Grubstakers - Episode 11: Bill Ackman

Episode Date: April 16, 2018

On episode 11 we talk about hedge fund billionaire and star of the documentary Betting on Zero, Bill Ackman. Hear not only of his inspiring story betting that Herbalife would go down to zero dollars in value but his own quest to reduce his personal net worth to that amount through a bitter divorce and a terrible investment in the fraudulent Valeant pharmaceuticals. We had to release this one now because at $1.08 billion and falling he won't qualify to have an episode made about him much longer!

Today on Grubstakers, we're going to be talking about Bill Ackman, the charismatic star of the Netflix documentary, Betting on Zero. We're going to be talking about his humble beginnings, his feud and tempestuous relationship with Carl Icahn, as well as how he's a crusader for people who have been screwed by Herbalife, and simultaneously the Martin Scorelli of people not named Martin Scorelli. So settle in and buckle up, because it's time for some Grubstakers. Because of my success in the private sector, I had the chance to run America's largest city for 12 years. I taught those kids lessons on product development and marketing.

They taught me what it was like growing up and feeling targeted for your race. And that's just not true. You know, I love having the support of real billionaires. Hey everybody, welcome to Grubstakers. We're back, we're back at it right here. Sean P. McCarthy, joined as always by my friends. Steve Jeffrey. Andy Palmer.

Yogi Poywalt. And today we're going to be talking about Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire and star of the Netflix documentary Betting on Zero, which is the fascinating story of his bet against Herbalife. And we're going to kind of go over that and just other things that are not quite talked about in the documentary. And, you know, hopefully we can do that all before Trump blows up the world. I was thinking about this the other day because we talked about this in the group chat is that like we, it would take us 19,

there's about 2000 billionaires in the world. And the goal in this podcast, I think is I would like to cover and just provide a resource to learn about all of the billionaires in the world. It would take us about 19 years. And I'm realizing we might have to truncate it a bit. Just like we might have to like compress multiple people into one episode

or do like 20 minutes each in the interest of getting this all done before New York City is a, what do you call it, a parking lot? Sure, sure. Teenage wasteland, if you will. But yeah, we hope we will be doing a special. You don't get a term as Bob O'Reilly. Wait, we're continuing the pod if we get attacked, right? Yeah, I hope. We'll be doing a special... You'll be the term as Boppa O'Reilly. Wait, we're continuing the pod if we get attacked, right? Yeah, I think so.

The sound quality might go down. You might hear like screams and cries in the background and kind of a tinny sound. We have EMP-proofed our equipment. You just need to own a can and string and you can get on our network. If I started my work day and then there's a nuclear explosion,

assuming I survive, my first question would be, so I guess the pod's off this week? We're like, no, Stephen. You gotta get out of the fallout shelter. We promise them new episodes every Sunday. This is how you lose

audience when you don't consistently put out episodes after a nuclear attack. It's quantity. It's consistency. Sean and I do in our de facto fallout shelter, which is our basement, we do have podcasting equipment down there.

So it's just Andy and I this week. It looks like Steven and Yogi were melted In the event But we're going to talk about Carl Icahn All his net worth is now non-existent Because the banking system has collapsed But he was technically

A billionaire We did the research You may know Carl Icahn as one of the Haunting shadows In downtown Manhattan and we did the research. You may know Carl Icahn as one of the haunting shadows in downtown Manhattan of people who have been incinerated. Yeah, I don't know if you saw that black splotch on a wall, but that used to be Carl Icahn on the side of the Chase building. Before all the bombs, we had about eight printers

printing all of Wikipedia, so we really made sure to cover our bases on the research. But yeah, so next weekend, I think the plan is we're going to do a special episode on the weapons industry, and we'll talk a bit more about, you know, Trump's bombing of Syria and that whole situation there. But today, we're

talking about Bill Ackman. And Bill Ackman, again, the documentary on Netflix, I really recommend. It's very good, pretty depressing. It's called Betting on Zero. And they talk a bit about Herbalife's business practices and this big short sell bet that Bill Ackman made against them. He ultimately lost a lot of money.

I don't know why Sean thought it was depressing. I found it very uplifting. The Herbalife, how they're helping the Latino community start small businesses that go under in like a year. I do want to say that we started this podcast with the question, is there a good billionaire? Yeah. And I watched the documentary and I was like, yeah, it's Bill Ackman. He's a hero.

And I think we can wrap this up for good. It's nice. Like if you watch the documentary and know nothing else about Bill Ackman, he comes away pretty well. He does, yeah. And the episode today, I think, will talk about some of the other things that Bill Ackman does. But I guess just to bring people up.

What? Yeah. Believe it or not, a guy worth more than a billion dollars, more things have happened to him than just the two-year span of his life chronicled in a Netflix documentary. No, he's saving the Latino community. I mean, not everyone's cut out for business, Sean. The Latino community is not being swindled by these billionaires.

They just need to work harder. Pick themselves up by their chomp. Okay, so I guess we should start from the beginning here. So if you haven't seen the documentary, basically it goes through Herbalife's business practices and Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. I mean, allegedly or whatever. It's a multi-level marketing company. Right. Which for some reason, there's like a distinction between like the good kind of multi-level marketing well the idea with the ftc the federal trade commission their their way of setting this out is that if they make more of

their money by recruiting other people into it than they do by actually selling their products then that's when it passes from a multi-level marketing scheme into a pyramid scheme right there's a very thin line between the two and it's pretty clear that there are multiple huge pyramid schemes particularly herbalife and amway operating completely unhindered today um allegedly uh you know it's sort of like send those cease and desist notices to yogi pollywall it's like if they you had uh you bought a mcdonald's franchise and the only way you could make money off of your mcdonald's franchise was selling three of your friends' McDonald's franchises. The only way they could make money is by selling three of their friends' McDonald's franchises.

And you only make burgers for other McDonald's franchisees. Yeah. To convince them to open McDonald's franchises. Right. A product to sell to other people. Right, right. But yeah, so just to like, and kind of what they go through in this documentary is among other things, you know, Herbalife has had a lot of sales pitches

where they tell people, oh, you can become a millionaire or you can make any amount of money. And then they go through very clearly in the documentary like how this is a pyramid scheme where they say like 1% of Herbalife members get 88% of all the money. And I remember watching it and I'm being like,

oh, that's the U.S. economy. Like, oh, oh, so that's the pyramid scheme is they just mirror the actual U.S. economy. But yeah, so it's kind of interesting where it's like the way it actually works is like you get money from sales made by your downstreams. And Amway kind of works the same way where Herbalife has these nutritional products,

the protein bars. Allegedly nutritional products. The protein bars, the powder shakes, and all these things. And essentially, they just sell them for like three times the cost that you get like a SlimFast or whatever other market alternative.

