Bill Ackman is probably about to get a lot richer. And much louder

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — Bill Ackman, the Wall Street agitator who’s become an armchair political crusader for the put-upon billionaire class, is cashing in on his social media clout in a deal that could make him boatloads more money.

See here: On Monday, Ackman announced that he’s selling a 10% stake — valued at more than $1 billion — in his Pershing Square hedge fund to a group of investors. Basically, all that means is that he’s raising a ton of cash, likely because he wants to take the hedge fund public sometime next year, as several news outlets have reported.

The funding announced Monday puts a $10 billion price tag on Pershing Square, which manages about $16 billion worth of assets.

The benefit of going public is you get to make money, obviously, so it’s not hard to see why Pershing Square would want to do it. But an IPO is still a somewhat odd choice for a hedge fund, as they typically benefit from operating in the shadows, far away from the glare of US securities regulators.

For Ackman, in particular, being at the helm of a publicly traded company could be a particularly jarring shift.

“Once he does the IPO, the company becomes subject to all of the standard Securities and Exchange Commission regulations,” said Lawrence J. White, an economics professor at the NYU Stern School of Business. And those regulations can be “unexpectedly restrictive” in terms of what the CEO is allowed to say and do in public.

White said the IPO essentially poses a trade-off for Ackman between raising more capital (which is fun) and living with those regulatory restrictions (which can be, um, restrictive).

“He’s a smart guy — he surely knows what I’ve just said,” White told me. “And he’s decided it’s worth it. I’m not sure I fully understand that.”

Of course, what we do know about Ackman is that whatever he’s planning, he’ll likely pursue it relentlessly.

Ackman is an investor known for ruthless tactics that made him a billionaire — even if his most memorable gamble was a disastrous $1 billion bet against Herbalife. But in recent years, he moved his day job away from the kind of loud corporate activism that made executives fear him. Pershing Square officially hung up its activist megaphone in 2022, opting to work with a small group of companies behind the scenes.

But around the same time, Ackman, who is 58, turned his own personal megaphone on high volume, broadcasting his own hot takes on Twitter, later renamed X. 

As the Israel-Hamas war began, Ackman trained his ire on college students who he accused of antisemitism, fueling a public campaign that ultimately saw Harvard’s president step down and many of the students doxxed. He took to writing several-thousand-word screeds blasting the media and defending his wife, a former MIT professor, against plagiarism accusations.

Ackman, like X’s owner Elon Musk, has taken a notably right-wing turn on X, where he regularly reposts pro-Trump and pro-Israel commentary and rails against DEI to his more than 1.2 million followers.

Many of those followers are the kinds of retail investors Ackman could hope to attract to a publicly traded fund. In fact, Pershing Square’s prospectus for its new US fund even touted how Ackman’s “brand-name profile and broad retail following will drive substantial investor interest.”

Of course, many others are institutional shareholders looking for a steady hand rather than a loose cannon.

“I don’t think Mr. Ackman is quite the loose cannon that Mr. Musk is — it’s hard to imagine a looser cannon — but still, I can imagine Mr. Ackman not being accustomed to being the CEO of a publicly traded company,” NYU’s White said.

Pershing Square declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Ackman couldn’t be reached Monday.

Another possibility is that Ackman is counting on being able to say and do whatever we wants with some degree of impunity. Musk regularly pushes racist and conspiratorial garbage online, and Tesla shareholders have largely stood by. The Tesla CEO’s only major tussle with the SEC ended with what was essentially a slap on the wrist and some fines.

And Ackman, who personally made a cool $610 million on paper last year and has a net worth of $2.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, can likely afford the extra legal fees that could come with running afoul of regulators.

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