First on CNBC: Transcript: Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman Speaks with “Squawk on the Street” Today

WHEN: Today, Wednesday, April 29, 2026

WHERE: CNBC's "Squawk on the Street"

Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC interview with Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" (M-F, 9AM-11AM ET) today, Wednesday, April 29. Following is a link to video on CNBC.com: https://global-deals.online/video/2026/04/29/pershing-square-ceo-bill-ackman-we-look-nothing-like-other-closed-end-funds.html%3C/a%3E.

All references must be sourced to CNBC.

SARA EISEN: But let's get to the big event here at the NYSE today, Bill Ackman's Pershing Square debuting this morning in a combined IPO for both its new closed-end fund and the investment management firm. Joining us now first on CNBC is Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman. Welcome. Good to see you.

BILL ACKMAN: Thank you.

EISEN: Congratulations. So, why are you doing this now, taking these companies public?

ACKMAN: Well, actually, the -- I'm an American investor, run an American company, and I invest in American companies. But we don't have a way for U.S. 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.

EISEN: I mean, that was a big deal for you, getting retail investors involved in this. You did a YouTube presentation. You did, I think, a podcast with Vlad Tenev of Robinhood—

ACKMAN: Sure.

EISEN: And got some allotment there. Why, why retail investors? And what's your sense of what demand is going to be like there?

ACKMAN: Well, this is a very unusual -- well, 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 eight years has generated a seven percent return. We've generated a 25 percent return over the same period per annum. All right, so it's a very different kind of animal. And why now? Or, I'm sorry -- your question?

EISEN: Yeah. I mean, why demand for retail? Why that?

ACKMAN: So actually, that was the point I was trying to make, which is a typical closed-end fund, 99 percent of the buyers are retail. It's really like a financial product that's sold to 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. I've 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 you, 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.

EISEN: Yeah. Why do they tend to trade at a discount, closed-end funds?

ACKMAN: 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 a REIT? REITs trade at discounts. He's like, 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.

EISEN: How do you feel about the amount you raised? I think $5 billion was, was about half of as much as you were aiming for, as much as $10 billion.

ACKMAN: Aiming is not the right word, OK. So we were giving, actually, it was a very unusual offering. All we talked about was Pershing Square USA. But as part of this, two years ago, we came to market, and what we heard from people is they like the structure, they like the governance, they like the track record, they like the sponsor. But they're like, why should I invest on the first day? Just going to be a pile of cash. It's 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 percent the first day. So, that's when I scrapped it. I said, I'm going to come back with something better.

EISEN: That was '24.

ACKMAN: That was '24, and it was actually my wife's idea. I went home, I 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? I said, sweetheart, this is 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 at PSUS 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, getting an immediate spinoff 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. 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. 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.

EISEN: So, you're not disappointed?

ACKMAN: By the way, I asked the bankers. I said, when was the last time you worked on a five? Have you ever worked on a $5 billion-plus offering? And only a couple of people out of a group of 60 have raised their hands.

DAVID FABER: There's a lot of bigger ones coming, though, very soon, as you well know.

ACKMAN: 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 family office that invested in this transaction. We have a pension fund that invested $500 million in this transaction. This was the, you know, the $2.8 billion cornerstone round is the largest amount of committed capital ever raised for an IPO. So, 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—

FABER: Well, how do you think it's going to trade then? I mean, to that point.

ACKMAN: The lawyers told me not to advise how it's going to trade. So—

FABER: Right. But that's got to be a key consideration for everybody who is putting this together.

ACKMAN: Let me tell you what we did.

FABER: Given the discount we were just discussing that these things typically trade at.