But you can't buy these in stores anywhere. You can only buy these from actual Herbalife vendors. They're actually prohibited from selling to retail stores. Right, right. Shopping malls. Right. So these vendors, they can sell these products that are not that good and three times the price of comparables,

but the real way they make money is recruiting other people to sell their products because everybody they recruit, they get a cut of their sales. And it just goes higher and higher up the pyramid. And it's a pyramid scheme. I will say the ballsiest pyramid scheme is probably Cutco. Because their pyramid scheme is selling knives. Right. Most people in Cutco aren't making a lot of money

or losing money, and now they have lots of knives. Yeah, and they just found out that they got screwed and have a lot of very sharp knives. With Herbalife, I don't think they said, they didn't have much bad to say about the actual product. I mean... They said it was like

overpriced Slimfast, basically. It cost a little too much. It costs three times as much on average. At one point, Bill in the doc says, like, have you tried... One of the interviewers, I think it was CNBC, says, like, have you tried their products? Like, no. I've heard some shady stuff about how they make their stuff.

I mean, like, the reality is that, you know, you can put a powder in a box and say it's healthy, and just off the placebo effect, it could work. And nobody's using these products, so it doesn't need to work as well. They're just selling it to each other. Yeah. Within the Herbalife company, sort of.

It's kind of like selling off a jerk-off glove. No one's going to use it, but you can pretend like it's got its own lube. And trust me, it's good for your butt, too. Don't badmouth jerk-off gloves on our podcast. Have you guys been a part of a pyramid scheme ever? Any of y'all? When I first moved to New York, some dude tried to...

I didn't have a job, and I was looking on Craigslist, and some guy's like, yeah, hey, meet me at a coffee shop. I got a job. And then he tries to recruit me to Amway. And at the time, I didn't really know about it. So I was like, all right, well, I'm going to do some research. And he's like, well, you shouldn't just Google us. And he actually said to me, I remember this, he said,

you know, if you Google Oprah, you'll read bad things about Oprah. That's so funny. Oh, is Oprah engaged in a multi-level marketing scheme? Bill Ackman noticed that Herbalife was, in fact, a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme. And that forms the basis of his idea to short the company. Yeah, well, and so we mentioned the storefronts and recruiting the Latino community. Just like another interesting thing in that documentary is like they talk about how Herbalife sales, you know, a lot of it focused on like Spanish speaking people and undocumented people, because interestingly enough, when those people get scammed, they're

not as likely to go to the authorities. Right. And, you know, of course, you know, all this belief and, you know, American dream and hard work and they, you know, everybody responds to the sales pitch that like, if you just work super hard, you can make money when you're all the way starting at the bottom of the pyramid. Yeah. In the doc, they also talk about like how how when you get fucked over, you feel so terrible you don't want to tell anyone until you find out that, oh, other people got fucked over.

Then I want to admit that I got fucked. Well, it's really embarrassing to realize that you're just not hustling hard enough. You just didn't rise and grind enough. You got to grind. You got to grind. You did the rising, but not every day you did the grinding. But my favorite shit they do in that documentary, and you see this all the time with just how amorphous woke politics are, is at various points Herbalife spokespeople are accused of predatory practices

against the Latino community, and they get really defensive, and and they say like, well, it's just racist to imply that our Latino customers do not know what they are doing. I just think it's so condescending that these people think that we are preying on undocumented non-English speakers because they're saying that they're less intelligent or whatever. Yeah, at one point one of them was like, a grocery store opens in a poor community and people applaud it. And we're doing the same thing by providing nutrition to poor people. We're charging three times more. I don't see the problem. Oh, God. But yeah, I mean Herbalife is a terrible company.

But Bill Ackman, who's really the subject of this episode um he makes a bet a short sale bet let's let's describe a short sell real quick yeah so if i had to break it down in so few words it's um selling high and buying low so you're borrowing stocks from someone at maybe at a premium or something that you don't own and then you sell them high i'll loan you my stocks you'll pay me some interest for them yeah you're taking out a loan basically you sell the stock with the idea that it'll go down and then when you buy it back you'll spend less money on it and so you'll be able to take a cut of the amount you sold it for right so at the end of that whole process the other the person the broker who helped lend you the stock gets it back and

just for the premium right but and then the uh the problem with that is like you can lose a lot of money if the stock goes up because you've borrowed it and you're liable for the difference if the stock price goes up instead of with a long what'd you do with it sean shut up you borrow you dug a deep hole with it. Did you have some maple syrup in your throat, Sean? No more making fun of how I pronounce words on the podcast. Fucking Putin, drop the H-bomb now. Don't say that too loud.

We're literally recording this. So it's inherently risky because you could lose an infinite number because the stock price could go up to whatever right and it could only fall to zero because eventually you have to buy it back and so you have to have the amount of money to pay for that stock right yep and the more the stock price goes up above whatever price you struck it at with the the broker the like increasingly more you have to pay due to how highly leveraged you are.

And I learned this from shorting penny stocks. It's going to go to a fraction of a penny. Yeah. And it turns out that putting $20,000 into shorting penny stocks makes you liable for $5 million. $5 million. Andy used to go by Gustavo.

All right. Well, so yeah. So the point of this documentary is I think in 2014 or 2015, Bill Ackman makes this big short sale bet against Herbalife. He has a series of presentations about how Herbalife is a pyramid scheme, and he tries to get

regulators involved. And at the end, which I think we'll go through the timeline later, but he ends up losing about a billion dollars on this bet. Right. And it's partly owned. And there's a variety of factors for it, but one

of which is that Carl Icahn is another billionaire who we'll talk about on a future episode. The killmonger of the documentary. The real hero. Him and Bill Ackman had a dispute like 10 years before the events. And then he sees that Bill Ackman is in a big uh... short sell position any realizes oh i can just spend billions of dollars buying the stock and make him lose money because as we discussed that's what happens when stock price goes up short selling up the like men describes uh...

or how car like on car like i like them is car like on describes bill acme and i'm telling you like the crybaby in the schoolyard. You know, I went to a tough school in Queens, and they used to beat up the little Jewish boys, and he was like one of these little Jewish boys. This is a great CNBC phone interview with both of them where they yell at each other for 30 minutes,

and this is in the middle of the Herbalife thing. And they play. You said to me, you'd like to be friends so that we could invest together. Carl, I have no interest. Do you think I want to invest with you? Okay, let's move on.

I want to invest with you. Let's move on. You're the last man on Earth. So they're BFFs. Yeah. They should do a series called Investment Activists Getting Coffee.

