners. In a tiny office, they pored over corporate filings, hunting for undervalued companies. In 1998, Gotham started a hostile proxy fight against a small Ohio real estate holding company, First Union Real Estate Equity and Mortgage Investments. It took months of tussling before Gotham prevailed.
At Gotham, Mr. Ackman developed the methods he would use again and again. He went after big targets and took his battles into the public arena. Those techniques proved especially useful when he had sold short a company’s stock, betting on a collapse on the stock price.
His first foray into activist short-selling was in the spring of 2002, when he released a 48-page, scrupulously researched paper criticizing the management and reserve levels of the Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation. By that fall, Farmer Mac’s stock had tumbled, producing a quick win for Gotham, which had sold the agency’s stock short.
Mr. Ackman’s next short target, in late 2002, was the bond insurer MBIA, which he argued had backed billions of dollars of risky financing. It was a bet that would take years, hours of presentations to credit agencies and regulators, and a Wall Street financial crisis in 2007 before eventually paying off when MBIA’s stock started to collapse. Mr. Ackman’s bet was a huge success, netting just over USD 1 billion. But Gotham’s days were numbered.
Over the course of several years, Mr. Ackman struggled to right the troubled First Union, including an attempt to merge it with a failing golf operator that Gotham also owned. Investors started to voice concern. When a judge’s decision about the merger in late 2002 went against Gotham, the partners decided to wind down. The once highflying fund was done.
More than a decade later, Mr. Ackman accepts partial responsibility for Gotham’s demise. The problem, he said, was not its investments, which he argues ultimately paid off, but rather the strategy of investing in real estate, which was hard to sell quickly when investors wanted their money back. “I made a couple of strategic mistakes that, had I had more perspective, I wouldn’t have made,” he said.
About a year after Gotham closed, Mr. Ackman reappeared with a new fund, Pershing Square, and a USD 50 million seed investment from the Leucadia National Corporation. There would be a new focus: activist investing. At Gotham, he learned that he needed research and a story. At Pershing, he perfected the skill of telling that story to an audience of shareholders, corporate directors and the news media.
“He’s trying to create a theatrical setting where it’s not about the words, it’s about the dynamic, the action,” said J. Tomilson Hill, chief executive of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, an investor in Pershing Square.
He charged quickly out of the gate, persuading Wendy’s to divest itself of the Canadian chain Tim Hortons. Then he got McDonald’s to sell some of its restaurants and buy back shares. It became clear that when Pershing Square announced a stake in a company, something big was going to happen, and the stock moved.
“Bill commands a room. He’s a tall guy, a good-looking guy. He draws all eyes to him when he speaks,” said Damien Park, the founder of Hedge Fund Solutions, which consults on activist campaigns but has not worked with Mr. Ackman. “Also, his ideas aren’t usually incremental in nature — asking a company to distribute cash or clean up a balance sheet. They’re usually quantum changes in a company.”
That was true of his 2007 mark on Target. In just two weeks, he raised USD 2 billion for a special fund to invest in just one stock. He wanted Target to sell its credit card business and restructure its real estate holdings. Target sold off part of its credit card business, but management disagreed with his real estate plan. Over the course of two years, Mr. Ackman waged a USD 10 million campaign to replace board members with himself and four others.
When shareholders voted against him in the spring of 2009, the defeat stung more than his reputation. By then, losses amounted to as much as 90 percent, and many investors in the special Pershing Square fund, including the fellow activist investor Daniel S. Loeb through his Third Point hedge fund, had asked for their money back.
Mr. Ackman suffered another black eye a few years later with J. C. Penney. He won a seat on its board in 2011 and handpicked Ron Johnson, the head of Apple’s retail stores, to turn around the troubled retailer. But the efforts were botched; the company went from being profitable to losing USD 1.4 billion in 2013. Mr. Ackman resigned from the board in the summer of 2013, selling his stake at an estimated loss of USD 473 million.
“Every time I see him,” said Mr. Hill at Blackstone, “I say: ‘Bill, do me a favor. Stay away from retail.’ ”
Still, Mr. Ackman notched two of his biggest hits — General Growth Properties and Canadian Pacific — over the same period, helping to offset the reputational and financial losses from Target and J. C. Penney. Pershing estimates that Mr. Ackman’s original USD 65 million investment in General Growth, which operated commercial properties and has been restructured into three businesses, is now worth USD 3.3 billion. In Canadian Pacific, Mr. Ackman has so far tripled the value of his original investment after replacing the board and forcing through a turnaround.
His defenders argue that anyone with a fund as large as Pershing is going to have the occasional blunder. “In this business, if you don’t make mistakes, you’re either a liar or you don’t take many swings at the ball,” said Leon Cooperman, the founder of the hedge fund Omega Advisors.
Always a Competition
Last year, Mr. Ackman and some friends took a scuba-diving trip off the coast of Myanmar. The sun was warm, the ocean calm, but even in this idyllic setting, Mr. Ackman felt compelled to devise a competition he could win. After surfacing from each dive, he checked his air gauge against everyone else’s, to see who had used the least amount of oxygen while diving. Using less oxygen suggested less stress, thus proving who was least rattled under water. Mr. Ackman really, really likes to win.
“When we lost at tennis, always, on some fundamental level, he regarded it as an aberration,” recalled Michael Grossman, his tennis partner in high school.
Mr. Ackman had an upper-middle-class upbringing in the New York suburbs, and he recalls plenty of rough-and-tumble arguments at home with his parents and sister. “Let me win?” Mr. Ackman recalled. “That doesn’t exist in my house. No one lets anyone win. Fight to the death.”
And if, at times, that means putting his fund and reputation at risk, so be it.
“I think he is just prepared to live with the scrutiny and the calumny heaped upon his head,” said William A. Sahlman, one of his professors at Harvard Business School.
This year, Mr. Ackman made a rare move. It began with a meeting in early February between him and J. Michael Pearson, the chief executive of Valeant. Five days later, Mr. Pearson expressed his interest in buying Allergan, the maker of Botox, and sought Mr. Ackman’s help, according to Valeant’s regulatory filings. Mr. Ackman agreed and began buying shares in Allergan through a unique partnership with Valeant later that month, eventually building a USD 4 billion stake in the company. By April, Mr. Ackman and Valeant had gone public with a bid for the company worth USD 47 billion. It went hostile.
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