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William Ackman: Everything You Need to Know About Finance and Investing in Under an Hour | Big Think

Big Think | March 7, 2026



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Everything You Need to Know About Finance and Investing in Under an Hour
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WILLIAM ACKMAN:

William Ackman is founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management. Formed in 2003, the hedge-fund has acquired significant shares in companies such as JC Penney, General Growth Properties, Fortune Bands and Kraft Foods. Ackman advocates strategies of “activist investing,” the practice of using stock shares in publicly-traded companies to influence management practices in a way that benefits shareholder interests.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I’m Bill Ackman. I’m the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management and I’m here today to talk to you about everything you need to know about finance and investing and I’m going to get it done in an hour and you’ll be ready to go.

How to Start and Grow a Business

So let’s begin. We’re going to go into business together. We’re going to start a company and we’re going to start a lemonade stand and now I don’t have any money today, so I’m going to have to raise money from investors to launch the business. So how am I going to do that? Well I’m going to form a corporation. That is a little filing that you make with the State and you come up with a name for a business. We’ll call it Bill’s Lemonade Stand and we’re going to raise money from outside investors. We need a little money to get started, so we’re going to start our business with 1,000 shares of stock. We just made up that number and we’re going to sell 500 shares more for a $1 each to an investor. The investor is going to put up $500. We’re going to put up the name and the idea. We’re going to have 1,000 shares. He is going to have 500 shares. He is going to own a third of the business for his $500.

So what is our business worth at the start? Well it’s worth $1,500. We have $500 in the bank plus $1,000 because I came up with the idea for the company. Now I’m going to need a little more than $500, so what am I going to do? I’m going to borrow some money. I’m going to borrow from a friend and he’s going to lend me $250 and we’re going to pay him 10% interest a year for that loan.

Now why do we borrow money instead of just selling more stock? Well by borrowing money we keep more of the stock for ourselves, so if the business is successful we’re going to end up with a bigger percentage of the profits.

So now we’re going to take a look at what the business looks like on a piece of paper. We’re going to look at something called a balance sheet and a balance sheet tells you where the company stands, what your assets are, what your liabilities are and what your net worth or shareholder equity is. If you take your assets, in this case we’ve raised $500. We also have what is called goodwill because we’ve said the business—in exchange for the $500 the person who put up the money only got a third of the business. The other two-thirds is owned by us for starting the company. That is $1,000 of goodwill for the business. We borrowed $250. We’re going to owe $250. That is a liability. So we have $500 in cash from selling stock, $250 from raising debt and we owe a $250 loan and we have a corporation that has, and you’ll see on the chart, shareholders’ equity of $1,500, so that’s our starting point.

Now let’s keep moving. What do we need to do to start our company? We need a lemonade stand. That’s going to cost us about $300. That is called a fixed asset. Unlike lemon or sugar or water this is something like a building that you buy and you build it. It wears out over time, but it’s a fixed asset. And then you need some inventory. What do you need to make lemonade? You need sugar. You need water. You need lemons…

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/learn-to-invest-and-start-a-business-in-under-an-hour

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Comments

This post currently has 28 comments.

  11. @JustinHarper-z2h

    March 7, 2026 at 5:08 pm

    I got into trading thinking I could learn as I went along. At\ first, I enjoyed the challenge, but it didn't take long for reality to set in. YouTube alone wasn't enough, and the constant ups and downs left me second-guessing myself. I ended up losing more than I gained, but it really opened my eyes to what I was missing.

  26. @ryanfranklin2224

    March 7, 2026 at 5:08 pm

    Bill Ackman contributed $1.75m to a total $22m collectively spent in a super PAC by billionares to defeat Mamdani in NY. He would have spent less money by just paying taxes.

Comments are closed.

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