Bill Ackman Pershing Square IPO 2026-APR-29 Monday

Thank you.

Well, actually, I'm an American investor, running an American company, and I invest in American companies. But we don't have a way for US investors to invest with us. We didn't until today. And by bringing Pershing Square USA public, we create a way for anyone who can buy one share to invest with our firm. And it's sort of the democratization of capitalism. Something I feel very good about. You know, hedge funds are sort of known for managing money for rich people. And now we have the opportunity for someone with $50 can be a long-term shareholder.

Well, this is a very unusual, while we basically, we took the body of a closed-end fund, but we look nothing like other closed-end funds in terms of scale, in terms of governance, in terms of strategy, in terms of performance. You know, the average equity closed-end fund over the last 8 years has generated a 7% return. We've generated a 25% return over the same period per annum. All right, so it's a very different kind of animal.

That was the point I was trying to make, which is typical closed-end fund 99% of the buyers are retail. It's really like a financial product, financial advisors and they put it in a client's portfolio. This was a, we did this like a traditional IPO. 80-plus percent of the investors are actually institutions. Most of them family offices, pension funds, insurance companies, very sophisticated investors. None of them had ever before invested in a closed-end fund. So, we took this structure, which is an amazing structure. People, I'd never looked at closed-end funds. What's unique about closed-end funds? You can buy minority stakes in companies. You can buy controlling stakes in companies. You can use derivatives to hedge risk. And there's only one layer of tax. Typical corporation, there's corporate tax and then there's tax when you pay a dividend. So, it's the most tax-efficient corporation, it's the most flexible corporation, but no one's ever used it for the purpose we're using it for.

Because they're passive collections of securities with fees. That should trade at a discount. But don't blame the closed-end fund industry for, don't blame the structure for the performance. And the analogy I would make, go back to the 1970s, a whole bunch of real estate investment trusts were launched. They all traded at discounts. Why? Because the sponsorship was weak, because the performance was weak, because the asset quality was poor. And then in the early '90s, I'm sure Carl will remember, Sam Zell took public one of the first multi-billion dollar professionally managed real estate companies and he chose to do it in a REIT. And people were like, 'Sam, why would I invest in REIT? REITs trade at discounts.' He said, 'No, no, not this one.' And REITs traded at big premiums particularly in the '90s because lower cost capital in public markets, liquidity, and what does Sam have? He had best in class governance, he had best in class performance, and best in class asset quality. That's what we're doing. We're kind of the rebirth of the closed-end investment company universe.

Aiming is not the right word. So, we were giving, actually, it's a very unusual offering. We've, all we talked about is Pershing Square USA, but it's part of this. Two years ago, we came to market. What we heard from people is they liked the structure, they liked the governance, liked the track record, they liked the sponsor. But they're like, 'Why should I invest on the first day? Just going to be a pile of cash. Hard to get a pile of cash to trade up on the first day.' Retail loved it. Financial advisors loved it, but the institutions you need to do a large-scale offering are used to an IPO that pops, you know, it goes up 10, 15, 20% the first day. So, that's why I scrapped it. I said, 'I'm going to come back with something better.' That was '24. It was '24, and it's actually my wife's idea. I went home and complained to her it's going to be a $2 billion offering. I thought it could be 10. She said, 'Well, is there something else you could give them?' And I said, 'Sweetheart, that's a really good idea.' And so, what we're doing is we're giving a piece of the GP, the management company, the entity that receives fees from the funds. And it's like a gift with purchase. And so, for every five shares you buy of PSUA as in the IPO, you get one share of what we call Pershing Square Inc. So, the IPO pop comes from the receipt of another security. It's almost like buying stock in an IPO and getting an immediate spin-off of another company. Once we had that, we were able to create an offering that was oversubscribed, which has never happened. There's no such thing as an oversubscribed closed-end fund offering because they take every dollar of demand. In this case, we cut back the institutions very significantly in the offering. We let the retail investors get every dollar of, it's usually the retail gets cut massively back and the institutions are favored. We did the opposite. Now, we picked the best in class institutions. But just to give you context, a $5 billion offering is the sixth largest IPO in the last decade. It's like the 20th largest IPO in American history. So, you're not disappointed.

I mean, SpaceX could be a lot bigger obviously. But in this universe, I mean, permanent capital, you know, this has never happened before. And you know, so I think it's a great thing for, obviously we have some of the wealthiest investors in the world. We have a, you know, 200 billion dollar family office that invests in this transaction. We have a pension fund that invested 500 million dollars in this transaction. This was the, you know, the 2.8 billion cornerstone round is the largest amount of committed capital ever raised from IPOs. We broke a lot of records here. And ultimately at the end of the day it's going to be about the performance long term. But you know, this is a pretty...