Okay, let's begin. I'm here, Bill Ackman, with colleagues, Ryan Israel, Chief Investment Officer of Pershing Square, Bharath Alamanda, who's a partner and member of our investment team, Ben Hakim, who's our President. I'm going to walk you through a number of slides. We are at the end of the presentation. We're going to have to switch to a Spaces so we can take live questions. We'll probably give a bio break between the two. To begin, just summarizing the transaction, we are going to be investing, if the transaction takes place, $900 million and buying 10 million shares of stock from Howard Hughes at $90 a share. This is a primary purchase of shares. The $90 price represents a 46.4% premium to the $61.46 unaffected price. That's the price prior to our filing a 13D saying we're looking or considering a going private transaction. We're funding the transaction with cash on our balance sheet, and there is no need for financing. Our ownership of the company will go from 37.6% - 48%, and the transaction itself will not represent a change of control. We intend to, for the Pershing Square funds, to retain their existing stake in Howard Hughes. What's great about this version of the transaction is several fold, but one of the most important parts is speed to completion. We can complete this transaction really as quickly as we can execute documents with the board of directors versus probably a six-month period to do the previous proposed transaction. We raised the price from $85 - $90 per share, a massive premium. Normally, you would see premiums like this in change of control going private transactions. Here, we are simply buying stock from the company, a large stock purchase of the company to improve its capitalization. Typically, it takes place at a discount to a market price, and here we're paying a 46% premium. The cash coming in enables Howard Hughes to begin executing on its strategy immediately versus our previous transaction would have taken significant time and actually, because the capital was going out to shareholders, the company itself would not be well capitalized versus today, we'll have $900 million of excess cash sitting on the balance sheet in addition to the company's existing cash resources, which are needed for its real estate subsidiary. The infusion of cash will be a credit ratings positive event for the company and, of course, meaningfully improves the company's financial wherewithal and flexibility. No change to the post-transaction float, no incremental debt, and we don't need to raise any capital to complete the deal. This is sort of a chart that shows our increase in ownership. The company shares outstanding increases to 60.1%. Our stake goes up by 900 million. To be clear, these shares are being purchased by Pershing Square Holdco. That is the holding company for Pershing Square Capital Management. That is our alternative asset manager, the management company for the Pershing Square funds. I own about 44% of that company. The investment team 45%, the investment team and other members of the firm own another 45%, and a 10% balance is held by other investors. The Pershing Square funds will own about a billion seven stake, retaining their existing holdings, and as a group, we'll be 48% of the shares with the public float at 52%. If you look at our sort of what we call the look-through ownership, that is the ownership that the investment team members, myself, and other partners of the firm own in Howard Hughes. Post-transaction, we will have a look-through ownership stake of approximately 14.3 million shares or $1.3 billion investment at $90 per share. This is the second largest investment I will have personally other than my stake in the Pershing Square Holdings. Post-transaction, Howard Hughes becomes a diversified holding company that pursues the acquisition of controlling interest in private and public companies. The senior leadership of the holding company becomes myself, Ryan Israel, Ben Hakim, and the full resources of Pershing Square, the entire investment team, accounting team, legal team, technology team, investor relations, capital raising functions, and more will become now available to the company. We will take no cash or stock compensation as employees of Howard Hughes. The Howard Hughes Corporation real estate subsidiary will remain unchanged, continued to be led by David O'Reilly and team, Carlos Olea, and team who've done a superb job with the business. The business today is a highly focused master plan community company in light of the spinoff in August of some of our non-core assets. We are, in lieu of being compensated as employees of Howard Hughes, we are paid consideration for services rendered. We receive in the proposed transaction 1.5% of the market cap of the company paid on a quarterly basis. We've received no promotes, no options, no performance fees, or other equity incentives. We're going to discuss the fees in greater detail. I noted a meaningful number of questions and concerns about this. We'll cover it later in the presentation. But just to quickly point out that we are in the alternative asset management business. We charge our clients a 1.5% management fee for all of our funds and anywhere between 16% and 20% incentive fee, which is paid on an annual basis on realized and unrealized gains. So a 1.5% fee in this case would represent, without a performance fee, a very substantial discount to what we normally charge. But we'll go into that in some more detail. The company looks like this the day after the transaction. Today at Howard Hughes, at the holding company, there really is little if any activity. Really, all of the operating activities of the company today take place at the Howard Hughes Corporation subsidiary. Envision we take a couple $100 million and we make an investment in operating business number one. It becomes a subsidiary of the holding company, and over time, we build a base of operating assets. When the operating assets generate excess cash, the excess cash can be repatriated to the parent, the holding company, for reinvestment. To the extent one of the operating businesses, including Howard Hughes Holdings itself, has attractive opportunities for investment, the holding company can send capital downstairs, so those businesses have access to incremental and important resources. We intend for the company to continue to have best-in-class corporate governance. Remains a New York Stock Exchange-listed company. There's no change in the float. We will commit not to squeeze out the public shareholders. We won't buy back stock other than, of course, with approval of the board of directors. The board itself will remain independent, controlled by a majority of independent directors with an independent audit committee, compensation committee, nominating corporate governance committee, and will not be a controlled company under the NYSE and SEC rules. This is just a chart of the company's stock price relative to the S&P 500 index, Dow Jones index, and the Dow Jones Homebuilder Index. And what you'll note is the stock, since we announced the transaction, has traded at a consistent widespread to sort of the collection of indices that it normally trades with. Homebuilders have been under pressure, including today. I know Toll Brothers, I think, earnings this morning. But the reason why the stock is traded at about a 22% premium to the other to the unaffected price, while the comparables have on average are flat over the same period, of course, is the expectation on the part of the market and then our proposal that we made early in the year and now, of course, our