But yeah, maybe when the nuke comes, they will be the last men on earth and they can invest together. I would watch a series with both of them. They get a fire starting company, a rock structure company. You're going to insult me and I'm going to insult you and we're going to make money on the stock market. And then we're going to fuck because we have needs. There's no one else here. But so I guess... When I said beat up

Jewish boys, I meant beat off Jewish boys. They would whine. Move on, Chuck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently Eichmann was uh jewish and that makes his comment his okay yeah it's not anti-semitic it's just anti himself it's it's self-hating anti-semitism no you don't understand andy he didn't like the crying jewish boys not all the jewish boys just the crying ones you can say any group sucks if you just add certain adjectives

before it. The crying Mexicans. That's what Herbalife said. We don't like the crying Latinos. Man, I hate to go back to it, but in that doc, there is that one scene where one of the Mexican store owners who's left shows you the dude who fucked him over

and that guy comes out and is like, oh hey! And then realizes, oh there's a camera in that car. I just want to go back inside my store. But this dude, you see him drive off, you're just like, motherfucker, I can drive up to your store whenever I want. There's a very Sopranos feel to how that part of the documentary plays out.

Well, so Bill Ackman, and we mentioned in the documentary, and he's worth, as of today, April 2018, Forbes has him at $1.08 billion. In 2015, he was like $2 billion. Can we short bet against Bill Ackman's net worth? Just his personal net worth, yes. Yeah, no, I mean, he seems to not be doing so great,

which we'll get into. But a funny thing, so as we mentioned, he's kind of like doing so great, which we'll get into. But a funny thing. So as we mentioned, he's kind of like comes off as the hero in the documentary, but just like a few funny scenes. One funny scene I liked. At the end, he visits this Latino church of people who have been harmed by Herbalife. And, you know, because he's like the person making this crusade against Herbalife, it's like a come together moment. And he talks about the testimonials and how emotional it is.

And I remember there's a man there who tells him that he lost $20,000 in Herbalife. And Bill Ackman's so sympathetic. And I'm like, this guy could just give him $20,000. Like right now, it would be like if somebody was telling me, I lost my net worth of $1.

I could just reach into my wallet and be like okay you'll be all right but bill ackman you know and all billionaires really are just so divorced from the world that they're not like oh i could just write a check for twenty thousand dollars you know it's how much i spend in a fucking restaurant on a weekend yeah that's the thing that's really crazy about this is you know to be a good billionaire you just have to help yourself yeah like in the in reality of it it's like a bad billionaire fucks everyone and benefits a good billionaire is like i'm kind of helping everyone but mostly myself like literally every person ackman talks to in this you he could give you know a couple of grand and they would be much better off and honestly he could have not made this documentary and just given them money and never talked about any of this i would appreciate

it that's not his style though he's at eight days uh they talked about him like he's a master manipulator of the media right which is a great phrase right it's uh he does have a talent for it he's a he's a moderately charismatic guy guy, and journalists like him because he's got the Anderson Cooper look and all that. He seems like he knows what he's talking about. There's this Business Insider article talking about top five tips about... Not tips. Let me take that entire thing again. There's this Business Insider article about the top things you don't know about him, and one of them says, him quoting himself,

I'm a good conversationalist, Ackman once said. How do you get such a good conversationalist? It comes from a lot of blind dating. That's his... Yeah, I've been trying to slang my dick around New York for a while. And you know what? It makes you good to start talking about yourself. Okay, Cupid.

Yeah, right. Here's a picture from Machu Picchu. How'd you become such a good conversationalist? Oh, I've got herpes like four times. You see, being a billionaire in New York, you gotta learn how to slang that dick, you know what I mean? Even though I'm in a relationship for 25 years, more importantly though, the women I blind dated before that

is what made me such a good conversationalist. I'm a great conversationalist because I'm cheating on my wife. You meet so many interesting women when you cheat on your wife. You learn people you'd never learn about. But so I guess let's get into

the biography just to kind of go through the timeline of Bill Ackman's life. He's born in 1966 in Chappaqua, New York. And this guy had a very privileged upbringing. His grandfather founded a real estate financing firm that's today, it's still operational, known as Ackman Ziff Real Estate Group, LLC.

His grandfather... Ackman Ziff? His grandfather founded this real estate... real estate podcast in the 90s his grandfather founded this in 1926 so this is a uh a long history and then his fan his father took over and was president of this uh before his father leaves in 2011 to go work at uh bill ackman's company his son's company um and so he is uh so his father has an mba from harvard uh bill ackman also has an mba from harvard that's right he uh he gets a magna cum laude uh ba in history from harvard in 1988 Bill Ackman does. And would you like to know the name of his thesis? Yeah.

Scaling the Ivy Wall, the Jewish and Asian American experience in Harvard admissions. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I went to a tough school in Queens. I used to beat up the little Jewish boys. Say the thesis again. Say the title of that bullshit. Scaling the Ivy Wall.

The Jewish and Asian American experience in Harvard admissions. That is disgusting. That is one of the worst things I've ever read. And I've never even read that. That's terrible. Scaling the Ivy Wall. I like that.

Man, that's so funny. I mean, personally, as an indian person i hate this because asia is literally a good quarter of the world and the jewish population is less than the population in new york and it's like i think it's very frustrating that those two groups are being tied in this article as if somehow the experience of jewish people and asian people are similar in that way yeah no i mean it's just kind of funny to me because, like, I haven't read his thesis statement because why would I do that to myself? But just the title itself, like, Scaling the Ivy Wall, it's like your father has an MBA

from Harvard. Oh, I'm sure it was so hard for you to get into Harvard. So... Father, they are making me write a statement of purpose, father. Um, and so there was actually, uh, you told me there'd be no wall to scale. This is good content for my thesis. I must go to the study. Matilda.

Um, so, uh, uh, there was a forward.com article, um, where, uh, uh, both article where both Bill Ackman and his father sat down together for like a talk in New York, I think in 2015. And so Ackman Ziff Real Estate, it's a privately held company. It still exists. We don't know like how much business they did and these kinds of things. But we do know that when Ackman went to start his first hedge fund, Gotham Partners, he was able to just get $3 million to start a hedge fund, which again... It's a common theme. Yes, a common theme. Through family and friends.

Yeah, through family and friends. Small donations. It should become a meme on this show. It reflected his early dream to become the Penguin. But so they do this father-son talk together, and he talked a bit about Ackman Ziff real estate, and his father said it really got prosperous after the Korean War. Again, it was founded in 1926, but I'm just quoting from forward here.

