Rarely does Wall Street offer such a display of bravado as when Bill Ackman, that perennial seeker of lost causes and oversized conference rooms, dips his pen into the Pershing Square ink and scrawls a check for nearly $1 billion. The beneficiary this time? Howard Hughes Holdings (HHH)—not to be confused with the aviator, though one suspects Ackman enjoys a parallel feeling of high-altitude vertigo.
Pershing Square, adopting the motto “Go Big or Go to Your Summer House,” somehow managed to cough up $900 million for a paltry 9 million shares. (At these prices, why not just buy the Statue of Liberty and redecorate?) The purchase represented a 48% premium over last Friday’s share price—a gesture not unlike cashing out your pension to buy Beanie Babies because your cousin said the market’s due for a comeback. With this, Ackman now controls a staggering 46.9% of HHH, which must be like showing up to Monopoly with a gold-plated top hat.
Not content with mere shareholder status, Ackman has ascended to Executive Chairman of the Board, probably just to ensure nobody else moves the fountain pens. He proclaims the company’s value has been “largely unrecognized”—a polite way of saying the market, like an elderly relative, simply refuses to be impressed.
“HHH has built substantial value for shareholders in recent years that has largely gone unrecognized due to the high cost of capital that the market assigns to the Company in light of its pure-play exposure to real estate development and community creation. We believe that HHH is a superb platform to build a faster-growing, high-returning holding company that will acquire control of companies that meet Pershing Square’s criteria for business quality and durable growth.”
If this all sounds uncannily familiar, it may be because Ackman is winking—with both eyes—at Warren Buffett, the Nebraska Oracle and undisputed King of the Letters to Shareholders. In a conversation with Yahoo Finance (which, presumably, still answers his calls), Ackman alludes to his own dreams of transforming a company less glamorous than a dying textile mill into something investors can brag about during brunch.
“The story begins arguably when I began my career. Very early on, Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway letters, beginnings of my investment education. And the story of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett buying basically control of a textile business and then transforming it over time into a diversified holding company.”
With an air of one assembling the world’s most expensive Lego set, Ackman concludes the “ultimate investment dream” is a public company with permanent capital. Why change the world when you can just buy large chunks of it instead?
“You can follow investment principles and build a business of significance. And that’s what Warren has achieved, that’s what we hope to achieve with Howard Hughes.” 🚀
So, is this the dawning of the next great Berkshire? Or merely further confirmation that billionaires get bored, too? Only time—and Ackman’s ever-resourceful PR team—will tell.
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2025-05-08 12:48