revision to our proposal. Howard Hughes stock has not traded above $90 a share since early 2022 when the Fed began raising interest rates aggressively. Obviously, the company has, as a real estate business, a lot of exposure to interest rates, and that really accounts for the decline since that period of time. So 90 is a very large premium to the trading price of the stock on an unaffected basis and even a large premium to where the stock has traded since our bids have been announced. I'll just point out that I've been on the board of this company since its inception in 2019. We considered selling the company with Centerview, a very highly regarded firm. And we did a full court press to try to sell the business. And while a lot of people sort of did some digging and homework, think the big private equity firms, some I would describe mega family offices, ultimately, we got no bid and we had to withdraw the transaction. We figured as a more simplified business with a seaport spun off that we would have a better chance taking the business private. And we hired Jefferies to take the business private post our announcement of looking at transactions. Working with Jefferies, we put together a very good materials, a data room. Jefferies approached 284 investors. Of those, 40 signed NDAs. We provided access to a data room. Of those, 20 had Zoom or in-person meetings with us. Four months in, we did not receive a formal expression of interest or even an informal indication of participation. We had a number of investors, I would say, who were interested, but what we struggled with was, despite the fact that the investors we approached, one would describe as long-term, really every one of them wanted to see a path to liquidity within some period of time, whether it was five years or seven years or 10 years. The problem is it's very hard to create, to guarantee to an investor that there's a path for liquidity. That makes it a very challenging transaction for a person who wants to take the business private. And faced with that inability to sell the company in 2019, our inability, it appears at this point, to take the business private and actually feedback from shareholders who said, "Look, Bill, if you're buying at $85 a share, I'm not inclined to sell." And that's when we started thinking about alternative transactions. The first cut at that was the transaction we proposed where we were buying out a percentage of the shareholders, if you will, squeezing out shareholders at 85, combined with the self-tender from the company. And then with feedback from the company, concern about the balance sheet of the business. And then as we did more due diligence on the company's operating cash flows after required equity for development, we realized the business itself, Howard Hughes, would not be in a position to generate meaningful cash for distribution to really beginning four or five years from today. The company itself, Howard Hughes, the board always likes to keep a fair amount of cash on hand. Our goal typically is an order of $500 million of free cash. The business won't be in that position for three plus years, and with some announcements you'll hear in the upcoming earnings release, the company has some incremental development opportunities that are likely to consume more equity capital, so our initial thesis was, "Okay, we'll take control of the business. The excess cash of Howard Hughes will invest in building a company." The more we looked, however, the more we realized that could not start for three or four years in terms of excess cash and not material excess cash, not for five, six years, and that's assuming no incremental development opportunities presented themselves. And that's what led to the revision of this transaction and where we're buying primary shares from the company at a very substantial premium. The other thing I just sort of want to point out about the business and why Howard Hughes has kind of struggled as a public company. We've been a shareholder for 14 years. If you look at how the stock has performed since we invested along with Blackstone and others in a rights offering November of 2010 at a $47 share price, the business was $61 and had not paid a dividend other than a couple dollar distribution of Seaport over a 14-year period of time. So a 2% compound return over 14 years, not something to get excited about. And why? And I think the answer is a few things. One, this is a complicated business. For real estate investors, it's not a REIT. It doesn't pay dividends. It's development intensive. Two-thirds of the assets are land. Land is considered a volatile and risky asset. The business has a lot of economic sensitivity, interest rate sensitivity, and has limited ability to hedge those risks itself. The company itself, in terms of access to capital, has really been reliant on Pershing Square from the day we capitalized the original rights offering. To March of 2020, the company really had to do almost a rescue equity offering. The company's bid over its skis after entering into a bridge loan to acquire an important asset going into COVID, and the company needed to raise capital. And we raised our hand and backstopped it. In fact, a $600 million wasn't a rights offering. It was an equity offering, but the point remains the same. And then again, in spinning off the Seaport, we stepped in for the company. All of these cases, and we've never taken compensation from the company. It's extremely unusual for a financial participant to backstop a rights offering and not get paid some form of fee, but we took no fee for doing so. The other thing that we looked at and thought about over time is, is there another way to unlock this "some of the parts value" of Howard Hughes, and the problem there is a few things. One, it's a C Corp. We've got very low tax bases in our assets, and I would say even more significantly than that, the income-producing assets of this strategy, the reason why we've maintained high occupancies in our office space buildings, for example, is because of the nature of the MPC business, where we're not competing with anyone. We have very little competition in terms of other people owning buildings in our small little cities. And that changes the course if you sell off the assets individually. And then there really is no buyer for our very large land holdings. You can sell those land holdings over a very long period of time, a small percent each year at an auction. But if we put on the market a few thousand acres in Bridgeland, one of our master plan communities, for example, the price would be a fraction of what we would get selling to homebuilders in a retail versus a wholesale type transaction. So to kind of summarize this proposed transaction, really two questions that we asked the board to consider, and now we're presenting these questions to shareholders. Should Pershing Square be allowed to increase its investment in the company by buying 10 million shares for $900 million, take our stake from 37.6% to 48%? So first, the transaction itself is not a change of control. At 37.6%, we're already obviously a very influential shareholder of the company. I don't think our influence meaningfully changes when we go from 37.6% to 40%. We already had permission from the board to go to 40%. So really what we're asking is for the right to go from 40% to 48%. The $90 share price, obviously a very large premium to market, very large premium to the unaffected price, obviously sends a strong message about our confidence and our ability to create value from a $90 share price. The infusion of cash, credit