Bill Ackman, Meme Stock

When writing about business leaders who speak out on political and social issues, I generally steer clear of well-known edge-case billionaires because it's hard to learn much from them. Their appetites for public attention are exceeded only by the wealth that insulates them from the consequences of their words.

But I'll make an exception for Bill Ackman. Ackman, founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, is a hedge fund manager more than a CEO. He made headlines last fall for his tweets about Israel, the responses of top-tier university presidents to antisemitism on campuses, and DEI. As his outrage won him newfound fame among the anti-DEI crowd, his social media presence ballooned to 1.3 million followers on X.

Ackman's statements did not have anything to do with to his core business. They were his personal views. The only reason anyone paid attention was because of his considerable power and influence.

With his social media star rising, Ackman announced plans for the IPO of a Pershing Square investment fund. He no doubt envisioned an army of armchair stock pickers eager to buy shares in their new standard bearer's brand and benefit from his investing acumen.

It shouldn't have surprised anyone that Ackman pursued this path. In 2022, he and Peter Thiel bankrolled entrepreneur-turned-culture warrior Vivek Ramaswamy as the founding CEO of Thrive, an upstart asset management firm intended to challenge the big institutional firms that preached the gospel of stakeholder capitalism (read: BlackRock). Strive branded itself as "emphasizing excellence over politics." Apparently Strive’s backers’ distaste for politics only went in one ideological direction.

Alas, the professional investor set was not impressed with Ackman’s plan to go public, and support for the offering softened to the point of collapse. As Felix Salmon pointed out, investors did not fare particularly well when Ackman tried a similar gambit in Amsterdam a decade ago. On July 31, Ackman announced that he was pulling the Pershing Square IPO.

From a communications standpoint, there’s a big difference between being a highly opinionated manager of a private hedge fund and a CEO of a publicly traded company: a CEO cannot afford to become a meme stock.