Staying at one company for decades was once a badge of honor. But as layoffs have become more common and workers have turned to job-hopping for higher pay and career growth, employee loyalty has become harder to find. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, however, still believes earning employee loyalty is worth every penny.
That’s why his hedge fund Pershing Square, which manages roughly $35 billion in assets, offers its four dozen employees generous workplace benefits, including broad ownership and a rare degree of flexibility for Wall Street.
“There’s not a person at Pershing Square that doesn’t own multiple millions of dollars of stock in the company—whether you’re cleaning the space or at the front desk or another role in the company,” Ackman told Fortune’s editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell on a recent episode of Fortune’s podcast Titans and Disruptors of Industry. “We believe in taking care of our people.”
Ackman’s approach to retention goes beyond financial incentives. While Pershing employees are required to work from the office five days a week—that policy applies only for 10 months of the year. During July and August, employees can spread out as they like, with the company’s investment team moving to the Hamptons together, either in homes they rent or own, to work.
“We look after people, and so that when you operate that way, people don’t think about going anyplace else,” Ackman said.
Pershing also invests heavily in employees’ health and well-being, Ackman said, offering everything from healthy meals in its café to gym access and comprehensive health care benefits. With a staff of just 48 people, Pershing has not had one “undesired departure” from the firm.
“I think everyone here feels accurately that they’re a big contributor to our success, and the result is we can accomplish an enormous amount,” Ackman added.
How Ackman built Pershing into a multibillion-dollar firm with ‘people you want to hang out with’
Ackman grew up in New York before graduating from Harvard with his bachelor’s in 1988 and his MBA in 1992. That year, he founded Gotham Partners with fellow Harvard graduate David P. Berkowitz, but the investment firm later failed in part after its bets on private companies backfired.
In 2004, Ackman launched Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist hedge fund that has grown into one of Wall Street’s best-known investment firms. Since its founding, Pershing has built major stakes in companies including Chipotle, Universal Music Group, and J.C. Penney. The firm went public on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in 2014.
But on top of the workplace culture itself, Ackman credits much of Pershing’s recent success to the way he’s built out his team.
“[I’m a] big believer in only hiring people of the highest character, human qualities—people you want to hang out with, spend time with,” he said, adding that because employees spend so much of their lives at work, he has prioritized hiring colleagues people genuinely enjoy being around.
“There are a lot of super talented people, but when you combine a super talented person with great human qualities, that’s a great base to build a great culture.”
AI is putting world-class intelligence within everyone’s reach, Ackman says
Throughout his career, Ackman has built a reputation for taking unconventional positions and backing them with conviction—whether making bold investment bets or weighing in on contentious public debates. But looking ahead, the 60-year-old believes artificial intelligence will be the next major competitive advantage, not just for companies but for workers willing to embrace it.
Earlier this year, after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos argued that AI-driven productivity gains could eventually create a labor shortage—and that lower-income Americans should pay no income tax—Ackman said he agreed, calling Bezos’s argument a “powerful case” for the technology’s long-term economic impact.
Ackman expects AI to reshape industries including education and health care, arguing that advanced models can already help people better understand complex medical issues while making expert knowledge far more accessible.
“This is the era in which you can learn anything, and you don’t actually have to read books now,” Ackman said. “You can just ask your AI to teach you whatever it is that you need to learn.”
For Ackman, that’s one of AI’s biggest promises: making world-class expertise available to anyone with an internet connection.
“We’re in a world in which intelligence—very high level of intelligence—is available basically for free,” he told Fortune. “It’s a pretty amazing world.”