ratings positive for a company that is a below investment grade, B, BB - type issuer. And so that's a nice comfort in an uncertain world. And the board itself remains an independent board. So we think question one is really an easy question. Second question is, does the company want Pershing Square to take over, in effect, the management of the holding company and change the business strategy of Howard Hughes Holdings into building a diversified holding company? And then should Pershing Square be paid for doing so and what form of compensation? So let's start with what we call our value proposition, what we bring to the table, and then we'll go in depth on fees. So just with respect to the team, and I'll walk you through the investment team, 133 years of public and private equity investing experience on the investment team. And it's not just a nine-person investment team that we're bringing to the table. It's full access to our entire organization, resources, office space, capital raising teams, legal, accounting, technology, and otherwise. One of our core capabilities that has been a big driver of our returns and also helped mitigate our exposure to various macroeconomic and geopolitical risks is what we call our asymmetric macroeconomic hedging capabilities. I'll go into those in some more depth. We are good at doing research on companies and doing due diligence. Those are core skills, obviously, for identifying and investing in acquiring new businesses. We do have a demonstrated track record of creating value at a large number of companies over our 21-year history. We certainly see unique deal flow, and we have done privately negotiated transactions. Our mandate for the Pershing Square funds is limited to the public markets, even though we have done privately negotiated deals. And the team itself has enormous private equity experience in terms of their backgrounds, which we'll talk about. And we think the company, by virtue of our involvement, will have massively improved access to raise additional capital on an as-needed basis. Here's the investment team. And if you look at the tenure of the team, Pershing Square is, I would say, quite unusual. Most investment firms, most hedge funds have enormous turnover on the investment team. You see people, the millennials of the world, paying $50 million to recruit someone from Citadel, for example. Here, Pershing Square is a place where people come and build a career. Ryan's been here for 16 years. Ben for 13. Anthony 12, 11 for Charles, and so on. We just recruited a new member of the team. And our ability to recruit talent, I would say, is unique. We basically got a resume. When we announced we were looking for a new analyst from every associate, if you will, at Apollo, a KKR, Warburg, a Blackstone, seeking that one job opportunity. Sonal Khosla sort of won the contest, and she will be joining us in May. And really, it's our ability to recruit talent, the unique, I would say, culture and economics. And just this is a very interesting place to work, allows us to literally recruit the best and brightest from the top private equity firms, which are really the training ground that we use to recruit talent to Pershing Square. You'll note the backgrounds: Goldman, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, KKR, KKR. The KKR school has been very good to Pershing Square: Hellman & Friedman, Warburg, and again, another KKR, if you will, graduate joining Pershing Square. This is the org chart. Unusually for a firm that today manages, I don't know, $17 billion-18 billion of assets, it's a very small team, and when you have a very small team, the economics of working in a place like this are extremely attractive. The culture is much more interesting, and if you notice the tenure, the tenure of the team members is very, very long, beginning at the reception desk and at the administrative team. Sarit has been here 21 years. Megan and Mercedes, 6, 5. It tells you something about a firm when there isn't even turnover at the reception desk. Unique culture, very attractive economic characteristics, and a partnership culture. With respect to our investment here, we are big believers in investing in our own funds. We have a 28% stake in the Pershing Square funds that we manage. The Pershing Square funds, in turn, have a 38% stake in Howard Hughes. As we describe it here on a look-through basis, the people making the investment decisions for the new Howard Hughes and helping oversee the company will have an $810 million investment. Those are the investment team members. In addition to that, another $475 million by virtue of the 28% ownership we have in the Pershing Square funds. Of that total, I will have a $764 million investment, and the rest of the Pershing Square team will have a little over half a billion dollar investment. What is happening here is a new management team is coming on board to run the holding company, and we're adding an extra $810 million to our investment in the company, a personal investment. This has to be the largest investment probably ever made by a new management team stepping in to run a public company. My look-through investment will be $764 million. The only other investment I have, anything close to scale of that, is an investment I have in the Pershing Square Holdings public entity. If you look at our results over the last 21 years, we present here the S&P 500, which is up eightfold, which is not a low return, I would say, over that 21-year period of time. The funds net of the incentive fees we charge and management fees have been a 25-fold return, more than 3x the returns of the S&P over the same period. The green line, we show what our returns would have been if we only charged a management fee. That's relevant here, of course, because we're not charging incentive fees to Howard Hughes. It's been a 4,441% return or a 45.5x return. If you invested $10,000 in January 2004 and you didn't pay the incentive fee and just the management fee, you'd have $455,000 today. If you look at our firm's history, there's sort of three periods as I describe them. The first 11.5 years, we could do, I would say, pretty much no wrong. We started out as an activist investor buying stakes in companies and getting Wendy's to spin off Tim Hortons, taking stakes in Canadian Pacific, taking control of the board in a proxy contest, bringing in new leadership. Very successful, very profitable strategy. We made a very large and very disappointing investment in a company called Valeant Pharmaceuticals in middle 2015. That investment lost 85% + of its value, and that led the world to believe that Pershing Square was going to be forced to liquidate. At that moment in time, about 70% of our assets were in open-ended hedge funds, and those redemptions, which people were right to anticipate, forced us to sell other holdings. And that led to this, you see the line down on the chart, right? We had a 30%+ drawdown, and that led to a change in strategy. We decided to get out of the open-ended hedge fund business, so we didn't liquidate those funds, but let anyone who wanted their money take their money. And we really focused our energies on growing Pershing Square Holdings, which is our European public entity that now comprises 93% of the assets we manage. The permanent capital era, as I call it, began in January 2018. That's when we basically got out of the open-ended fund business, we have a small remnant of that business, 7% of our fee-generating capital today. But if you look at our results over the last seven years, it shows you the power of having permanent capital, not having