His father says it really got prosperous after the Korean War with demand for apartments in Manhattan. He describes all the different parcels sold to developers, deal after deal after deal. Does he say why the Korean War? I guess all the returning troops or the economic boom. You see, Andy, when you have to cross this ivy wall, and you're Jewish or Asian,

you really learn to appreciate the dichotomy between the two. Matilda, by the way, isn't her real name. It's Lupe. But the family calls her Matilda. It turns out all the shell-shocked GIs who constantly had flashbacks of the 500 Chinese people, each one killed,

were very easy to screw over with upscale rent. Yeah, they became prosperous after the Korean War because they took a deal with the CIA to help throw a guy out of one of their apartment windows to cover up biological warfare. After that, In-Q-Tel became their largest shareholder. Wait a second isn't also that the era when like redlining became a big thing yeah probably yeah but but we digress yes we do

digress the point is um uh the company was started in 26 uh it had some trouble in the great depression but it came out of the great depression in 39, and then by the end of the Korean War in 1953, it was extremely profitable and doing well. So Bill Ackman was born in 1966. He was born into a lot of privilege. And the one other great quote from this joint father-son talk is Bill Ackman talking about his career path. So he graduates from Harvard, uh, in 1988. And he recalls in this forward article, he says, quote, I couldn't get a job when I graduated from Harvard. So I went to work for my dad.

I worked for you for two years, uh, then went to business school and you wanted me to come back. And I came back for one week, then chose to go out on my own. So basically, you know, his,

his struggle was he couldn't find a job after he graduated from Harvard. So he went to work for his father's multi-million dollar real estate financing firm. And then he had $3 million to go found his own hedge fund. Papa, I enjoy the buildings too. The job market, it's so hard

when you're a white Jewish man. Just like it is for the Asians. I wrote about it in my thesis. So Bill asked... Full disclosure, after college I also went to work for my dad, and it was part-time and minimum wage. I told actually a mutual friend of ours who might listen, Nam, that, and he just laughed in my face and was like,

man, there is no nepotism there. Maybe your father just doesn't love you enough, Andy. Your father never taught you how to scale the IV wall. I once got a raise when minimum wage got increased. I'm just imagining Andy's... Your dad will only pay you what's legally required. Right. I'm imagining Andy's father like bitching about having to pay him more i guess i gotta give my useless son ten dollars an hour now you try to start

politicians it was it was nine andy just comes in and there's like a milton friedman article on his dad about how the minimum wage is like price controls and price controls never work i did tell my dad i'm like i'm getting a raise he's like yeah that's just because the state legislature wanted you to get one um all right so uh bill ackman gets an mba from harvard in 1992 and uh the same year he graduates he starts gotham partners his first hedge fund uh in 1992 with harvard classmates classmate david berkowitz as we mentioned, thank you for the job dad, by the way, as we've mentioned,

according to routers and some other people, they had about 3 million in startup capital, friends and family. And they did mediocre. Friends and family is a trust fund, by the way. If we have time at the end, we'll talk a little bit just about the hedge fund business in general.

But just to give you the long and short, like the model... So the hedge fund model is usually called the 2 in 20 model. And the idea is that, though they've had to decrease their fees recently, but the idea is that a hedge fund, you put your money there

and they charge you 2% a year of all assets that you put with them. And then they charge you 20% of all profits they make for you. And if you compare that to, say, an equities traded fund or an exchange traded fund with the S&P 500, for example, then the management fee is 0.1% a year. And they don't charge you a cut of the profits. It can be higher, but, yeah, it's overall much cheaper than your average hedge fund. Right, and we were talking earlier about how hedge funds are kind of like a value transfer scheme

between the bourgeoisie, where it's like he's able to raise $3 million because he knows a lot of rich people, and they can invest in there. And I think my opinion is successful hedge funds are basically entirely based around insider trading. Maybe a controversial opinion, but this is from what I've read of it. So Gotham Partners starts in 92, and they have some kind of mediocre returns. They lose money some years, some years. And this is the 90s boom, by the way. Some years they make like 14% gain.

But again, the stock market s&p 500 will be doing like close to that without you know any fees or without significant fees um but what does uh gotham partners in is uh they buy a golf course uh a golf company that's losing money. In 1997, they buy a golf course operator and rename it to Gotham Golf. And then this is from Business Insider. They were taken down by the Batman. From Business Insider, as time passed, the value of its assets declined,

but Ackman and his partner kept buying up more golf courses. The company got bigger and deeper into debt. You won't get away with buying all these golf courses. So basically... You were raised in a golf course. I was born

there. Your punishment must be more severe. You will watch the masters. Even when Taiga's not participating. Okay, you can all riff on this, but not Palantir. Okay, so...

We have to read the summary. No one joined me in... You can't do a Bane riff on Palantir. It doesn't make any sense. So according to the New York Times, Gotham Golf eventually accounted for 20% of the firm's assets, the fund's assets. It sank deeper into trouble.

From 2000 to 2002, According to the New York Times Gotham Partners hedge fund Lent Gotham Golf $15.4 million So they keep lending money To this money losing golf operation They keep buying up more golf courses And then finally

Bill Ackman comes up with the idea To merge So he owns They also owned this company Finally, Bill Ackman comes up with the idea to merge. They also owned this company, First Union Real Estate Equity and Mortgage, according to Business Insider. Bill Ackman comes up with the idea to merge his golf company with this cash-rich equity and mortgage company. But the shareholders of the equity mortgage company sue to stop the merger from going through a judge blocks it temporarily and then gotham partners runs out of money essentially so you're saying gotham partners is in the hole in one so bill ackman has to wind down the hedge fund in 2002, but not before engaging in a potential pump and dump scheme.

Gotham Partners, because they're losing all this money on this golf company, they don't have any liquid assets. So they start having to sell things. So weird things happens where Gotham throughout, I think, late 2002 keeps issuing like glowing reports about this company prepaid and, you know,, this is a quote from the New York Times, although the Gotham website still carried a recommendation for prepaid and an estimated per share value of 67, Gotham Partners began selling, shedding 10% of its position at around $30 a share. And then they eventually sell the rest of it at the end of December. And then on December 23, the research and the buy recommendation disappears from their website. Oh, really? Yeah.

You see, the lower the score, the better you're doing. But basically, the idea is what happened here is you can either say they're doing a pump and dump where they're putting out all this information with buy recommendations and talking about how great this company is while they're selling it. But they would argue and they have argued that, oh, we were in a tough position and we needed liquid assets, so we were only selling it because we had nothing else to sell. And Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York at the time, looked into this. He ultimately didn't charge them criminally, but it was kind of a black mark and it was, you know. Why does it got to be black? It's kind of a black mark and it was uh you know why's it gotta be black it's kind of a jewish mark what you think of the board meeting cut that there you're editing shot

you think of the board meeting they're like well uh returns have not been on par and then they all have a good laugh you know no but we are losing money as someone who read uh like four articles on this i will say road reuters has the headline judge calls four so uh andy palmer's humor would make him a great newspaper man i've been saying that for a long time print is dead well they use golf rules for the eps estimate the lower the better but so yeah gotham partners goes under and then uh as we mentioned carl icon this is where the feud develops so basically um as he's going down in 2003 uh ackman enters in this deal with carl icon uh and then ackman real haldeman ehrlichman yes duo but uh ackman says so basically carl icon won't pay him like they enter into this deal that if preconditions are met um icon's supposed to uh sell it's like they called it schmuck insurance basically if icon were to sell shares within

three years um and make a profit of 10 or. Him and Ackman would split the proceeds. Icahn does, but then he just refuses to give Ackman money, which is kind of funny. You know, alpha move. And then, of course... You know, I went to a tough school in Queens. I used to beat up the little Jewish boys. But so Ackman sues, and eventually, eight years later, Icahn is forced to pay Ackman four and a half million plus nine percent interest per year since the date of the sale.

