Bill Ackman is one of several high-profile billionaires who in April made headlines for their statements regarding President Trump’s tariff-fueled trade war.
After initially expressing concern over the President’s aggressive tariff implementation, Ackman applauded Trump’s subsequent pause on tariffs with America’s trading partners. When Trump then upped tariffs on China while pausing reciprocal tariffs on other U.S. trading partners on April 9th, 2025 — causing the U.S. stock market to briefly skyrocket after previous lows — Ackman tweeted, “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”
Also on the 9th, Ackman reposted an ominous, all-caps tweet — ostensibly about tariffs — from the official White House account that reads like a line from The Empire in Star Wars:
DO NOT RETALIATE AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 9, 2025
Days later, however, another tweet from Ackman seemed to indicate that he would prefer a pause on tariffs against China to allow time for small businesses to make supply chain adjustments. As of this article’s last update, imported products of Chinese origin face tariffs of between 125% and 245%.
Who is Bill Ackman?
Bill Ackman’s success in the financial industry has elevated his profile to the point that his comments and opinions regularly grace headlines, whether they have to do with investing or not. The billionaire, who made his fortune betting on (and against) stocks and other financial instruments via his hedge funds, has become increasingly vocal on a myriad of social and political issues since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Despite his expertise in trading securities, he is now better known as one of the handful of billionaire “talking heads” whose opinions sometimes sway government action due to the influence bestowed by their wealth.
That being said, his firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, is still very much active with over $18.3 billion worth of assets under management. Ackman and his family own 23% of the company, according to a tweet he posted in November of 2024.
Ackman was born rich, and over the course of his career, he’s managed to parlay his initial familial wealth into a 10-figure net worth. So, after more than three decades in the hedge fund business, just how much wealth has Ackman managed to accumulate?
Here’s what the activist investor-turned-political pundit is worth in 2025 and an overview of some of his biggest investments (and opinions).
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What is Bill Ackman’s net worth in 2025?
Ackman’s exact net worth changes frequently since much of his wealth is tied up in his ownership of Pershing Square Capital Management, an entity whose value varies depending on the success of its investments, which themselves gain and lose value on a near-daily basis.
As of mid-April 2025, Forbes estimated Ackman’s wealth at $9 billion, while Bloomberg pegged his net worth slightly lower at $7.7 billion.
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How much does Bill Ackman make as a hedge fund manager?
Like other fund managers, Bill Ackman’s take-home pay depends in large part on the performance of his fund’s investments. In 2023, for instance, Ackman was the seventh highest-paid fund manager in the U.S., bringing home a reported $610 million.
About a third of this sum came from the actual gains in his fund’s portfolio, which held only 10 individual stocks and ended the year up 26.7% (compared to the S&P 500’s return of about 24%). The remainder came from client fees and gains from Ackman’s private funds.
Ackman’s exact 2024 compensation isn’t yet known, but Pershing Capital’s returns were significantly lower that year at about 10.2%, so he likely took home less than he did in 2023.
Bill Ackman’s early life
Bill Ackman was born in 1966 to a wealthy New York family in Chappaqua. His father, Lawrence, a Harvard grad, was the CEO and later the chairman of Ackman-Ziff, a prominent real estate financing firm. (By the mid-90s, he passed the day-to-day operations of the firm onto his successor and went on to continue investing in real estate through his son’s hedge fund before passing away in 2022.)
Ackman’s father’s status as a Harvard alum gave him a legacy advantage, and during his senior year in high school, he was accepted to the legendary Ivy League. In 1988, he graduated magna cum laude with a degree in social studies before moving on to a master’s program at Harvard Business School, which he completed in 1992 before diving headfirst into a lifelong career in investing.
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How did Bill Ackman make his money? His career explained
After finishing grad school, Ackman didn’t spend much time celebrating, and he certainly didn’t take a gap year before diving into the workforce.