to worry about money flows in and out. This is a tombstone that we created back in 2017 after going through that challenging period. We took our core investment principles that were supposed to be engraved on a stone tablet, and the team came back with a deal toy, but it really achieved the same purpose. There's one of these sitting on my desk right next to my computer. And these are the core principles of the firm. We look for simple, predictable, free cash flow generative businesses, businesses that have very high barriers to entry, businesses that have limited exposure to extrinsic factors we cannot control, strong balance sheets, unattractive valuation, of course. We want businesses that are minimally reliant on the capital markets, don't have to constantly raise capital in order to succeed. And of course, we like excellent management and good governance. We've been around for 21 years. I've been in the investment business since my first fund, which I started in 1992. And over that period of time, we have built a lot of relationships. We have entered into lots of interesting partnerships. I've been pretty active personally. I'm not permitted to make public securities investments personally, but I've been an active investor in venture and private equity. And the team all come from private equity backgrounds. Pershing Square has built a brand name, and we get approached all the time about investing in private companies, opportunities that we have to turn down because our mandate today does not include the ability to invest in private companies. We also focus on large-cap companies, generally mega-cap and large-cap businesses in light of the nature of our capital base. Actually, Howard Hughes is really the only small-cap company we own, and that's by virtue of an investment we made in General Growth years ago that it was spun out of. We do think there's a very interesting opportunity set in the public markets, opportunities to buy control of smaller companies. If you look at the S&P 500, it's massively outperformed the small-cap index by 640 basis points per annum. The small-cap stocks trade on average at 16 x earnings versus the S&P at 22 x. We still think there's some interesting gems in the small-cap world that we've had to pass on because we haven't had an entity or a fund that we could use to pursue those investments. There are other investors, of course, that can buy private companies. I think what's unique about Pershing Square is the nature of our strategy is one, we know how to buy large stakes in public companies and get historically something pretty close to control without paying a premium. Those skills are very valuable when we actually decide to get control of various businesses. And that, we think the Howard Hughes Holdings opportunity set will certainly, at its earlier stages, be focusing on kind of the small-cap universe and smaller private companies. If you look at our record on a compound annual basis, and again, here we show the net return net of the 20% and 16% incentive fees we've charged historically. And then we show the results without an incentive fee. Again, here we will not be charging an incentive fee. The results have been 19.8% compounded. That's a 935 basis point outperformance versus the S&P. If you look at the permanent capital era, that's the last seven years, the results have been extraordinary. 27% compounded for the last seven years, 14%, I'm sorry, versus the S&P at 14%. That's a 1,300 basis point annual outperformance versus the S&P. Most investors think over any decent period of time, if you can beat the stock market by, or the S&P 500 by 100 or 200 basis points, you're a superstar. And here our results are, I would say, off the charts. I believe certainly in the last seven years, I am not aware of another investment manager that has generated similar returns. And over the last 21 years at 19.8%, these are at the absolute upper end of equity performance. A big part of our success as an equity investor comes from the fact that we're always focused on risk, mitigating risk, hedging risk, and part of our strategy from the early days was thinking about macro risks, geopolitical risk, political risk, and hedging what we call black swan risk. And we do so by using option-like instruments, instruments that have limited finite investment and theoretically unlimited upside. And what we like about this is it helps hedge downside risk. And it's a method for us to get access to large amounts of capital when very bad things happen. If you think about Howard Hughes' business, going back to its formation, General Growth went bankrupt during the financial crisis because it lost access to capital, and because the MPC business, which at the time was within the General Growth company, they stopped selling homes, and so lot sales ended. They literally didn't sell a lot, I believe, for two years. And those cash flows, General Growth was relying on in order to meet debt service that led to the bankruptcy of G eneral Growth during the great financial crisis. And it just shows you some of the economic sensitivity of a business reliant on selling lots to homebuilders. COVID-19, Howard Hughes stock declined 71% over a 30-day period of time. And part of that was a little bit self-inflicted in that the company purchased the Anadarko buildings in The Woodlands and had to do so by year-end in order to win the bid. At least that was the view of the company. And then it got stuck with a bridge loan going into a very uncertain period, and the board prudently raised capital and asked us if we would step in to help the company. But again, a massive decline in value and a dilutive offering in order to get the company balance sheet right-sized. And then most recently, with the Fed raising rates, stock went from $102 to $55 a share. This is a leveraged long-only company that owns real estate assets and the most volatile real estate asset, which is land, comprising about two-thirds of the enterprise value of the company. So there is a lot of sensitivity to interest rates. Now, if you compare what Pershing Square did over the same period, we were very concerned about the growing credit risks in the market beginning as early as 2005. And we spent a small amount of money on interest rate, I'm sorry, on credit derivatives. These are instruments where you pay a premium every quarter. And if bad things happen, i.e., credit spreads widen, these instruments become much more valuable. We spent $64 million on premium. We collected $1.1 billion of profits from proceeds from the sale of these instruments when the credit markets imploded, a 17.5-fold multiple of the capital invested. And then we took that capital and we reinvested that capital in 2009, buying very cheap stocks. And the market bottomed in March of 2009. One billion sounds like a decent amount of money, but it was relative to we were managing about $4 billion at the time. So it gave us a very large chunk of cash that we can invest in the market when stocks were cheap. Same drill, COVID-19. In January of 2020, we became increasingly concerned about the risks of COVID. By February 23rd, I think it was, we had concluded that this was going to, the government was going to have to effectively, governments around the world were going to shut the global economy. This would be a credit event like no other expected by markets. Credit spreads were at the all-time tightest levels. We bought about $74 billion of investment-grade CDS and some high-yield credit default swaps. Those instruments made our investment over a 10-day period. Spreads exploded. We sold the swaps, collected $2.6 billion, and we were buying stocks at the bottom. Proceeds, 93-fold return on the premium invested. Beginning late December 2020 and then early 2021, we started buying, we bought $104 billion of two-year interest rate swap options. These were out-of-the-money instruments. The two-year treasury was at 12 basis points. If I remember correctly, the strike price was around 93 basis points. It's a bit like buying a call option on a stock that was seven-fold out of the money. 