Oligarchs and the Trump Admin: Bill Ackman

Bill Ackman

Net Worth: ~$9 billion (Forbes)

Who is Bill Ackman?

• Bill Ackman is the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund with at least $20 billion in its assets that include Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Chipotle, and Uber.
• A longtime Democratic-aligned donor, Ackman publicly backed Donald Trump and the Republican Party in the 2024 election cycle. Ackman donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican-aligned PACs in the general election after backing Dean Phillips in the Democratic primary, both Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Republican primary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s run as an independent.
  • In a characteristically long-winded tweet from October 2024, Ackman gave 33 individual “actions” that Democrats made him decide to support Trump over Kamala Harris. Three of them (actions 13, 26, and 27) were about Ackman’s personal skepticism of vaccines. According to Ackman, he supported Trump in part because Democrats …
    • … “mandate vaccines that have not been adequately tested nor have their risks been properly considered compared with the potential benefits adjusted for the age and health of the individual, censoring the contrary advice of top scientists around the world”
    • … “do nothing about the proliferation of new vaccines that are not properly analyzed for their risk versus the potential benefit for healthy children who are mandated to receive them”
    • … “do nothing about the continued exemption from liability for the pharma industry that has led to a proliferation of mandatory vaccines for children without considering the potential cumulative effects of the now mandated 72-shot regime”
• In March 2023, during the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Ackman pleaded for a bailout, joining David Sacks and Mark Cuban as one of the biggest names associated with the effort; partially as a result of their incredibly long tweets, Americans were stuck with the bill for SVB’s incredibly irresponsible investing practices.
• In late 2023, Ackman vocally supported efforts to force Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard. Ackman boosted plagiarism allegations dug up by right-wing anti-DEI grifter Chris Rufo. When Business Insider found similar instances of plagiarism in the work of Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, Ackman threatened to sue the publication.
• The incident may have also been motivated by Ackman’s ongoing crusade against what he sees as wokeness in higher education. Shortly after Gay resigned, Ackman published a lengthy essay in the Free Press calling for an end to DEI initiatives at Harvard and blaming them for a rise in campus antisemitism. Later that year, in a New York Magazine profile, Ackman claimed that Harvard had “indoctrinated” his daughter, who graduated in 2020, into an anti-capitalist cult.

What does Bill Ackman have to gain from the Trump Administration?

• Ackman stands to gain from the potential privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises that are crucial to the stability of the housing market. Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management owns roughly 10 percent of the common stock of both Fannie and Freddie. Privatization would almost certainly increase mortgage rates, increasing the cost of buying a home for many Americans—a boon to investors like Ackman.
• In February 2026, Ackman’s fund became the target of a lawsuit over its purchase of shares in the real estate developer, Howard Hughes Holdings. Plaintiffs claim that Ackman threatened minority shareholders with reputational damage in order to secure a more favorable price for the purchase. If the case goes to federal court, a Trump-appointed judge may be inclined to rule in favor of Ackman.
• Pershing Square is also benefiting from the AI boom and Trump’s coziness with Big Tech. At the end of 2025, nearly 40% of Pershing Square’s holdings were concentrated in Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon–three companies who stand to gain from the Trump administration’s deregulatory AI policy. In November 2025, another 20% of Pershing Square’s holdings were in Uber.
  • In addition to benefiting from the AI boom, Meta–and as a result Pershing Square’s–legal position has become much more stable since Trump took office. In January 2025, Trump settled a $25 million lawsuit with Meta shortly after the company announced it would end the fact-checking program that Trump accused of violating first amendment rights. This settlement and a massive donation to Trump’s inauguration fund dramatically improved relations between founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the Trump admin. In March 2026, Trump even named Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to his President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
• Pershing Square’s Uber holding gained a lot of value in February 2026, when Trump’s Department of Labor got rid of a 2024 rule which made it easier for companies to classify their workers as independent contractors rather than employees. Uber has waged a war on this ruling from the start, as classifying gig drivers as employees creates the possibility of unionization.

For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Oligarchs in Trump World tracker.