A Delay for Ackman’s Long-Awaited Pershing Square USA Fund

Ackman delays his big bet

Monday isn’t going to be the day that Bill Ackman prices the I.P.O. of his Pershing Square USA investment vehicle, as had been planned.

That has been pushed back at least a few days as the S.E.C. reviews a headline-grabbing letter that the financier sent to investors. But the long-awaited fund, whose investors will probably include many who follow Ackman’s provocations on social media, is still coming, it says.

The context: Pershing Square USA is a so-called closed-end fund that’s raising money to make the sort of concentrated investments that Ackman is now known for. The fund would have permanent capital, since those who buy in can only cash out if someone else buys their stake.

The fund had faced big expectations after Ackman set an initial I.P.O. target of $25 billion, which would have been one of the biggest in history. But closed-end funds traditionally don’t invite much investor interest, raising questions of whether the mogul was being too ambitious.

The question now is timing. The fund said on Friday that it was still proceeding with its I.P.O., after a New York Stock Exchange website said the deal was “postponed.” (The exchange site now describes the offering as “pending on a date to be announced.”)

Here’s what happened: On Wednesday, Pershing Square USA filed with the S.E.C. a letter that Ackman had sent to shareholders of his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, about his expectations for the offering.

The letter — which Ackman initially believed didn’t need to be publicly disclosed, DealBook understands — was unusually candid:

• Ackman noted that “there is enormous sensitivity to the size” of the I.P.O. He wrote that the deal would most likely come in at $2.5 billion to $4 billion, which would still be one of the biggest initial offerings of the year, and that the fund was being capped at $10 billion.

• Ackman wrote that prominent investors had placed orders for the I.P.O., including the Baupost Group, a hedge fund; Putnam, a mutual fund manager; and the Teachers Retirement System of Texas, a public pension fund. Representatives for all three declined to comment to DealBook.

The S.E.C. has been reviewing Ackman’s letter, and is expected to require Pershing Square USA to make additional disclosures that the agency will then have to sign off on, DealBook hears. That puts the I.P.O. on track to price by late this week or next Monday.

That would be a small delay for a key initiative by Ackman. Pershing Square USA is essentially an American version of his fund that’s listed in Amsterdam and London — except that Ackman can talk about it with his 1.3 million followers on X and can market it to U.S. retail investors.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Venezuelans protest their authoritarian leader’s claim to electoral victory. Nicolás Maduro said he won this weekend’s presidential election with 51.2 percent of the vote, though opposition leaders raised questions about the outcome’s validity. U.S. officials have kept a close eye on Venezuela, given the country’s oil reserves and Maduro’s cozying up to Russia, China and Iran.

Simone Biles makes a strong showing at the Paris Olympics. The U.S. gymnastics superstar was poised to advance to the finals in three individual events and led the U.S. to first place through the second of five qualifiers on Sunday. It’s a remarkable comeback for Biles, who withdrew from the Tokyo Games, citing mental health concerns.

Disney strikes R-rated gold at the box office. “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the blood-splattered latest entry in the Marvel canon, grossed an estimated $438 million this weekend, setting a record for an R-rated movie and giving a lift to the embattled superhero franchise. Marvel also announced that it’s bringing back its biggest star, Robert Downey Jr., in two upcoming Avengers movies — but as the villain Dr. Doom, not as Iron Man.

The Fed meeting and Big Tech earnings top the agenda this week. Most economists don’t expect the central bank to cut rates after top officials meet tomorrow and Wednesday, but they and markets are looking for signs that it will start to do so in September. Elsewhere, Microsoft reports tomorrow, Meta on Wednesday and Amazon and Apple on Thursday, with wary investors looking for signs that tech giants’ hefty investments in artificial intelligence are starting to pay off.

Thiel warms to Trump, again

Donald Trump has made inroads into Silicon Valley, winning high-profile endorsements from Elon Musk and others, and pitching hard for the backing of cryptocurrency evangelists.

One big name who has offered encouraging words — but not yet money — is Peter Thiel. But the billionaire investor is getting closer to opening his wallet after Trump picked his protégé, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, as running mate, The Times’s Theodore Schleifer writes for DealBook.

Thiel is edging toward supporting the Republican ticket. The billionaire investor gave money and credibility to Trump’s first run for the White House in 2016. But relations between the two soured afterward, with Thiel declining to donate again.

Trump picked Vance, in part because of an ask from Thiel. The venture capitalist donated millions to help get Vance elected to the Senate in 2022. This time around, Thiel placed calls to the Trump campaign and urged the former president to choose his longtime acolyte.

