Bill Ackman PS

CEO & Founder, Pershing Square

Bill Ackman Predicts the Winners of the AI Revolution | Stocks | Investment

📅 Aug 01, 2026 The Financial Economics 8 MIN 15 SEGMENTS · 4 SPEAKERS

In this video, billionaire investor Bill Ackman shares his outlook on AI stocks and explains why only a handful of artificial ...

What Bill Ackman said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square, discussed the AI landscape and investment strategies. He expressed skepticism about OpenAI due to projected losses and the rise of open-source models, while praising Anthropic as a frontier model leader that recently turned profitable. Ackman highlighted SpaceX's strong assets, including Starlink's profitability and GPU rental business, but noted its absence from Pershing Square's portfolio due to lack of predictability. He identified Alphabet as Pershing's most direct AI investment, with a nearly $2 billion position, acquired after AI fears depressed the stock. Ackman predicted AI would intensify short-term trading competition among firms like Citadel and Millennium, benefiting patient long-term investors. He argued AI lacks human creativity, citing his unique IPO gift to investors as an example. The narrator added that Pershing Square's Alphabet investment yielded over 4x returns, with an estimated $3.5 billion profit.

Key takeaways

Anthropic is the frontier model leader and recently turned profitable; OpenAI faces significant losses and open-source competition.
SpaceX offers unique GPU rental capacity but lacks predictability for Pershing Square's portfolio.
Pershing Square holds a nearly $2 billion position in Alphabet, acquired due to AI-driven stock decline.
AI cannot replicate human creativity, as seen in Pershing Square's unique IPO gift to investors.

Numbers and commitments

Figure	What it refers to	Type	At
$2 billion	Pershing Square's investment in Alphabet	commitment	3:14

Chapters

0:00Frontier model leaders and concerns
0:37SpaceX's assets and valuation
1:33Pershing Square's predictability criteria
3:07Alphabet investment rationale
4:13AI's impact on investment management
4:38Market forces and long-term opportunities
5:32AI as a research tool for short-term trading
6:11Human creativity versus AI

Questions asked in this interview

0:00So, with OpenAI and Anthropic, SpaceX all going public, who do you think the winner is going to be?
2:59Are you investing in things relating to artificial intelligence?
4:00If it starts making research breakthroughs on physics, science, do you think it's going to replace investment management like to 99% or what are your thoughts?

Interviewer 0:00 ↗

So, with OpenAI and Anthropic, SpaceX all going public, who do you think the winner is going to be?

Bill Ackman 0:06 ↗

You know, Anthropic seems to be the leader in terms of frontier models and building a business that apparently turned profitable recently. That's pretty impressive. What concerns me about OpenAI is, you know, kind of a prediction of very significant losses for the foreseeable future. And also, I think the open-source models are getting so good and the people will have access to either lower cost or free models that will enable them to answer most questions or solve the problems that they need. So, I'm less of a believer in betting on the frontier model company.

You know, SpaceX is a very interesting business. The Starlink franchise is enormously profitable and a near monopoly on global satellite telephony. Their space franchise is incredible and they have an amazing position in terms of data infrastructure. You want to rent 100,000 GPUs, about the only place you can do that today is SpaceX and they're earning very high returns on those assets. And then they have their own AI models that launched a new one recently. So, it's an incredible collection of assets run by the most talented technologist entrepreneur of our generation. And I think the only question is just price. At a trillion, whatever it is, six or seven, there's less upside than if you could buy for half that price. But, you know, I wouldn't — the word is never to bet against Elon. So I think SpaceX will be an incredibly important company over the next 12 year period of time.

Now, it's not in the Pershing Square portfolio because it doesn't have the degree of predictability that we're looking for. We like businesses that sort of today, and if you think about a business, you know, people think about stocks and bonds, right? Bonds, you get paid a coupon, an interest rate, a couple times a year. And if it's a fixed rate bond, you're going to get your six or seven percent for sure. And at the end of the life of the bond, you're going to get your principal as long as it's a credit worthy company. A business is a bit like a bond as well, except the coupon, the interest payment is not known. You have to estimate what it's going to be. And the interest payment, the way to think about it, the way we think about companies is we think about the earnings as the yield on the business. So, people talk about PE, right? A stock's trading at a PE of 20. Well, if you flip over the PE, it's a 5% earnings yield. One way to think about it is you're investing in a company that's generating a 5% return on your investment today. And the question is, is that 5% yield going to grow over time? Or is someone going to come up with a business that disrupts it and the company's going to disappear? And so, stocks are riskier than bonds because there isn't the same degree of certainty about their future. But if you narrow down the universe of companies you invest in to these really predictable businesses where their market position is, we believe, so dominant, you can earn well in excess of bond-like returns without taking a ton of risk.

