Bill Ackman

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It's really a self-perpetuating board that effectively elects its own members. Once the balance tips, politically, one way or another, it can be kept that way forever. There's no kind of rebalancing system.

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I would argue having a business leader run these institutions and then having a board that has, itself, diverse viewpoints, and by the way, permanently structured to have diverse viewpoints is a much better way to run a university than picking an academic that the faculty supports.

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When a company fails, most people blame the CEO. I generally blame the board. Because the board's job is to make sure the right person's running the company, and if they're failing, help the person.

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And oftentimes it's more important to them to have the public perception that they're good directors so they get the next best deal. If they have a reputation for taking on management too aggressively, word will get out in the small community of founders and they'll miss the next Google.

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That large owner on the board can help buy the time necessary for management to behave in a longer term way. And that's, I think, good for all the shareholders.

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And what activism has done, and I think we've helped lead this movement, is it restored the balance of power between the owners of the business and the management of the company. And that's been a very good thing for the performance of the US stock market actually.

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So as I like to say, incentives drive all human behavior and that certainly applies in the business world. So understanding the people and what drives them, and what the actual financial and other incentives of a business, are very important part of the analysis for investing in a company.

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So we at Pershing Square short a very few stocks. And the reason for that is short selling is just inherently treacherous.

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Actually individual investors did a much better job analyzing Tesla than the so-called professional investors or analysts, the vast majority of them.

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There are very few that earn their keep in terms of the fees they charge. They tend to be too diversified and too short-term. And you're often much better off just buying an index fund.

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I even recommend for individual investors to invest in a dozen companies, you don't get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50.

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So as long as you don't borrow against securities, you own really high quality businesses and it's not money that you need in the short term, then you can actually be thoughtful about it.

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People tend to get excited about investments when stocks are going up and they get depressed when they're going down. And I think that's just inherently human. You have to reverse that. You have to get excited when things get cheaper and you got to get concerned when things get more expensive.

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And that's why we have tended to stay away from companies that are technology companies because technology companies generally... The world is such a dynamic place that someone's always working on a better version.

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The most difficult analysis to do as an investor is that, is kind of figuring out how wide is the moat, how much at risk is the business to disruption? And we're in, I would say, the greatest period of disruptability in history.

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Price matters a lot. You can buy the best business in the world and if you overpay, you're not going to earn particularly attractive returns.

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You want to buy a company at a price that if you're wrong about what you think it's worth and it turns out to be worth 30% less, you paid a deep enough discount to your estimate that you're still okay. A big part of investing is not losing money.

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And very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about. And as a result, many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future.

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The value of anything, I would say, other than love, let's say, is the present value of the cash you can take out of it over its life.