93 basis points sounded a lot relative to 12, but 0.93% interest rates sounded very low in light of our expectation for massive inflation. This was, if you can remember, a period when you had the most aggressive monetary policy of all time. We had extremely aggressive fiscal policy. We had the Biden administration with the Build Back Better bill and large commitments to invest our taxpayer money. And then, of course, we had the vaccine and the world reopening. All of these things coming into the world at the same time. We said, "Look, this is going to lead to explosive inflation." And we made $112 million investment in swaptions. And then that increased in value by 11-fold. We took the profits or some of the profits and bought another tranche when that one, when we sold the first one at a higher strike price and extended the term and made another $1.3 billion. But the point being that had we been part of the Howard Hughes enterprise, these are the most liquid instruments in the world. We could have done the same thing for Howard Hughes and helped the company hedge exposures. But we were not able to do so, of course, because we were not running the company at the time. Howard Hughes did not have the resources or the relationships or the banking relationships or the skills in order to do so. But we think this skill set is obviously valuable for investing in companies and markets, but very valuable for a company that has economic exposure. The hedging capabilities of the firm are something that we've built up over the last 21 years. It's a systematic process on a daily basis. We're looking for interesting opportunities to take advantage of sort of dislocations and potential risks that appear in the marketplace. Not only do you have to be good at identifying these opportunities, but you also have to know how to execute them in a way where you have minimal market impact and you can come and go without a huge impact on the market, and you're dealing with counterparties where credit matters. You have to negotiate credit agreements and have arrangements that are favorable so that if your counterparty fails, you always have U.S. Treasury collateral protecting your investment. If anything, the world has become a much more volatile place in recent years, and we think this capability is a very valuable one that we would bring to Howard Hughes if we were so appointed. This is just sort of a list of companies that we took an active role in. The active role varied anything from taking a 10% stake in Wendy's and having them spin off Tim Hortons, catalyzing the sale of Sears to Kmart. We have a long list of companies that we could go through here, but in each case, a wide range of engagement, everything from governance transformation, think adding directors or replacing a board in a proxy contest, recruiting CEOs, Brian Niccol to Chipotle, Hunter Harrison to Canadian Pacific, Seifi Ghasemi in the earlier days to Air Products. We have a competency in recruiting top talent, giving them the right incentives and letting them do their thing. Major operational turnaround stories, Chipotle being, obviously, and Canadian Pacific being two great examples in very different industries, helping businesses reorganize. We were an investor in Fortune Brands and were a catalyst for them separating into a golf company, Titleist, Beam, and Fortune, the hardware, Fortune products, the hardware manufacturer. We've been General Growth. We bought 25% of the company, the common stock prior to Chapter 11, and we led reorganization of the company, and it is considered by many the most successful bankruptcy restructuring ever. The creditors, $27 billion of creditors, got par plus accrued plus default and late fees, and the shareholders, the stock went from $0.34 a share to $31 a share during our ownership. Obviously, a lot of experience in the capital markets. We've done numerous capital markets transactions. Capital allocation is a core competency of the firm, and we're always an advocate for the shareholders, and we help companies tell their story to the market. We've done a lot of transactions in the kind of privately negotiated world, and we spend a lot of time on boards working with management teams, and I pretty much know every CEO in America or one person removed from every CEO and/or board director in the country. The team has enormous experience, pretty much everyone coming from a private equity background at a top firm, and a lot of success. We've had a few failures, most notably an investment in Valeant Pharmaceuticals, an investment in J.C. Penney. We lost money shorting a company very famously called Herbalife, but those are the small, less than a handful of problematic investments and a very long list. We have a very, very high batting average of success that has enabled us to compound what we call our reputational equity over time, and that's led to great long-standing relationships with management teams, boards, important institutional investors, and we've built really a following in the retail world. We did a transaction. We took Restaurant Brands public. This was at that time Burger King, a transaction we did with 3G. They were the controlling shareholder. They took it private. We took it public with them. We remained a shareholder 12 years later. It's been about a 14% compound return. Universal Music, we were chosen by the Bolloré family and Vivendi to help take that business public, and we have the nature of a hedge fund manager, alternative asset manager as you build relationships with private sources of capital. And so we're known by pretty much every family office, insurance company, pension fund, sovereign wealth fund. Many of the investors have been investors with Pershing Square over a very long period of time. Broad retail following. I did everything you need to know about finance and investing in under an hour video. It's gotten something like 40 million views that helped build a relationship with the retail community. Obviously, pretty active on X. And that's a platform that we think is important. We've had some unusual success raising equity debt in the public markets. Pershing Square Holdings is the largest permanent capital hedge fund in the world. It has $16 billion of assets, a BBB+ S&P rated company with a positive outlook, $2.3 billion of long-dated unsecured bonds outstanding. We raised the largest SPAC ever. Unfortunately, we were not able, the SEC would not let us close the transaction with Universal Music Group. So, one, we had to close it outside of this SPAC, which was obviously very disappointing to those investors. But I promised all of them that who stayed to the end that we would give them a free option on our next transaction. It took us two years to get through the SEC, $10 million, and about 15 or a dozen or so filings. But ultimately, Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, a new acquisition company, no founder stock, no shareholder warrants, no underwriting fees. We were actively looking for a large-cap, high-quality business to take public. And we've raised about four billion of equity for co-investment vehicles