Permanent capital and patience: Ackman on what makes a great business
Key points
Key takeaways from an In Good Company podcast interview with Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, hosted by NBIM CEO Nicolai Tangen (October 2026):
A great company. A business you could buy today where the markets shut for 20 years and you would still own something enormously valuable a decade or two later — royalty-collecting, annuity-like businesses whose cash doesn't need reinvestment.
Why concentration works. Only a couple hundred to 300 truly great businesses exist, and they rarely become available at prices that make them great investments — hence a concentrated portfolio of roughly 12-14 names.
Permanent capital is the edge. Most asset-management money is redeemable short-term; long-horizon capital like Buffett's or Chris Hohn's is scarce and is what makes the strategy implementable.
The checklist. Pershing Square runs a stone-carved investment framework — predictability, durable cash flows, a moat, and no exposure to uncontrollable commodity, interest-rate or regulatory factors — ignoring short-term earnings events.
A team, not a star system. ~48 people, nine investment professionals, no individual P&Ls: two-person teams go deep on a name and the whole firm forms a collective view, with no decade-ago investment lacking consensus.
AI is shortening market horizons. Ackman sees AI turning market participants shorter-term, while his own AI-linked exposure (Amazon, Meta, Microsoft) is roughly a third of the portfolio — bought on pullbacks after capex disappointments.
Activism evolved. The last activist campaign launched a decade ago; today CEOs thank him for taking a stake, and a single miss can drop a high-quality stock 30-40% given indexation shrinking float and leveraged short-term capital.
Creativity is the human edge. When everyone has access to low-cost super intelligence, what's left for humans is creativity — Ackman doubts AI could derive E=mc² from anything preceding Einstein, and expects an explosion of entrepreneurship and GDP growth.
Read more: In Good Company on YouTube