Question 1

True or false: Bill Ackman is the founder of the investment firm Pershing Square Capital Management, launched in 2004.

Accepted Answer

True. Ackman started Pershing Square in 2004 with $54 million; it grew into a multibillion-dollar activist hedge fund firm.

Question 2

True or false: Ackman graduated from Harvard Business School and was a classmate of Mark Zuckerberg.

Accepted Answer

False. Ackman earned a BA from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School, but Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard College years later.

Question 3

True or false: Ackman once bought a controlling stake in the New York Mets baseball team for $2.4 billion.

Accepted Answer

False. Steve Cohen bought the Mets; Ackman is a noted fan but never purchased a team. He did once propose a hostile takeover of Allergan.

Question 4

True or false: Bill Ackman made his first billion by shorting Herbalife stock in 2012.

Accepted Answer

False. Ackman famously lost over $1 billion on his massive Herbalife short bet; Pershing Square exited at a huge loss in 2018.

Question 5

True or false: Bill Ackman proposed a $10 billion takeover of McDonald's to fix its menu and operations.

Accepted Answer

False. Ackman never targeted McDonald's; his famous activist campaigns include Canadian Pacific, Allergan, and Chipotle, not fast-food giant.

Question 6

True or false: Bill Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, is a renowned MIT professor and designer who won a MacArthur 'Genius Grant'.

Accepted Answer

True. Neri Oxman is a designer and former MIT Media Lab professor; she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019. They married in 2019.

Question 7

True or false: Ackman's Pershing Square Holdings is a publicly traded closed-end fund on the London Stock Exchange.

Accepted Answer

True. He listed Pershing Square Holdings on the LSE in 2014 to provide liquidity; it trades like a stock, not a traditional hedge fund.

Question 8

True or false: In 2020, Ackman made $2.6 billion in a single month by buying credit default swaps on corporate bonds before COVID crash.

Accepted Answer

True. He hedged Pershing Square's portfolio with CDS on investment-grade indexes in February 2020, netting a massive profit as markets plunged.

Bill Ackman Trivia Questions