that we've done over time. These are a list of capital markets transactions we've done. In many cases, they were the first of their kind, the largest of their kind, or never been done before. The IPO of Pershing Square Holdings was the largest IPO in Europe at over $3 billion. The kind of benchmark billion-dollar bond issue, largest of its kind for a publicly traded hedge fund. Lots of examples of unique structures. The services agreement. So I've read many of the comments on Twitter. I would say a lot of very supportive investors interested in what we're doing. I would say the only criticism we received is, of course, anytime you try to make a comparison to the great Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, you're subject yourself to potential criticism because that standard is very, very high. But I actually think the comparison is a fair one. And let me walk you through what we're doing and what the differences are. So number one, just to summarize, we're getting paid 1.5% in this transaction of the equity market cap of Howard Hughes going forward, paid on a quarterly basis. No promotes, no performance allocation, no performance-based fees, no equity, no options, no restricted stock. Typically, we charge all of our other funds a 1.5% management fee and an annual 16%-20% performance fee based on realized and unrealized gains. Here, there will be no equity-related fees. The team that is going to receive no cash or stock compensation as employees of Howard Hughes. The agreement itself is subject to termination for cause with customary cure rights. Other than third-party transaction costs, there are no additional fees or compensation expenses beyond the 1.5% fee for the services arrangement. The question that we received, of course, is why does the services agreement contemplate a 1.5% fee rather than paying us typical cash and stock compensation, which is what most public companies do? And the answer to that is really twofold. First, I've got a day job, which does not permit me to take a new role at another company in exchange for compensation. And the same is true for all of the employees of Pershing Square. The second point is what we're doing is we're allocating all of our resources or a portion of all of our resources to Howard Hughes in order to help Howard Hughes execute a strategy. Howard Hughes could not afford to hire this team, could not recruit this team for any amount of money or just within the context of Howard Hughes. One way to think about this, the holding company itself is a shell. There's really nothing going on there. We're putting in place an entire organization with a 21-year history and relationships and access to capital and all the hedging and other capabilities I talked about. Howard Hughes couldn't hire that team on its own. If you think about the fee in the context of alternative asset, private and public funds, it's certainly at the lowest end of any such funds. When I made the Berkshire Hathaway analogy, the question became, well, Berkshire doesn't charge any advisory or service fee. Why are we doing so? And I think you have to look at our transaction in its entirety. Buffett bought control of Berkshire when the stock was trading. I think it was practically a net-net way back when at $8-$10 a share in the early 1960s. What we're doing is we're paying a 46% premium and investing $900 million in primary shares of the company. We're providing. We're not a one-man band. We're bringing the full resources of a 40-odd person team, nine-person investment team into the company. And we're doing so in the construct in which we are allowed to do so. We're an alternative asset manager. We've got a fiduciary obligation to our existing funds. We have partners in our holding company. We can't quit our day jobs and go over to Howard Hughes and take it on. When people think about Berkshire Hathaway, they think about Warren Buffett working in a small office with a dozen people. And that's one way to think about Berkshire. But if you l ook more deeply, Buffett is not a one-man band. His key executives are very highly compensated, Greg Abel, Ajit Jain, in the proxy. Their base compensation is, I think, the highest of any executives I've seen in the high teens plus bonus compensation. They get $20-odd million a year. Ted Weschler, Todd Combs, who managed the Berkshire portfolios, get an excess of $10 million, purportedly in base cash compensation and a profit interest participation in returns above the S&P 500. Other than Buffett, every other employee at Berkshire is paid a market salary. We could not hire this team into Howard Hughes and pay them a market salary and come anywhere close to the management fee that we're charging. What we do on the pages that follow, and I'll have Bharath step in here, we do a comparison between what we're charging and what Blackstone, or KKR, Brookfield charge for similar services. Wh y don't you go ahead, Bharath? Sure. T hanks, Bill. A natural starting point for these fee comparables are the traditional private equity funds managed by the KKR, Blackstone, Carlyle, et cetera. These funds typically charge between a 1.5%-2% in management fees and performance fees equal to 15%-20% of investment gains. When you compare that to HHH, its 1.5% fee will be on the lower end of the private equity fee range, and there are no performance or incentive fees. Plus, it's a very simple and transparent fee arrangement with no monitoring fees or other hidden ancillary fees that PE firms typically charge their portfolio companies. Even beyond the fee structure, the liquidity and governance provisions of these private equity funds are much less favorable. On liquidity, private equity investors mainly realize liquidity through portfolio company sales and dividend recapitalizations, which are both heavily dependent on the capital markets with very limited visibility. On governance, private equity funds are essentially fully controlled by their sponsor with limited board representation, disclosure, and other shareholder rights for investors. HHH, on the other hand, it will be publicly traded, will have its NYSE listing, and will have an independent board of directors. In many ways, we actually think the more appropriate set of comps are the three publicly traded investment vehicles that Brookfield manages, BIP, BEP, and BBU, which are invested in infrastructure, renewable, and private equity assets, respectively. These vehicles share a lot of similarities with HHH. They're listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They're managed by a well-recognized sponsor with meaningful skin in the game. Brookfield Corporation owns between 26%-66% of these entities. They have independent boards with very robust public disclosure. If we go to the next page and look at their fee structure, they're charged both management fees and performance fees. Their management fee ratio is 1.25%, but most notably, it's 1.25% of not just equity value, but of total capitalization, and Brookfield's definition of total capitalization includes both equity value plus the value of all their corporate net debt, which is effectively any debt that's not asset-level financing. So if you were to look at it on an apples to apples basis, HHH's 1.5% fee on equity value really becomes a 1.15% fee under Brookfield's definition of total capitalization, so a full 10 basis points lower than what Brookfield charges. Then in addition to the management fees, the Brookfield vehicles are also charged incentive fees, and for BIP and BEP in particular, these incentive fees are 15%-25% of these vehicles' dividends above a