The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has always been a master of media access.
He knows how to get publicity on CNBC, mostly good over the years, as he’s weaved his way in and around one minefield (Herbalife) after another (Valeant), despite losing billions of dollars along the way.
In the past five years, though, his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, is up 195 percent, thanks in part to an ingenious $27 million Covid-themed hedge that generated some $3.6 billion in three weeks in and around March 2020. In the same time period, his hero Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Holdings is only up 58 percent. The S&P 500 is up 47 percent. The publicly traded holding company controlled by his nemesis, Carl Icahn, is down 72 percent, Pcuk reports.
Now Ackman is back with a new variety of SPAC that he’s calling a SPARC, or “special purpose acquisition rights company,” and he is once again chumming the waters. On Sunday, just two days after the SEC gave its approval to the company, Ackman got a huge free advertisement for it by telling The Wall Street Journal that he would “absolutely” want to do a deal using his new SPARC to buy Elon Musk’s private company, X, which the rest of us still call Twitter. That got a whole lot of media attention, of course, including a sit-down Monday morning on CNBC with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Needless to say, Wall Street now knows that Ackman’s SPARC is open for business and on the make for a big deal. Read more.