Interviewer 2:59 ↗

Now, another area that investors have been very interested lately is artificial intelligence. Are you investing in things relating to artificial intelligence?

Bill Ackman 3:07 ↗

You know, the most direct investment we have in AI, I would say, is Google or Alphabet, which I, you know,

5 more exchanges in this transcript

Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX

APA

Ackman, B. (2026, August 1). Bill Ackman Predicts the Winners of the AI Revolution | Stocks | Investment [Interview transcript]. The Financial Economics. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1150211/

MLA

Bill Ackman. "Bill Ackman Predicts the Winners of the AI Revolution | Stocks | Investment." The Financial Economics, 1 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1150211/.

BibTeX

@misc{ackman2026_1150211,
  author       = {Bill Ackman},
  title        = {Bill Ackman Predicts the Winners of the AI Revolution | Stocks | Investment},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Financial Economics. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {aug},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1150211/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}

▶

Key Quotes (2)

“Anthropic seems to be the leader in terms of frontier models and building a business that apparently turned profitable recently. That's pretty impressive. What concerns me about Open AI is, you know, kind of a prediction of very significant losses for the foreseeable future. And also, I think the open-source models are getting so good and you know, the people will have access to either lower cost ”

▶ 0:06 CONTROVERSIAL POLICY

“AI is at least at this point is about understanding everything in the past and on the basis of that, perhaps predicting the future. And that relies on you know, I I think creativity is basically doing stuff that has never happened before. When I look at Pershing Square, many of our most successful investments transactions were things that had never happened before. You know, going short the credit”

▶ 6:13 POLICY

Mentioned in this interview

Anthropic None-Anthropic: Frontier model leader, recently turned profitable, impressive business.

OpenAI None-OpenAI: Predicted significant losses for the foreseeable future, concern for Ackman.

SpaceX: Has Starlink, GPU rentals, and AI models; incredibly important company.

Alphabet: Direct AI investment, nearly $2 billion, attractive price due to AI fear.

Microsoft MSFT: Powerful demonstration with OpenAI led to Google's stock crush.

Citadel None-Citadel: Uses AI for short-term trading, server location and fiber for edge.

Millennium: Pod shops with short-term money, high compensation, tight risk limits.

Earlier, on the same topics

“We are building an asset management firm that has similar attributes to a Blackstone but it is extremely investment centric. We will grow this principally by compounding instead of raising a lot of funds. Buffett was building over time. I became executive chair. The full Pershing Square team was ava”

Apr 29, 2026 at 17:24 →

“I think the citadels, the millenniums, uh I think that AI is going to make a lot of investing strategies more and more short-term almost like an arms race where you know a company files a 10K and the AI can read it and come to a conclusion faster than anyone else who's got the fastest model to analy”

indexation · May 01, 2026 at 6:42 →

“You look at Amazon, Meta, uh you know, these are Microsoft businesses we've admired for for many many years, but kind of never got to a price that we found them compelling. Uh now each of them are at prices we find compelling. And I think that it's a bit you know the the excitement of SpaceX uh if y”

spacex · Jun 17, 2026 at 6:42 →

“We made 2.6 billion on these interest rate swaps and we bought stocks. So, when you think about Pershing Square as an investment firm and think about the funds we manage, today we focus exclusively on owning some of the best great durable companies in the world. Think of that as the long-term engine”

Apr 14, 2026 at 11:14 →

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About Bill Ackman

Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, has recently commented on artificial intelligence, markets, and the economy in several media appearances. In late October 2026, he stated that he does not doubt demand for AI, describing intelligence as one of the most valuable assets in the world. He distinguished cash-rich large technology companies from "neoclouds" that take on debt to buy GPUs, calling the latter a different kind of bet. He also said that if conflicts involving Iran and Russia-Ukraine are resolved, interest rates and inflation could come down, which he described as positive for the economy and markets. Ackman called Anthropic "perhaps the greatest business story I've ever seen," but said Pershing Square generally prefers to own more predictable, durable businesses such as Microsoft, Visa, and Mastercard rather than fast-growing capital-intensive firms. He also expressed more concern about a "rogue actor" using open-source AI models to cause harm than about major frontier labs. Ackman has also discussed his firm’s strategy and personal matters. He said Pershing Square’s goal is not short-term stock moves, and that current market narrowness has created opportunities to buy high-quality franchises at attractive prices. He described plans for Howard Hughes and a newly acquired insurer, comparing the approach to creating value similar to Berkshire Hathaway's model. On higher education, he said the cost of Harvard is "insane" and that universities need to be rethought, adding that AI can now teach most material for free. He also spoke about his daughter’s recovery from a brain condition and his plans for a medical institute focused on brain research.

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