Bill Ackman’s Pershing Powers Through AI Selloff With a Big Bet Worth Watching

The S&P 500 finished last week down 1.5%, the Dow Jones Industrial down 1.4% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq down 2.2%. Markets have pulled back from record levels as an AI-induced selloff has investors thinking more like Harlan Ellison and William Gibson, worrying what present and future techno-disruptions are in store.

But then there’s Bill Ackman. His Pershing Square made the case that there’s Warren Buffett-like value hunting to be done, with payoffs from one AI behemoth in particular.

A Ten Percent Bet

Shares in trucking and logistics companies, software firms, and insurance and real estate brokers have unloaded by investors worried that their traditional businesses are kaput. The mere appearance of a new Chat-GPT-based app can send shares in a sector (temporarily) down double digits. 

The environment has been complicated by stronger-than-expected jobs data, which raised the prospect that the Federal Reserve could comfortably hold off on rate cuts in the short term to focus on lowering inflation. But, on Friday, inflation dropped to a near five-year low, opening the door to deeper rate cuts. Which is where Ackman’s hedge fund Pershing, among the market’s most vaunted value investors, comes in. The firm is known for taking big, concentrated positions, suggesting a high degree of confidence (go big or go broke… well, broke’s not so much in the cards when you’re worth $8.4 billion). It has worked very well: Pershing returned 34% last year, well ahead of the S&P 500’s 17.9% and marking the latest in a near-decade-long streak of besting the index. At its investor presentation last week, it laid out the case for one big position that Ackman argued cuts through the noise of the market’s AI-nxiety:

• Ackman revealed a $2 billion stake in Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant Meta, a big enough swing to account for about 10% of the hedge fund’s portfolio. While Meta has returned over 500% since the start of 2023, it’s actually been in a rut for some time, down 12% in the last 12 months.
• Meta’s plans to spend $115 billion to $135 billion on capital expenditures in 2026 has worried some investors that the heavy AI spending may not pay off. But its use of AI to make its mammoth ad business more efficient — the average price per ad rose 6% in the fourth quarter of 2025 — which led Ackman to assert “concerns around Meta’s AI-related spending initiatives are underestimating the company’s long-term upside potential from AI.” The Buffett-like value position rests partly in the fact that Meta trades at 27.3 times earnings, better than many of its big ticket tech peers.

Make Up Your Own Mind: Pershing jumped on the Amazon bandwagon last April, when the online retailer dipped after the US placed tariffs on most imports, marking a bet that quickly paid off. But its balance sheet is not gospel: late last year, it exited bad bets on Chipotle and Nike, the latter of which cost more than $600 million.