certain threshold. The two key points to highlight here are, one, these fees are paid quarterly, and two, for both BIP and BEP, their current dividends are well above their thresholds and "in the money." Although they're considered incentive fees, they're much more recurring and management fee-like in nature. If we flip to the next page, it's sort of clearest to see the combined impact of both management fees and incentive fees by looking at what these vehicles paid in 2024. If we look at the red dotted box at the bottom of the page, it compares that total fee ratio on an apples to apples basis with HHH. What you'll see is BIP's all-in fee ratio was 2.7% of its equity market cap. BEP and BBU's all-in fee ratios are around 2% of their equity market cap. 120 basis points and 50 basis points higher, respectively, compared to the 1.5% for HHH. Another interesting group of comparables are the non-traded perpetual REITs, with Blackstone's BREIT sort of being the most prominent example. These funds have a management fee of 1.25% of NAV. But for a lot of their retail share classes, there's also upfront commissions of up to 3.5% of NAV and ongoing servicing fees of another 85 basis points per annum. With HHH, there's obviously no upfront commissions or ongoing servicing fees, regardless of whether you're a retail or institutional investor. Another important distinction is that HHH's advisory fees are calculated as a percent of market value rather than a self-reported NAV, which creates much better alignment for investors. For example, in 2022 and 2023, these REITs received a lot of negative feedback from their shareholders because their NAV didn't necessarily reflect the declines that publicly traded comps saw, which meant that investors ended up likely paying higher fees than they otherwise would have if it were calculated purely on market value. And then on performance fees, these funds are charged 12.5% of the increase in NAV. And these performance fees get crystallized annually. So sort of similar to the Brookfield examples, it's instructive to kind of look at the all-in combined impact of both management and performance fees. And that's what we show sort of illustratively on this page for BREIT in a year where it hits a 12% target return. If you again see the red dotted box at the bottom of the page, you'd see that between the management fees and the performance fees, investors end up paying an all-in fee ratio of 2.7% of NAV, which again is a 120 basis points premium to the Howard Hughes percentage. Then lastly, another sort of set of comps are the non-traded private equity perpetual vehicles. These vehicles are effectively the private equity equivalents of the non-traded REITs like BREIT with substantively similar terms. The main difference here is some charge higher performance fees. For example, KKR's vehicle has a 15% performance fee. If you were to compare it to the example from the prior page, that 2.7% all-in fee ratio for BREIT would be closer to a 3% all-in fee ratio for KKR's vehicle. Why don't I take over here, Bharath? Another point that I think is meaningful is the incremental fees or service fees to Pershing Square here are approximately half of what we're charging Howard Hughes. Why is that? Well, one, the fee we're charging on our own capital is sort of fees that we're paying ourselves. That's not incremental fees to Pershing Square. 31% of the fees that we're charging relate to fees on funds we're going to be rebating to our clients, the fee that we charge them on their investment in Howard Hughes. They don't pay a double layer of fees, right? So we have existing funds own 19 million shares. Those 19 million shares will pay a management fee by virtue of or a service fee by virtue of the arrangement with Howard Hughes. So we're going to reduce the Pershing Square funds fees that they pay us by a like amount. So the net to us is actually 52% of what we charge Howard Hughes. At a $90 share price, that's $42 million of incremental fees or about 0.8% of Howard Hughes's market cap at a $90 a share arrangement. But so the question is, is this a windfall for Pershing Square? And the answer is it's not. The Howard Hughes capital will represent about 27% of our aggregate fee-paying capital. Since Howard Hughes is not going to pay us to promote, the fees will be something in order of 5%-6% of the total revenues of Pershing Square. So our revenues will go up by 5%-6%, but we'll be responsible for managing a lot more assets. And I think a better way to think about this, maybe the clearest way to think about it, is we're going to have an investment of $1.3 billion in the company. We're going to net an incremental. The scenario here is if Howard Hughes' stock price were to go up by 20%, we'll generate $50 million of fees that we can use to offset our costs associated with overseeing this investment. But the profit on the $1.3 billion will overwhelm the incremental fees. So we'd make $260 million on our stock investment, our management team's investment in Howard Hughes if the stock went up 20%. But if the stock went down 20%, we'd lose $260 million and we'd collect only $34 million of incremental fees. So the investment we're making in the company, how that does overwhelms any incremental benefit from the fees. The bottom line here for us is we've proposed an arrangement that works. We're basically putting in place one way to think about this is the Howard Hughes Holdings entity is a shell. We're putting in place a driver, a thousand horsepower engine, et cetera, that shell couldn't afford if we actually charged a market fee. It just would be completely uneconomic. What we're doing is we're setting a fee in line with what we charge to manage other assets, and that will go toward covering the costs associated with our oversight. But it's not going to be some huge incremental profit opportunity for the firm because we're only getting the benefit of half of these fees and there's no performance in other fees. Investors have the alignment of a management team that has a $1.3 billion investment, a $900 million incremental investment at the time we take over the company. I think the simplest way to think about this, and I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I know it was definitely a hot button issue for a number of people in the comments, is will the addition of the Pershing Square team, our investment expertise, our hedging capabilities, our ability to build this company into a successful diversified holding company, are we going to generate 150 basis points per annum of excess return versus the status quo? Can we generate 1.5% more IRR in exchange for the resources we're going to bring? And I believe the answer to that is overwhelmingly yes. And if you look at our long-term track record, in particular our track record of the last seven years since we've been managing permanent capital, the fact that we're starting with a relatively small base of equity here, it's a lot easier to compound $5 billion of equity at a high rate than it is to compound hundreds of billions of equity at a high rate. And that we find particularly appealing. Another question that was raised by some is the company has put out a net asset value calculation on a periodic basis over time. And while $90 represents a 46% premium to where the stock was trading, it's a discount to where management has set net asset value. I think net asset value is a reasonable construct for Howard Hughes investors to think about as they invest in the company, but it is a very different construct from net asset value when you compare it to real estate