Bill Ackman Quotes
2 min readMar 24, 2023
- Experience is making mistakes and learning from them.
- I’m an extremely, extremely persistent person. Extremely. And when I believe I am right, and it is important, I will go to the end of the earth.
- I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy.
- If you think of the typical Herbalife distributor and their level of sophistication, to this day I still don’t understand the marketing plan — true story.
- I’m not emotional about investments. Investing is something where you have to be purely rational and not let emotion affect your decision making — just the facts.
- Herbalife: the customers are fictitious, the business opportunity is a scam, the university degree is a fraud.
- If you look at the great frauds of all time, Enron had that phantom trading floor. What Herbalife has is it has phantom or fictitious customers.
- I was a little bit of a cocky kid.
- I think a very good system in a world with a lot of passive investors is one in which there are at least a few entrepreneurial investors, prepared to say what they think, prepared to propose a change in management, change in strategy, change in cost structure, capital structure.
- Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.
- Preserving the 30-year prepayable fixed-rate mortgage — it’s like the bedrock of the housing system — is critical.
- If I believe that I am right, I will take it to the end of the earth until I am proven right.
- I am always prepared to do the right thing regardless of what other people think.
- I think the hedge-fund industry has taken a reputational turn for the worse, this dog-eat-dog stuff. I’m not just talking about Herbalife or J. C. Penney, but in other situations where the media really focuses on who’s long and who’s short. I don’t think it’s a good thing for the industry.
- It is a certainty that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. We believe it’s harming a population of low-income, principally Hispanic people in the U.S. to benefit a handful of super wealthy people at the top of the pyramid.
- The President is the CEO of this business that we call America.
- I love what I do. I don’t do it for the money. I work on behalf of investors that I like and want to do well for. I’m a competitive person.
