Bill Ackman Quotations

Experience is making mistakes and learning from them.

If I believe that I am right, I will take it to the end of the earth until I am proven right.

If you think of the typical Herbalife distributor and their level of sophistication, to this day I still don't understand the marketing plan - true story.

I think a very good system in a world with a lot of passive investors is one in which there are at least a few entrepreneurial investors, prepared to say what they think, prepared to propose a change in management, change in strategy, change in cost structure, capital structure.

I'm not emotional about investments. Investing is something where you have to be purely rational and not let emotion affect your decision making - just the facts.

I am always prepared to do the right thing regardless of what other people think.

Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.

I love what I do. I don't do it for the money. I work on behalf of investors that I like and want to do well for. I'm a competitive person.

I was a little bit of a cocky kid.

I'm an extremely, extremely persistent person. Extremely. And when I believe I am right, and it is important, I will go to the end of the earth.

I think the hedge-fund industry has taken a reputational turn for the worse, this dog-eat-dog stuff. I'm not just talking about Herbalife or J. C. Penney, but in other situations where the media really focuses on who's long and who's short. I don't think it's a good thing for the industry.

Herbalife: the customers are fictitious, the business opportunity is a scam, the university degree is a fraud.

I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy.

The President is the CEO of this business that we call America.

It is a certainty that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. We believe it's harming a population of low-income, principally Hispanic people in the U.S. to benefit a handful of super wealthy people at the top of the pyramid.

If you look at the great frauds of all time, Enron had that phantom trading floor. What Herbalife has is it has phantom or fictitious customers.

Preserving the 30-year prepayable fixed-rate mortgage - it's like the bedrock of the housing system - is critical.

As a result of overdiversification, their (active managers) returns get watered down. Diversification covers up ignorance. Active managers haven't done enough research into any of their companies. If managers have 200 positions, do you think they know what's going on at any one of those companies at this moment?

Short-term market and economic prognostication is largely a fool’s errand, we invest according to a strategy that makes the need to rely on short-term market or economic assessments largely irrelevant.

You can learn investing by reading books.

In order to be successful, you have to make sure that being rejected doesn’t bother you at all.