Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square files for IPO on the NYSE

Outspoken investor Bill Ackman is taking a step toward his long-held ambition of building a publicly traded investment vehicle modeled on Warren Buffett’s approach, filing to list his hedge fund firm Pershing Square Capital Management on the New York Stock Exchange.

Pershing Square filed on Tuesday to list on the Big Board under the symbol “PS.” The planned listing would give public investors a stake in Ackman’s investment platform, which oversees a concentrated portfolio of large-cap companies and high-profile bets.

The transaction will involve a dual listing structure. Pershing Square’s common shares and the shares of its closed-end fund, PSUS, will both trade on the NYSE. The securities will be listed concurrently but will trade separately, allowing investors to buy or sell each independently. The firm noted that there has previously been no public market for Pershing Square’s common stock prior to the combined offering.

As part of the combined transaction, Ackman is seeking to raise between $5 billion and $10 billion for PSUS with investors able to purchase shares at $50 apiece, according to the filing. The firm said it expects to deliver 20 shares of Pershing Square Capital Management’s common stock for every 100 PSUS shares purchased in the IPO, at no additional cost.

The investment firm said it has secured $2.8 billion in commitments ahead of the offering. The capital is coming from a mix of family offices, pension funds, insurance companies and ultra-high-net-worth investors, according to the filing.

The public listing is a move to leverage his following among Main Street investors after he accumulated more than two million followers on social media platform X. Pershing said PSUS will be its first fund marketed to both U.S. retail and institutional investors.

Ackman has frequently cited Buffett as the inspiration for how he built and developed his two-decade-old hedge fund management company. The Pershing Square founder has described himself as a “Buffett devotee,” saying the 93-year-old investment icon has been his “unofficial mentor” for years and regularly attending Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meetings in Omaha, Nebraska.

The investor has pointed out that Buffett himself began his career running a series of private investment partnerships — essentially operating as an activist investor and hedge fund manager — before shutting those funds in the 1960s and taking control of Berkshire Hathaway, then a struggling textile manufacturer. Ackman has said that transformation helped shape his own vision of building a permanent-capital investment platform modeled after Berkshire’s long-term compounding approach.

“Permanent capital allows us to take a long-term view and be opportunistic during periods of market volatility, without being exposed to the need to raise capital by selling assets to meet redemptions during such…