Other prominent tech influencers and donors, including Musk and the investor David Sacks, also pushed for Vance.

Part of the pitch that Vance made was that he could help deliver Silicon Valley. The right-wing of the tech industry is ebullient about the Ohio senator — and that’s partly why Vance is in Palo Alto tonight to raise money, according to a copy of the dinner invite seen by The Times.

(Vance is heading west after a stumbling debut on the campaign trail, and as some Republican leaders worry about the choice.)

Can Vance deliver Thiel? Last month, he told Andrew that he would vote for Trump “if you hold a gun to my head.” The financier has seemed despondent about politics since the 2022 midterms: He did not enjoy how much of a main character he had become in political combat and he doesn’t seem to think his money makes a difference in presidential politics.

“Trump is locked on a massively winning race. And the Democrats are locked on a massively losing race,” Thiel told The Times. “And that’s why the money doesn’t matter.”

That sounds like a dodge. But Thiel suggested he isn’t rushing to give to a Trump super PAC.

Still, the Thiel-Trump relationship seems repaired. Over the weekend, Trump endorsed Blake Masters, another Thiel protégé who unsuccessfully ran for Senate in Arizona in 2022 but is now running for a House seat there. The only complication is that Trump also backed Masters’ main opponent.

• In other election news: Jon Henes, the C.E.O. of C Street Advisory Group who was Kamala Harris’s finance chair in 2020, and Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, are forming a “lawyers for Kamala Harris” group to raise money for her campaign and address legal issues related to the election, according to emails obtained by DealBook. They’re looking to recruit a group of Wall Street heavy hitters, including Faiza Saeed of Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Neil Barr of Davis Polk.

“Well, the people you just named have not been very philanthropic yet. They use their voice and they use their megaphones, but I would not call those men philanthropists.”

— Melinda French Gates, drawing a distinction between longtime donors to charity such as herself, her former husband Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and outspoken activist billionaires like Elon Musk.”

What happens if Rupert Murdoch wins?

If Lachlan Murdoch comes out on top in the (latest) succession fight over the media empire built by his father, Rupert, what would it mean for the family’s companies?

The Times’s Edmund Lee, who has covered the Murdochs for years, set down his copy of “King Lear” to examine Lachlan’s record for clues about what he might do next.

Murdoch wants to alter the family trust to hand majority control of his companies to his elder son. Under the terms of the so-called irrevocable trust, his four oldest children — Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James — would have equal control of the empire after Murdoch dies.

Prudence, James and Elisabeth are fighting to prevent any change.

Lachlan’s career is mixed. He left the family company amid a bitter dispute with his father in 2005 and started his own investment firm. A bet on a radio network worked out. A big investment in a TV network did not.

Lachlan returned to the fold about a decade later and became his family’s heir apparent, taking over as chair of News Corp and executive chair and C.E.O. of Fox when his father retired last September. (Murdoch became chairman emeritus of both companies.)

Lachlan’s big deals haven’t worked out. Last year, Lachlan failed to reunite the two parts of his media empire after investors balked at his first big attempted deal since taking charge.

He also didn’t manage to pull off the sale of a real estate listings business.

The Murdoch empire still faces serious structural problems. When your business relies primarily on newspaper and cable subscriptions, chances are you’re seeing fewer dollars come into the register:

• News Corp, which publishes The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, as well as influential titles in Britain and Australia, cut 5 percent of its work force last year. But The Journal is a bright spot, with digital subscriptions having grown an average of 17 percent a year since 2019.

• Fox has been steadier. N.F.L. games on its broadcast network are consistent money makers and viewership is solid at Fox News. Even so, investors expect total revenue to be essentially flat on average over the next few years.

What will Lachlan do if he wins control? He could try again to reunite Fox and News Corp, but may have to win over investors via moves including selling off weaker businesses like the newspapers (except for The Journal).

If Murdoch’s fight to protect Lachlan fails, his oldest son is sure to face angry siblings who could unite to demand sweeping changes across both of the family’s companies after Murdoch dies — including who runs them.

THE SPEED READ

Deals

• The driverless-technology start-up WeRide is planning to go public in New York, in the biggest potential U.S. I.P.O. by a Chinese company since Didi Global’s disastrous listing in 2021. (Bloomberg)

• Why investors including Bill Gates and Andreessen Horowitz are rushing to buy a piece of Kobold, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence to identify mining sites. (WSJ)

Elections, politics and policy

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