Aaron Brown, Columnist

Do You Trust Bill Ackman to Build a $250 Billion Fund Manager?

The celebrity investor will need superb marketing and good performance to attract the assets to justify a $10.5 billion valuation as he plans a Pershing Square IPO.

June 4, 2024 at 9:30 AM UTC

By Aaron Brown

Aaron Brown is a former head of financial market research at AQR Capital Management. He is also an active crypto investor, and has venture capital investments and advisory ties with crypto firms. He is the author of the soon-to-be-released "Wrong Number."

Building big.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg

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Celebrity fund manager and activist investor Bill Ackman just sold 10% of his investment management company in a deal that valued Pershing Square at $10.5 billion. An initial public offering could come as soon as next year, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The valuation amounts to about 64% of the $16.3 billion in assets Pershing Square is said to manage. That compares with market capitalizations of 15% to 18% of assets under management for the four public hedge-fund-style managers valued by the market at more than $10 billion: Blackstone Inc., KKR & Co., Ares Management Corp. and Blue Owl Capital Inc. Traditional public asset management companies such as BlackRock Inc., Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Ameriprise Financial Inc., T. Rowe Price Group Inc., Northern Trust Corp. and Franklin Resources Inc. have ratios from under 1% to about 4%.