ACKMAN: Yes. Remember, we're not typical, right? We have -- this will -- if you take the track record of Pershing Square at the fee structure of this vehicle, it's by far the best performance of any closed-end fund of -- extent, okay? So the, our 22-year record is a 19 percent compound return. The next best performing closed-end fund is 14 percent, and the returns drop off very quickly. If you look at the last eight years, that's the period since we've had permanent capital. For us, it's been a 24.9 percent return. The average closed-end fund, a little over seven percent over the period. The next best, 14.7 percent. You understand the power of compounding. The difference of that extra 10 percentage points a year is kind of huge. So, governance. Let's just talk about it. Closed-end funds have notoriously bad governance. If you're a BlackRock closed-end fund, they have the same five or six directors on 80 of their funds. We have a best-in-class board. We have the former head of the Division of Investment Management in the SEC. We have the former CIO of Fidelity Investments. We have the former head of risk management of Morgan Stanley. We have a former private equity executive from Providence Equity. We have a former hedge fund and private equity executives, Like real board. And the other thing we're going to do that's different is we're going to treat, the fact that it's a corporate structure as a closed-end fund. It's a corporation. And we're going to run it like a normal company. We're going to have quarterly earnings calls. We're going to have analyst coverage, right? We're going to—

EISEN: Investor days.

ACKMAN: We're going to have investor days. We're going to have an annual meeting, Berkshire Hathaway style, where people come and they ask questions. This is going to be something that people want to own, right?

FABER: Bill, explain to our viewers how it differs from what was originally, I think it was Amsterdam-based fund back in 2014. Now, it's a London-listed fund that does trade at a significant discount to its assets under management.

ACKMAN: Yeah. Sure. So, not to talk about it much, and here's the reason why. The SEC does not like publicly traded hedge funds that Americans can buy. Because under the 40 Act, you have to be an accredited investor to invest in a hedge fund. So, we have to keep that vehicle offshore. What that means is I'm not allowed to talk about it on TV. I can't go on Jim Cramer's show and talk about how we're doing. I can't put the ticker symbol in an article. I can't market to U.S. investors. The beauty of Pershing Square USA, it's an SEC-registered entity, anyone in the world can own it. By the way, the other thing I think is unique about this, typical closed-end funds, 100 percent of the buyers, 95 percent are U.S. Our investor base here is global. We have investors from Mexico. We have investors from the Middle East. We have investors from Israel, Europe, Asia. It's a company with an incredibly tax-efficient structure. But don't throw me in the basket of grandma's closed-end funds. We have nothing to do with those entities. We're just passive. Look at our strategy, right? We're a very active investor. We made an offer to buy a major company a few weeks ago. All of that activity is now -- it's going to happen through this vehicle on a pro-rata basis with the other stuff that we do. So, it allows a -- an investor with $50, literally $50, to invest alongside investors that have $200 billion. And I think that's really a unique opportunity.

CARL QUINTANILLA: I was going to ask you whether an incrementally more retail investor base alters the way you think about risk.

ACKMAN: Not at all. Not at all. And by the way, we should spend a little time talking about the management company. So, everyone knows Blackstone and KKR and Apollo and Carlyle, these alternative asset management firms. Well, the gift with purchase is a business called Pershing Square Inc. And that business has a lot of unique attributes. So, number one, Blackstone's got a trillion of assets. We have, in terms of fee-paying assets, we're going to have $25, $26 billion coming out of the gate. So, we're tiny. But we're the only firm that grows organically, 98 percent of our assets are in these permanent capital vehicles, which means our AUM, our assets grow with compounding. So, the business model is like collecting a royalty on the compounding of three vehicles invested in a high-return strategy. So, if you, the last 22 years, it's been a, at the lower fee structure of this entity, about a 46X in terms of if you put a dollar in, you'd have $46 22 years later. With 26 billion of fee-paying assets, if all we do is compound at historic rates, in 20 or so years, we'll have a trillion of AUM. The private equity model is you raise capital, you invest it, you sell the assets, and you send it back, and you've got to raise a new fund. And our model, if you don't raise another dollar, and we compound at historic rates, the business model—

FABER: Historic rates being the 19 percent that you've had since you—

ACKMAN: That's right.

FABER: So, with the two percent management fee, then you're, then obviously the management company's going to—

ACKMAN: 19 percent is net of a two percent management fee.

FABER: Right.

ACKMAN: And by the way, in terms of the business, the -- the -- I feel good about the fact that our U.S. investors are getting a really good deal, right. We've actually generated a 21 percent gross return for 22 years, and we take two percent, right? It's 21 percent is about 11 percent above, per annum, the S&P over the same period. The S&P's up 9X over the last 22 years, and this vehicle, at its fee structure, would have been up 46X, right.

