ValueX BRK 2026 – Bill Ackman on Creativity, Permanent Capital, and Building a Mini-Berkshire

Few sessions at ValueX BRK 2026, held in Omaha ahead of the 2026 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, ranged as widely as the one featuring Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management. Forgoing prepared remarks, Ackman fielded audience questions on topics stretching from artificial intelligence and market structure to permanent capital, Howard Hughes Holdings, and geopolitics. A single investment philosophy tied the answers together: concentrate in high-quality businesses, hold capital that cannot be redeemed overnight, and rely on human creativity where AI cannot follow.

AI Will Create More Opportunity for Patient Investors

Ackman opened by addressing whether artificial intelligence will eventually replace investment management. His answer was measured. AI will, in his view, amplify forces already dominating short-term markets: the pod shops such as Millennium and Citadel, with their tight stop-loss structures, and the growing mass of index capital that mechanically buys the highest-weighted names. AI will accelerate that arms race, reading a 10-K faster than any analyst and placing a trade before anyone else can react.

But Ackman argued this dynamic actually helps the long-term investor sitting in the same room. When a short-term signal pushes a great company down and a wave of reactive capital follows, a patient investor with a multi-year horizon gets a better entry point. The noise generated by high-frequency AI trading is, in his framing, signal for anyone willing to look past the next quarter.

He was equally direct about what AI cannot do. Creativity, in his view, means doing something that has never been done before, and that is precisely where AI falls short. Ackman cited two of Pershing Square’s most successful transactions: shorting the credit of a AAA-rated company and buying the stock of a company in bankruptcy. Neither had been done before Pershing did it. He also pointed to Pershing Square USA’s recent IPO structure, in which the firm “gave a gift” to retail IPO investors at purchase, a mechanism with no precedent in the closed-end fund world. AI, trained on historical data, would not have generated that idea. “I think AI is more like an accelerant,” Ackman said, “but I think there’s still room for us for now.”