So Ackman sues him and eventually gets his money. But this is like this causes a big feud between them. And eventually it will cause Icon to just fuck him over on the Herbalife deal. Petty. Oh, yeah. So petty. It's the greatest thing because again like today Carl Icon's worth something like 17 plus billion dollars and again this is

4.5 million dollars that he owed to him. Right. And again this is just like Most people that's like two dollars or something. Right exactly and he's just like no fuck you. Yeah. I'm running up my high score. But yeah no just like kind of a fun... Always be hustling.

The best thing is, so this hedge fund collapses and winds down in 2003. And then, of course, because there's no consequences to being a failure if you're like born on, you know, third base. He's immediately, in 2004, able to start another hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management he starts in no he said Sorrel he starts Pershing Square Capital Management it's a little bit of both if you do it right

a year after the failure he starts Pershing Square Capital Management in 2004 which is quoting from Wikipedia with $54 million in funding from his personal funds and former business partner uh lacadia national he starts pershing square capital management in 2004 and uh well just to uh i guess skip ahead uh pershing square is uh capital management is not doing so well today the hedge fund i'm just quoting from forbes here

the 8.8 billion dollar hedge fund has underperformed the s&p 500 by 20 percent for three years straight nice and uh the year before that uh starts 2014 they post a respectable 40 percent gain uh which would ultimately lead to an insider trading case uh that they have to settle in a california lawsuit uh which we'll talk about briefly but um basically they do mediocre well they actually do pretty good and all in most terms but eventually they make some horrible deals and i want to talk a bit about the insider trading case, because that leads into the other thing they did, which is kind of a Martin Shkreli move. So in 2014, Pershing enters into a secret deal with Valiant Pharmaceuticals, which we'll talk about more. But so Valiant Pharmaceuticals wants to buy this company Allergan, which was the makers of Botox.

And so the idea is that Valiant doesn't have the capital by themselves. Steven, we can hear your breathing. Yes, Steven. Sorry, I was just like... I'm just incensed by this. I understand. I just wanted to point that out. But so, okay, the timeline of this is in February 2014, Pershing and Valiant Pharmaceuticals enter in this deal where Pershing's going to buy 9% of Allergan, and then Valiant is going to announce a hostile takeover and take over the company.

So in February 2014, Pershing does buy the 9% stake for $3 billion. In April, Valiant announces their hostile takeover and a $45 billion bid. And of course, this shoots the stock price up. Eventually, Allergan is sold instead to a Dublin company for $66 billion. And Persian Capital is able to cash out after this stock price has been pushed all the way up. But essentially, this is alleged to be insider trading, and eventually they settled the insider trading case because Persian Capital knew that the pharmaceutical company Valiant was going to make a hostile takeover bid in April and bid up the stock price.

And so using that non-public information, they bought a large stake in February. And eventually they were sued by shareholders and they settled for $270 million, I believe. And so basically that's just kind of like a classic case of insider trading. And I think this kind of thing is pretty endemic in Wall Street and hedge funds in general. Yeah, that was in the year that they returned 40%. Right, yes. So, I mean, if so i mean that's uh if you just say that's a cost of doing business it's still a pretty good year but yes so essentially

that was the last year of good returns they had was the year that they did this kind of insider trading scheme um but so what happens after this is after he enters into after bill ackman enters in this deal with valiant pharmaceuticals he wants to uh invest in valiant pharmaceuticals itself so in march 2015 about a year after span to prince valiant pharmaceuticals in march 2015 uh pershing uh capital uses comics to guide his investments uh so in march 2015 bill ackman enters into the worst deal of his career he he buys uh he begins buying uh valiant pharmaceuticals eventually acquires almost a 10 stake uh for about 3.2 billion dollars and as well as beetle bailey construction uh uh two years later he would take a four billion dollar loss

on this um basically valiant uh peaks at 200 he buys it at 190 a share it peaks at 260 a share and he sells it for 11 a share in april 2018 uh as of today it's around $17. And so the reason is Valiant is kind of a Martin Shkreli company. If I can just find this New York Times quote here. In interviews, he said he regretted not investing in get fuzzy weapons manufacturers or Foxtrot consulting solutions. He did take a short... Jughead Logistics? Yeah. All right.

So basically, Valiant's business practice... Jughead Logistics? Valiant's business practice, which... That's great. Valiant's business practice, which he fully knew about going into this, is basically buying up existing drugs and existing drug companies and

pharmaceuticals uh laying off all their employees to achieve savings and then jacking up the prices of drugs that they own that's classic corporate raider yeah behavior yeah right fire everyone and jack up prices didn't they cut out all research as well yes yes it's kind of fun so i'm quoting from october 4, 2015 New York Times article. Valiant is known for buying companies and laying off their employees to achieve savings. It's accumulated a debt of about $30 billion. It spends

an amount equivalent to only 3% of its sales on research and development, which it views as risky and inefficient compared with buying existing drugs. Traditional big drug companies spend 15-20% of sales on research and development. Valiant also pays extremely low taxes because it is officially based in Canada, although its CEO, Michael Pearson, operates from New Jersey. And Mr. Pearson, I believe, was the highest paid CEO in Canada.

He was making something like a hundred-some billion a year. What? Sorry, a hundred-some billion a year. What? Sorry, a hundred-some mil. That makes more sense, Sean. Yeah, I know. Jesus. What if he was making a hundred-some bill, but he had like a crippling jet ski addiction? Jet skis, eh?

Yeah. He would just, you know, buy them, buy the thousands, and then try to ride every single one over the course of a week. Rig them all up together? Yeah. Incidentally, Bill Ackman's had a divorce as well. I don't know, Sean, do you want to talk about what you're talking about? I want to do some more reading.