FABER: Yeah.

ACKMAN: So, this is a massive outperformance, and we take a two percent fee. The typical hedge fund is two and 20—

FABER: Yeah, we're aware.

EISEN: But—

ACKMAN: So this is -- this is a bargain basement fee structure.

FABER: You've done a great job selling it right here.

EISEN: But if you're a retail investor at home, why buy this and not just buy the sort of concentrated positions that you're in, these stocks, where they can just do that and not pay the management fee?

ACKMAN: Yeah, so we did an analysis a couple years ago. We looked at every investment we had made, and we compared our average cost to build the position with what you could buy it for on the day that we disclosed it, and you had to pay about a 26 percent premium. OK, so that's one. Two, we don't just buy stocks, right? We get pretty deeply involved in companies. We announce transactions, right? The other thing we do is we hedge risk. So, very important. So, 80 percent of our profits over the last, you know, 22 years came from what you know, kind of basically long-only, you know, these durable growth companies. We get pretty deeply involved. We help them succeed. That's been 98 percent of our capital, 80 percent of profits, 92 percent of our capital has been about 20 percent of our profits, and that comes from things like our COVID hedge, our hedge going into the financial crisis where we were short the credit of companies like MBIA and others. What's interesting is there is no other closed-end fund that has an asymmetric hedging strategy. The reason for that is you were not permitted to do so until August of 2022 when the SEC codified some new rules on closed-end investment companies using derivatives. We're the first one. We're the only -- we have this sort of unique strategy, and now a closed-end investor in this, forget closed-end. Investor in -- forget closed-in, investor in Pershing Square USA can own our company, and we get exposure to businesses that we can drive value, and also they can hedge risk by virtue of participating in our hedging strategy.

FABER: Bill, real quickly—

ACKMAN: Yes.

FABER: Because I just want to end on this, because you referenced an offer for another company. You're talking about UMG – Universal. They're reporting earnings, I think, actually, because it's over in Amsterdam or wherever it is. It's going to come out midday. Others characterize it more, as you just said, you want them to change jurisdiction. You're adding a notable person, Mike Ovitz, to the board of directors, and it seems to have gone nowhere. Can you tell us why you think you have any traction?

ACKMAN: Yeah, we certainly have traction, and the company has actually hired financial advisors. The reason why you haven't heard anything is, you know, the board is handling the company, handling transaction on part of the company. I believe they hired Citigroup and Paul Weiss, so we're taking it pretty seriously. And what really matters is there's one 28 percent shareholder that's going to play a major role, and that's the Bolloré Group. We're certainly in touch with them. Obviously, I can't discuss, we would not have gone forward with this transaction if we did not have, at a minimum, a nod of interest from the French, who are very important shareholders. Importantly, this is not just a change of jurisdiction. This is a complete reboot of the company in terms of how it's positioned in the public markets, right? It goes from being an Amsterdam-listed company to a, you know, New York Stocks Exchange S&P 500-eligible company. A complete recast of the board of directors, to your point on Michael Ovitz, a recast of the balance sheet of the company, a monetization of the Spotify asset, and a commitment to investor relations and a relationship with shareholders that will drive a lot of value. And it's also a transaction that allows people to continue. Everyone also gets a meaningful and effect, like a dividend. You get five. The stock was 16. We announced the transaction. You get five euros. The fact that you haven't heard anything doesn't mean we don't have traction, it means the opposite. It means the board, their advisors, are looking very, very closely at this transaction. And, we'll, obviously, when there's something to announce, we're going to come right back here.

FABER: Yeah, to be continued. We'll be following it closely.

EISEN: And we'll leave it there now. On the big news of the day, Bill. Thank you very much. But we have a lot more to discuss with you, of course, the world. I know you have thoughts on all sorts of other issues out there as it relates to the economy. We've got an interview with Bill Ackman. He'll be joining us live from the Milken Conference on Monday. That's 11 a.m. Eastern, "Money Movers," coming up Monday. But, Bill, thank you.

ACKMAN: Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it.

FABER: See you in a few days.

ACKMAN: Thanks for the time.