Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square files for IPO on the NYSE

Outspoken investor Bill Ackman is taking a step toward his long-held ambition to create a publicly traded investment vehicle modeled after Warren Buffett’s approach, filing to list his hedge fund firm Pershing Square Capital Management on the New York Stock Exchange.

Pershing Square filed Tuesday To list on the Big Board under the symbol “PS”. The planned listing would give public investors a stake in Ackman’s investment platform, which oversees a concentrated portfolio of large-cap companies. Brookfield, Uber And Amazon By the end of 2025.

The transaction will include a dual listing structure. Common shares of Pershing Square and shares of its closed-end fund PSUS will trade on the NYSE. The securities will be listed simultaneously but traded separately, allowing investors to buy or sell each independently. The firm noted that there was no previous public market for Pershing Square’s shares prior to the combined offering.

As part of the combined transaction, Ackman aims to raise between $5 billion and $10 billion for PSUS, in which investors could purchase shares at $50 apiece, according to the filing. The firm said it expects to deliver 20 shares of Pershing Square Capital Management’s common stock for every 100 PSUS shares purchased in the IPO at no additional cost.

The investment company said it had committed $2.8 billion before the IPO. The capital comes from a mix of family offices, pension funds, insurance companies and ultra-high-net-worth investors, according to the filing.

The public listing is a move to increase his following among Main Street investors after amassing more than two million followers on social media platform X. Pershing said PSUS will be its first fund marketed to both U.S. individual and institutional investors.

After a plan to raise its closed-end fund to $25 billion to list in 2024 collapsed, Pershing Square turned to increasing its stake in Howard Hughes Holdings as a platform to buy majority stakes in other companies.

Buffett as inspiration

Ackman has often cited Buffett as an inspiration for how he founded and developed his two-decade-old hedge fund management firm. The Pershing Square founder described himself as a “Buffett devotee” and said the 93-year-old investment icon had been his “unofficial mentor” for years and regularly attended Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meetings in Omaha, Nebraska.

The investor noted that Buffett began his career running a series of private investment partnerships (mainly operating as an activist investor and hedge fund manager) before shutting down those funds in the 1960s and taking control of Berkshire Hathaway, then a struggling textile manufacturer. Ackman said the transformation helped shape his own vision for creating a permanent capital investment platform modeled after Berkshire’s long-term compounding approach.

“Permanent capital allows us to take a long-term perspective and be opportunistic during periods of market volatility without being exposed to the need to raise capital by selling assets to meet redemptions during such periods,” the filing said.