Wait, first I want to note something that's kind of great is that the story of Valiant Pharmaceuticals, we talked about Bill Ackman having a whole documentary about him short selling Herbal Life. Right. We talked about Bill Ackman having a whole documentary about him short selling herbal life. Right. The Valiant Pharmaceuticals story is actually chronicled in a different Netflix documentary about a trader who was short selling Valiant Pharmaceuticals, which makes Bill Ackman the only person that I know of to have a netflix documentary both on him taking a short position and being shorted on uh why he's an ex-buffet he's just making moves shaking things but so basically we'll just a little bit more on valiant before we move on but basically the valiant business model again this is also is... Also, unlike his Herbalife position, the Valiant one is actually in Dirty Money, spoiler,

a success story for the shorter. The Valiant company, so its business model is the Martin Shkreli model, which, again, is a lot of different companies. Shkreli is just the fall guy for this business model. But just two cases, two heart medications. The United States House Committee looked into this. Two heart medications it had just bought the rights to sell,

NitroPress and Isoprel. Valiant had raised the prices of NitroPress by 212% and Isoprel by 525%. I thought NitroPress was that energy drink. I thought that... People need that to live. Come on. It acquired salix

pharmaceuticals in 2015 it raised the price of the diabetes pill uh glumataz about 800 percent in one year uh again this is all totally fine like wall street loves this what actually did valiant in and crashed this the the um the Senate and the House looking into it didn't help. But what really did it was massive accounting fraud. Oh, really? Yeah. So what happens is in October 2015, a short-seller activist looks into this, Citro Research,

run by Andrew Left, who publishes a short-se seller newsletter warning about companies he believes are fraudulent. So he looks into this company, and in October 2015, he finds out that Valiant has been secretly buying up different pharmacies, not disclosing them, and then apparently billing different pharmacies that it owns, sending billings between them, just essentially engaging in accounting fraud to buff up its numbers. Like it owns Philidor.

It bought Philidor Pharmacy without disclosing it. And then finally, after this report comes out, the CEO at the time, Michael Pearson, reveals that he had bought it. And, you know, so they're buying all these pharmacies and not disclosing them and sending invoices between the different companies. And what actually came, what finally brought this to light, as my understanding is, they also, it's kind of funny. So they bought Philidor Pharmacy.

They bought another pharmacy based in California called R&O Pharmacy. And then R&O files a court action suing Valiant because they receive an invoice from them for $69 million. But the weird thing is... Nice. Yeah, so... They receive this invoice from Valiant... Just a note.

Steven looked at me like, are you going to take this one? He gave the room a look like, I see a ball. Is everyone going to kick it? They receive this invoice for 69 million uh from valiant but val it should have been sent from philidor which valiant owns but because rno had no idea uh they sued for like possible fraud and then this whole thing gets exposed for 420420 million? Yes. But the funny part of the story is Valiant actually owned

both Philidor and R&O, the company that was suing it. Oh, wow. It was just like, essentially they were doing fraud and they fucked up and they sent an invoice on the wrong letterhead.

But it's also... Fucking friendly fire. Right. So the Citro research report is pretty fascinating, but it kind of goes through all these different companies that they own all have the same contact phone number, the exact same letterhead. Here's the office where we do fraud.

Right, exactly. So it's just very clear that they're setting up phantom accounts and doing these kinds of things. But the funny thing is that after this report comes out, Bill Ackman doubles down. He actually refers to the CEO. He says the company, actually, sorry, this is May 2015. He refers to the company as a very early stage Berkshire, referring to Warren Hathaway's company. Warren Buffett's. Warren Buffett. Yes, Jesus Christ.

But he proclaims its CEO, Michael Pearson. Who's he Tom Hathaway on? Michael Pearson as a Warren Buffett of pharmaceuticals. And basically, after this report comes out, Bill Ackman doubles down. He defends the company to his shareholders. He says the investments of this company are worth more than they're being valued at, even though this massive fraud is going on. It was more of a late stage, Berkshire. Right.

You know what the shareholders said? What's that? You know, I went to a tough school in Queens. They used to beat up the little Jewish boys. But basically, Bill Ackman gets hauled before the Senate. He comes onto the board to try and save this company in March 2016. He gets hauled before the Senate, and both him and his defenders engage in this whole,

we had no idea what was going on. We only got into the board in 2016 and started looking around, but it's like going into it, he knew their entire business model was jacking up the price of drugs. And we talked a bit about this on the Sackler episode, the Sackler family episode with what they did with Purdue Pharma and OxyContin and stuff, where it's like these are evil, shitty people. But it's more important to ask the question, why do we have a system that rewards people being evil and shitty? And as long as you put the profit motive in medicine the entire incentive is to jack up the price of drugs in another case

Valiant bought a pill that was more than 30 years old and jacked the price up 3000% so it's like what value are they creating for the economy by doing this Sean it's like you haven't even heard of innovation greed is good

it's an efficient outcome yeah like if as long as it's not your income that's going down that was efficient they they need your income there's some marketing efficiency there they need this system because without monetary rewards innovation does not exist yeah um but so valiant uh because of this massive accounting fraud and you know they get the accurate accounting innovation. Ackman gets hauled before. Ackman and the CEO gets hauled before the Senate and they get grilled about the price increases. There's a funny clip with like Carl Levin.

Price innovation. I think Senator Carl Levin was like, you know, if you just increase the price 30 percent a year, you still would have got healthy profits instead of this 500 a year and i do love that the like the soft bigotry of low expectations like you can still deliver to shareholders by you know squeezing heart uh failure patients by only 30 a year instead of 500 a year and behind the microphone you just see bill Ackman go like, yeah. Like, he just kind of gives this little nod. Like, I mean, you got a good point. He's like, what about 60% a year?

You had a nickel and dime. They're negotiating. But so. 70, 50, 60, done. But so Valiant collapses with the price gouging and then the massive accounting fraud. Two Valiant executives are charged criminally as of october 2016 bloomberg reported that the u.s prosecutors were looking into charging the ceo michael pearson i can i can just see fraud like during those hearings the senators being like you're making it real hard for us to drag our feet on health care um but so uh the ceo michael pearson has not yet been charged with fraud but maybe he will be probably not um but so uh the ceo michael pearson has not yet been charged with fraud but maybe he will be

probably not um but basically uh and it costs bill ackman four billion dollars for his hedge fund investors and since that time he's been losing a lot of money and it again it is just kind of funny because he acts like he's like a victim of this when it's like you knew what the business model was going into it it's like oh i'm so sorry you lost a bunch of money on your investment in the company that jacks up prices of life-saving drugs because they were also doing fraud but success is built on failure and also greed i just like the idea of him like crying in the schoolyard about like yeah they said they were just doing uh killing people by jacking up drug prices

that they needed to live. I didn't know they were also doing massive accounting fraud. But yeah, so that kind of brings you up to speed. And that Valiant collapse happened concurrent with the betting on zero case where he short sales Herbalife because as we mentioned Carl Icahn hates

