For Ackman personally, this is one of the ways he can follow in his (unofficial) mentor’s shoes.
Traditional hedge funds like Pershing Square allow investors to pull out their money either quarterly or annually. Therefore, fund managers need to keep cash on hand and may have to sell holdings in case their investors flee.
Through the dual listing, Pershing will instead have access to capital in its closed-end fund that can’t be directly revoked; investors have to sell their shares on the open market instead.
With this move, Ackman is directly channeling the Buffett playbook. Permanent capital—the kind Buffett perfected at Berkshire—has no expiration date, no forced exits, and no investors waiting for a check. Think of it as the Buffett model: Raise capital once, hold forever, and let compounding do the rest.
“Competing against investment managers with short-term capital is an important long-term, sustainable competitive advantage for Pershing Square, particularly in a world where a seemingly ever-increasing proportion of capital is managed with shorter-term investment objectives,” Ackman wrote in the filing.
From a young age, Ackman aimed high. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1988 and then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Soon after graduating he created his own hedge fund with a fellow Harvard graduate that had only $3 million under management and grew with some success before collapsing in the early 2000s.
Yet Ackman was able to rebound from that failure to create his own hedge fund, Pershing Square, which grew an original $54 million seed investment into a firm that today boasts $28 billion in assets under management.
When he started his first hedge fund at 26, Ackman wrote, “I thought that perhaps someday I could build a diversified holding company like Berkshire with an extraordinary long-term record.”
