Bill Ackman wants to monetize his X account to the tune of $25 billion
Why would someone worth over $9 billion spend so much of their time posting on X? For more money, obviously.
As someone with a self-diagnosed addiction to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, one of my favorite qualities about the site is that it levels the playing field between all of its users. Hedge fund managers, journalists, athletes, self-storage investors, degenerate crypto traders with profile pictures of pixelated primates, tech founders, and anonymous financial meme pages are engaged in a global conversation, and someone who would otherwise never set foot in the same room as a billionaire can elicit a multi-paragraph response from them on X.
One particular hedge fund manager loves chatting on X more than most: Pershing Square CEO and founder Bill Ackman. Ackman, who has 1.3 million followers, does not hesitate to chime in on the “current thing,” previously sharing long monologues advocating for JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon to run for president and calling for former Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign, with the latter having consequences in his personal life. After Ackman asked Harvard to review accusations that Gay had committed plagiarism, , Business Insider investigated Ackman’s wife, former MIT professor Neri Oxman, and found a “similar pattern of plagiarism” in her dissertation.
Why would someone worth ~$9.3 billion spend so much of their time posting on X, especially if that posting impacts their personal life? Perhaps because X is a great platform to fundraise from retail investors. From Bloomberg (emphasis ours):
The 58-year-old billionaire hedge fund manager told institutional investors in briefings ahead of Pershing Square USA Ltd.’s planned initial public offering that he would use his 1.3 million followers on social network X, formerly Twitter, to communicate his ideas, according to people familiar with the matter.
Ackman said the fund will mostly be focused on retail investors, with some institutional interest, according to one of the people. Pershing Square USA aims to raise $25 billion, Bloomberg News has reported — more than his hedge fund’s $19 billion in assets under management.
For what it’s worth, Ackman isn’t the first investor to attempt to monetize their X following. In 2020 and 2021, Social Capital founder and former “SPAC King“ Chamath Palihapitiya regularly tweeted “one-pagers” highlighting his investment theses for different SPACs, and the stock prices of the referenced companies often doubled (or more) as his followers poured money in. Palihapitiya made ~$750 million from SPACs before the SPAC boom ended in 2022, and he has since begun charging his followers $99 a month for a subscription to read his monthly deep dives.
Ackman stands to profit from a successful retail fundraise as well. While Pershing’s $15 billion Europe-listed closed-end fund charges a 1.5% management fee and a 20% performance fee, the US fund will only charge a flat 2% management fee, meaning that larger assets under management will generate larger guaranteed fee revenue. If Ackman hits his $25 billion target, Pershing Square stands to make $500 million per year.