him he buys up massive amounts of Herbalife drives up the price the FTC looks into Herbalife they ultimately find them about 200 million and they wag their finger at them and say they have to change the business practices but ultimately not that much so

basically what it looked like they did from the documentary to change some business practices but ultimately not that much so uh basically what it looked like they did from the documentary to change their business practices is they stopped targeting latino communities and just expanded only russian immigrants they expanded to vietnam like there's this great part where they're talking about going to vietnam and they're like you know people need jobs and people need food and we kind of cover both of those on one thing. And it's like, oh, America's finding new ways to destroy the people of Vietnam. And it's like a clip from Mad Money, the Jim Cramer show. And Jim Cramer's just like, I'm not trying to be racist,

but what do people in Vietnam need supplements for? And he's not wrong, but it's just the worst way to fucking say that. The Herbalife agent orange flavor wow so yeah like he loses about a billion dollars on Herbalife he loses four billion on Valiant and uh and then he gets divorced as we mentioned

he has to pay out a seven figure divorce so his net worth has more than fallen in half in the last few years. And as of April 5th, there's a New York Post story that about two-thirds of all... Wait, did you say seven-figure divorce? Yes. Yeah. Am I wrong?

Well, I mean, for a billionaire, that's pocket change. Yeah. So I've got the divorce dirt, as always. So he gets divorced, what, at the end of last year? He gets divorced at the end of last year? He gets divorced at the end of 2016. Two years. Apparently There's a documentary on that called

Betting on 50%. Betting on 50%. Vanity Fair says it's a nine figure divorce. Which I'm not even sure. Damn. How could she get... He was like two and a half billion so maybe she got half of it. Which I'm not even sure. Damn. How could she get... Anyway... Well, because he was worth like...

Yeah, he was like two and a half billion. So maybe she got half of it. Because there was no prenuptial agreement. There was no prenuptial agreement. Yeah. No, it's less than half. You know what I'm saying? So probably like some hundred million.

Never invest your money with a man who doesn't know to sign a prenup. So he gets a divorce from her. They've been married for between 25 and 22 years. All the articles are fucked up. And they got three kids. Karen, what's her last name? Herkovitz? It was Ackman, but it's not anymore.

Yeah, it's Herskovitz. Andy, can you read that? All I know is that she actually had this quote after the divorce. And I'm telling you, he's like the crybaby in the schoolyard. You know, I went to a tough school in Queens. They used to beat up the little Jewish boys. And he was like one of these little Jewish boys. I can, so like, there's an optimal level of bullying that he never got from Iken.

Yeah. I feel. So Karen is a landscape biotech. And there's really zero information on her on the internet. And on one website, the Human Rights Watch website, they talk about how she currently volunteers. She's partially responsible for a genocide. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. They talk about how she volunteers to help fake chemical weapons attacks in Syria to start a war. Karen currently volunteers and serves on the board of directors of the highline as we all know uh steven was telling me earlier about how fucked up the highline is i don't know much this it's just hard to it's hard for me to appreciate walking through the highline knowing what a huge giveaway it is to the developers for that area for non-new yorkers it was an elevated railroad track going through manhattan uh originally for freight trains and a group basically turned it into a very narrow park on top of the railroad track that's a cool idea until you go there

and it's full of tourists and you can't walk anywhere right and it used to be like substantially more affordable yeah live there and now it's all um like a lot of New York upscale condos. Yeah, it's private schools and shit. Upscale condos where you can go over to a park with an amphitheater that looks down upon traffic. That's a feature of the High Line is there's stadium seating viewing traffic. And so, Bill Ackman is now dating this girl uh nary oxman and uh apparently they were fucking for a little bit but however now all the articles are about how brad pitt is having sex with this nary oxman lady

and yesterday extra said it's a rumor but now today fucking yahoo says oh yeah they're fucking all right what wait brad pitt's cucking bill oh man that's pretty cool yeah that's pretty great but that is sad if you're brad pitt by the way that is totally your retirement plan yeah i think so um but i think the main thing i want to get across from these divorce and this relationship is Bill Ackman does not eat the butt. Probably not. Does not eat the butt. No. I don't think so.

He's a weak billionaire. He doesn't have that much money. Brad Pitt cucked the fuck out of him. And more importantly. Carl Icahn cucked him too. That's right. That's right. Carl Icahn eats the butt.

He only eats butt. He enters into agreement to eat butt and then reneges on it. I'm going to destroy this ass like those Jewish boys at my school. Wait, I didn't agree to that. You're supposed to destroy my ass. Come on, let's get to it. This is schmuck insurance. It is sad when Extra

and Yahoo are arguing because who do you trust? But last thing on Valiant Pharmaceuticals, after this massive accounting fraud and these terrible price gouging practices, they are actually still in business. They're operating as a little less Valiant. As of today, April 2018, they're selling for about $17 a share, and the CEO has said they are going to do the most important thing possible for a company that has been in the midst of scandals to restore trust with consumers. Would you guys like to guess what that is? Yes. They're going to change the name. Oh!

Rebranding, baby. It's what America does best. Yeah. According to the New York Post, in May 2017, the CEO says they are very serious about looking at alternative names. To the consumers who say they've lost trust in us, I say one more. One more turn of the screw.

Is Spectrum taken? It's my favorite thing about America is our cable companies just change their name every 10 years and our you know mercenary killing companies just change their name every time like people open up on a crowded traffic intersection and kill 20 people the first time i i'd seen that was they changed their name from valiant to blackwater it's like well they used anymore they have a better reputation than us um oh just kind of a a fun story if um we're kind of bouncing around here um but um uh bill

ackman um is actually it's interesting like all these people kind of know each other so bill ackman um is friends with a guy named ezra merkin, who was a feeder for Bernie Madoff, like he would steer client money into Bernie Madoff, Ezra Merkin would. And so in January 2009, Ackman defends his longtime friend Ezra Merkin saying, quote, has Ezra committed a crime? I don't think so. I think Merkin is an honest person, an intelligent person, an interesting person, a smart investor. And again, just to put this in context, Ezra Merkin has been charged with civil fraud

by the state of New York for quote, secretly steering $2.4 billion in client money into Bernie Madoff's Ponzi fund without their permission. So he got people to lose about $2.5 billion. He eventually had to pay out a $405 million settlement to victims, but he's still a millionaire because there's consequences for these people.