Gotham Partners
Alongside fellow Harvard grad David P. Berkowitz, Ackman founded his first hedge fund, called Gotham Partners, in 1992, less than a year after finishing school.
The two upstarts had zero real Wall Street experience, but they nevertheless managed to convince seven or so millionaires and billionaires to trust them with millions of dollars to invest.
Legacy admission wasn’t the only way Ackman benefited from his family’s position in society — some of his firm’s earliest clients were family friends or acquaintances, including the billionaire Ziff family, with whom Ackman’s father had worked for years at his real estate firm, Ackman-Ziff. Another early investor was Ackman’s father himself.
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Handouts and legs up aside, Gotham Partners did very well right out of the gate, delivering a reported 28% return over its first 15 or so months, compared to the S&P 500’s 3.7% gain over that same time period. By the summer of ‘94, the young pair of investors had done well enough to hire an assistant and an intern.
By 1998, Gotham had grown substantially and was managing more than $500 million. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, however, the hedge fund became bogged down with legal troubles involving some of its investors and holdings.
Shorting mortgage-backed security insurance
During the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, Michael Burry of The Big Short fame wasn’t the only investor to profit from the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market. Since 2002, Ackman had been shorting MBIA Insurance Corporation and buying Credit Default Swaps against the company’s debt. In 2008, his strategy came to fruition as MBIA’s debt ratings were lowered and its stock price fell significantly.
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Pershing Square Capital Management
Ackman’s follow-up to Gotham was Pershing Square, at which he remains CEO. He founded this second hedge fund in 2004 using over $50 million of his own money as well as additional funding from Leucadia National, with whom he had partnered in the past.
One of Ackman’s big bets at Pershing was on struggling chain retailer JCPenney. Once a household name and thriving shopping-mall mainstay, the clothing store had begun to lose cultural relevance and market share by the time Ackman invested via Pershing in 2010, buying a whopping 39 million shares at an average price of $22. As a member of the company’s board, Ackman worked to revitalize the aging retailer, but he began to butt heads with other board members and eventually stepped down.
According to a regulatory filing, Ackman sold these shares for around $13, losing nearly $500 million in the process.
Shorting Herbalife
One of the most publicized bets of Ackman’s Pershing career was his massive short of Herbalife (initiated in 2012), a supplement company with a multi-level marketing sales model. Ackman called the business a pyramid scheme and claimed it had no intrinsic value as a stock.
Initially, Ackman’s short worked, and the company’s stock price fell. Soon, however, Carl Ichan, another high-profile investor, challenged Ackman’s thesis on the company in a highly televised battle of the bucks and began buying shares, eventually scooping up over 16% of the company, causing the stock’s price to rise.
Determined to stick things out, Ackman spent a reported $50 million on a barrage of PR and lobbying efforts to sow distrust of Herbalife among investors and the public, earning him accusations of market manipulation for personal gain.
Despite Ackman’s efforts and a subsequent FTC investigation into the company’s sales practices, the stock eventually rebounded, reportedly costing him millions by the time he closed his short position in 2018.
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Is Bill Ackman a Democrat or a Republican?
Ackman is arguably just as notorious for his politics and opinions as he is for his long list of investment hits and misses. Historically, Ackman supported the democratic party and its candidates, but like many other high-profile billionaires, his politics have shifted sharply right in recent years, and he endorsed Trump in 2024’s presidential election.
Ackman has grown increasingly vocal on various right-wing agenda items, including support for DOGE’s efforts to cut jobs and funding provided by the federal government and his opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives (DEI) in schools and workplaces.
Ackman also regularly retweets material endorsing the Trump Administration’s 2025 efforts to use agencies like CBP to initiate unprecedented deportation proceedings aimed at legal residents who have participated in protests against Israel’s ongoing assault on Palestinian citizens and infrastructure, which an Amnesty International investigation has deemed a genocide.
In the past, Ackman has championed initiatives that were more closely associated with the democratic party, including supporting shutdowns and vaccinations in response to 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic.
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