Bill Ackman says permanent capital is the edge most managers can't buy — and plans to turn Howard Hughes into an 80% insurer

Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman argues that the ability to think in decades rather than quarters is the structural advantage that makes concentrated investing possible. Speaking on the In Good Company podcast with Nicolai Tangen, who runs the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, Ackman said that "absent being a sovereign wealth fund there's very little capital in the asset management industry that's permanent." Tangen described the resulting edge as "time arbitrage," which he said exists for Norges Bank Investment Management because of its capital base. Ackman contrasted this with high-leverage, shorter-horizon firms such as Citadel and Millennium, which he says cannot tolerate the drawdowns a concentrated strategy requires.

Ackman traced his thinking to Warren Buffett's 1969 decision to dissolve his partnership and take control of a textile mill, trading fee economics for permanence. He said Pershing Square was able to deploy aggressively during the COVID crash because it was not managing month-end redemptions. The firm's process is built around a long-horizon model: Ackman said that if a business cannot be modeled over 10 to 20 years, it cannot be valued, and the firm excludes commodity-, interest-rate-, and regulatory-sensitive businesses. He estimates only about 200 to 300 truly great businesses exist globally.

The firm's team is organized without individual P&Ls. Ideas typically originate when a followed company becomes available at a discount, such as a stock down 40% after an earnings miss. Objections trigger further diligence rather than a vote, and Ackman retains final say. He said he cannot recall an investment in the past decade that lacked a genuine collective view.

On AI, Ackman argued that the technology makes market participants shorter-term and that it will make high intelligence a low-cost commodity, leaving creativity as the differentiator. Pershing Square bought Amazon after the "liberation" tariff announcement, acquired Meta after its capex commitments disappointed investors, and added Microsoft after a similar selloff. Those three names now account for about a third of the portfolio.

Ackman's most concrete forward plan concerns Howard Hughes, which he describes as a capital-heavy developer he intends to convert into an asset-light property company reinvesting into insurance. He expects the company to be 80%-plus insurance and roughly 20% real estate within a decade. To staff the effort, he recruited Mark Brenesen, formerly of Arch Capital Group, David Gansburg, and Lucy Fetto, former vice chairman and general counsel of AIG. The insurance operation currently has not quite $2 billion of capital, making the thesis a measurable test of whether a specialty insurer of that size can earn Buffett-like returns.