And a random fun story that I found while researching this, Ezra Merkin lives at 740 Park Avenue, which has been called the most valuable apartment in the world. 740 Park Avenue, which has been called the most valuable apartment in the world. 740 Park Avenue, David Koch lives there. You need at least $100 million in liquid assets in order to be seen by the co-op board. But on April 2016, Ezra Merkin,

somebody was using his sauna at the place to store... Yeah, he was using his sauna to store clothes and books, I'm quoting from the Daily Mail here, and I think a staff member turned on the sauna while the clothes and books were in there and started a massive fire in 740 park avenue and the great thing is like it fucks over a bunch of other rich people i think uh steve mnuchin had to like stay in a hotel or something um oh man Oh, man. Damn, Zach. Props to the woke-ass agent.

By the way, this is the third Netflix documentary that is involved in this story because there's also one called Park Avenue that focuses on 720 Park with the idea that just one mile down on Park Avenue is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Bronx. Wait, really? Yeah. That's so fucked yeah. Really? Yeah. It's so fucked up.

Yeah, the Daily Mail article goes through all the different billionaire and multimillionaire... Watch those rich people have to live near those poor people. It's so fucked up. It goes through all the different units that had fire damage. They say fashion designer Vera Wang was choked by smoke and fumes. But I love... It's like the coke david coke's property

his and his wife's uh escaped fire damage they were quote uh hoses drenched the homes of the cokes and real estate mover and shaker andrew stone and then um uh later uh david coke's wife julia flesher fell in the dark and gloomy lobby and broke multiple bones. Owned. I don't know if that was actually related to the fire, though. The title of this article was Zero Percent Sympathy. Round winning kill. But yeah, it's just a fun story.

This will bring you a smile. Quote from fire. Wish we could have finished them. But it's just kind of funny it's out the uh fire is now uh pulling ahead in the mayoral race for new york ahead of bill de blasio it is kind of funny like maybe this is what this guy was trying to do to redeem himself for like steering all this money all this jewish charity money into like bernie madoff right he's like yeah i'm gonna drench david coke and hose water i will say that who did you say turned on the sauna like uh an assistant it's just a member of his staff okay hero yeah yeah yeah in in the in the

park avenue documentary they they uh interview uh bellhopper someone who worked for the coke or who worked a doorman who worked there they blurred out his face and everything yeah and he was saying like yeah you know i thought that on uh christmas you know we're gonna get i'm working for these rich people i'm gonna get a lot of money so you know on christmas they had us move all this stuff into their limousines you know for their uh big vacation and uh then they gave uh david coke gave me a 50 tip in the form of a check what and you just think like something happened to that staffer yeah oh yeah yeah i had to check and make sure the sauna was working and then i went off to you know Something happened to that staffer. Yeah, oh yeah.

Yeah, I had to check and make sure the sauna was working, and then I went off to polish your silver, and there was a fire. The article says it was started by a staff member and DSA member. It's more of an ML. Yeah. Marxist-Leninist. It's an anarchist. We're at an hour and a ML. Yeah. Marxist-Leninist. It's an anarchist. We're at an hour and a half.

Yeah, okay. Solidarity. Let me rephrase that. I've only got four minutes more of memory on this card. All right. And I have to go and... Steve's got to go too, yeah. We've got to clear this up. Okay, so just like a couple other random stories,

Joe Biden wanted to punch Bill Ackman in the face because I guess they were at some dinner at, interestingly enough, Anthony Scaramucci hosts an annual conference for hedge funds. The Mooch. Yeah. And so in Vegas, they were at this dinner together. And then it was originally reported that Biden was crying, talking about his dead son uh and then uh

he said i can't talk anymore and bill ackman said well that never stopped you before unfortunately uh multiple witnesses have said that's not actually what happened but i love the idea of that he was just like so bitter going through this divorce he was like shitting on biden but apparently the actual story was that um biden says he was like talking about trump and he's like i said uh i shouldn't uh say anymore and what uh ackman says you know well that's never stopped you before and biden apparently says who's this wise ass and he says do you want to take this outside and he later called him an asshole to his friends so you know just kind of a fun little anecdote from the uh page six of the new york post um ackman's also said that uh in november

2016 when donald trump was elected he said quote i was extremely bullish on trump believe it or not by the way biden was so distraught by that interaction he uh gave five women a shoulder squeeze that night uh so in november 2016 ackman says the u.s is the greatest business in the world it's been under managed for a very long period of time we now have a businessman as president and you know maybe he's kissing up to donald trump but clearly it doesn't work because his fund has underperformed the s&p 500 by 20 a year for the last three years he was kissing up up to Donald Trump while doing this, like, I'm here to protect the Latino community. Of course he was.

We're building walls between one another that I'm tearing down to tear down Herbalife. But yeah, so Bill Ackman, we will follow up on this guy because I think his hedge fund is going to go under just like his previous one did. As we mentioned, April this month, the New York Post reported that about two thirds of all eligible people are pulling their money out because he's been underperforming the market. And just another fun story about what is the kind of wealth transfer scheme between bourgeoisie hedge funds are. This is Wikipedia. But December 2012, Pershing Square Capital Management launches a closed-end fund called Pershing Square Holdings. As a closed-end fund, it was designated as a permanent capital vehicle from which investors

would not be able to directly withdraw funds. It gets about $3 billion and it has reported 17.1% in return since inception, which is 80% below the S&P 500. So again, they take $3 billion in investor funds. They say, no, you can't withdraw it. And then they underperformed the S&P 500 by 80%. So I think we all agree, Bill Ackman, although he does something kind of good, we're literally in our last seconds, he's also a major piece of shit.

Doesn't he butt, obviously. No. And more importantly, just sucks as a person. All right. In conclusion. And I'm telling you, he's like the crybaby in the schoolyard.

You know, I went to a tough school in Queens that they used to beat up the little Jewish boys. And he was like the crybaby in the schoolyard. You know, I went to a tough school in Queens. They used to beat up the little Jewish boys. And he was like one of these little Jewish boys. Before we go, I just want to say thank you to our listeners. We crossed 1,000 listens. And it was very fantastic of everyone. If you like our podcast, I don't know, tell a friend maybe.

Other than that, you guys are amazing. We'll put out more content on the Internet soon. We're at our last 20 seconds. With that, I believe I'm Yogi Poliwog. I'm Eddie Palmer. I'm Stephen Jeffries. I'm Sean McCarthy. Good night. Isopryl was $21.83 for 10 5-milliliter vials. It's now $17,901. That's in about a year and a half time. Why would you not recommend to the board that, you know,

over a 30% increase for one year? I would think that's a pretty good return rate. Why don't you charge $3,000 for that? Look, it's something we'll discuss tomorrow. You will discuss dropping the price of isopryl to $3,000 because that's over a 30% increase in the original price. So we will absolutely discuss it. Okay. Nitro Press went from $214 to $880 for one 2-milliliter vial.

A 30% increase, again, a pretty good shot, would be about $300. Will you talk about that as well at the board? Sure. Sure.