investment trust. Well, and I think you can see that when you look at the chart. This is Green Street's equal-weighted average of REITs that tend to trade in and around Green Street's estimate of NAV. So NAV looks like, with respect to real estate investment trusts, a pretty good measure. Sometimes stocks trade above NAV. Sometimes they trade below NAV. Think COVID, think financial crisis. Those kind of difficult periods they tend to trade at a discount. But the ordinary course, they're plus or minus 10% versus NAV. So NAV looks like a pretty good metric. And therefore, buying at a discount seems like would be a bargain. Now, interestingly, if you look at Howard Hughes's investor day NAV calculations, stock has traded at anywhere between a 37%-39% discount since the company has reported a public NAV. So either this means the public NAV or the NAV that management disclosed is very wrong, or for some reason, investors are assigning a big discount to it. And our $90 price, by the way, is a 24% discount to management NAV. And the reason why we think NAV is not a relevant construct for the company issuing stock here is if you think about the REIT example, if there's an apartment REIT trading at $50 a share and NAV is $75, if you issue stock at $60, it's going to be dilutive because the alternative for the company is to liquidate. So if an apartment REIT liquidates, it should be able to achieve that $75 NAV value because it's a flow-through entity for tax purposes. So there's no tax friction in the entity itself. Putting aside the cost of if there's debt that has to be refinanced, et cetera, there may be some transaction costs, but you'll get something pretty close to NAV. So if you could take control of an apartment REIT trading at 50 cents to NAV, you could make a lot of money doing so. Howard Hughes is a very different animal. Number one is a C Corp. And as a C Corp, there is a layer of corporate tax. Today, 21%. And you pay that tax relative to any tax gains on assets. The assets of Howard Hughes in most cases, their tax basis is well below market value. So there's a big tax cost if you were to try to liquidate Howard Hughes. The other more material consideration is that two-thirds of Howard Hughes' NAV, marked using the most recent sale prices or alternatively doing a present value of the cash flows that you could expect to earn on that land over a multi-decade period of time, two-thirds of NAV is land. There is no market for Howard Hughes to sell a few thousand acres in one of its MPCs. There's a very active market where on a quarterly basis, the company holds auctions, homebuilders compete in those auctions, and the company's able to realize growing land prices over time. But if we tried to dump all that land on the market, there is no bid for those assets. We were able to buy into what we call Teravalis in Phoenix at a very attractive land value because we were the only bidder. That was a $600 million transaction. It was a relatively small transaction. This company owns what we call $7 billion of land. The universe of people who are prepared to buy $7 billion of land at a price a homebuilder will pay for 1% or 2% of that land being sold over the course of a year sort of doesn't exist. The other really important point about Howard Hughes is it's an organic going concern. For people less familiar with the business, when you own a small city, the advantage you have is very different than if you're a real estate developer building a building. The advantage you have is Howard Hughes owns substantially all of the commercial land in its MPCs. It owns all of the unsold residential land in its MPCs. And it owns a very high percentage of the income-producing assets. That creates a very different competitive dynamic when Howard Hughes goes to when there's a 200,000 sq ft tenant looking for space. They're not bidding one landlord against another. If they want to be in The Woodlands, they've got to be basically in one of our buildings. And that enables us to have a better negotiating leverage, if you will, with the tenant. And because we own substantially all the commercial land, we only build when there's demand. We never have the problem, the problem that they have in, let's say, downtown Houston when the market improves. There's demand for a million sq ft buildings, and all of a sudden, the market's overbuilt. Think Austin, Texas. There was a great market until a bunch of developers at the same time built a lot of Class A assets, and they're now competing with each other. You don't have that problem in MPCs, but if you try to sell the land or the income-producing assets off separately from the commercial land or to different buyers. So the company has looked at, over the last 14 years, lots of different alternatives to create value, including a sale of the whole company. At various times, looked at a potential, could we sell off or spin off income-producing assets? And ultimately, we concluded that would destroy value. So while the company's NAV, hopefully, it grows sort of over time, is an interesting metric to judge the progress of the business, it's not a number that could be realized in a liquidation. By the way, it's not a number that includes the operating costs of running this company. Our view on Howard Hughes is it's a very well-run master planned community company. But as a standalone company in one business, it is at risk. Pershing Square, as a 14-year shareholder, has stepped in both at the inception of the company and at various times to help the company recapitalize when the capital markets shut. But as a standalone single B to B B rated company, we think it's not a great standalone business. I think that's been proven for better or worse over the last 14 years by a stock that has permanently traded at, obviously, a very large discount to NAV and one that has not really generated a meaningful return for shareholders. That's reflected in this chart. The early days of Howard Hughes, there were rumors and then eventually a cover story. The risk of this, of course, that was a kind of cover story of Forbes magazine. And the reporter wrote an article saying, "This is it, it's going to be Bill's Berkshire Hathaway." The stock ran up to whatever, $150 a share. When we didn't turn it into Bill's Berkshire Hathaway over time, the stock went back down. And now we would like to turn it into Pershing Square's, as we say, modern-day version of Berkshire Hathaway. And then the obvious question, of course, is why will new Howard Hughes trade at a better valuation and generate higher returns than standalone Howard Hughes? And we think the answer to that is several-fold. One, stocks trade on the basis of supply and demand. We are not increasing the supply of Howard Hughes shares. The flow to the company is not changing. We are, however, in our view, going to meaningfully increase the demand for Howard Hughes shares. It's going to be some turnover from, if we do this transaction, from a pure-play real estate investor that wants nothing to do with a diversified holding company. So there'll be some investors who will sell. But we also believe there's a much, much larger group of investors who would love to find a long-term compounding vehicle run by an aligned management team, in this case, investing $1.3 billion of their own capital alongside the public at a huge premium to market value, taking a modest amount of service fees to cover a portion of the costs that we will assume when we take over this entity. But again, our $1.3 billion investment vastly overwhelms any material benefit from the net $40 million of potential fees that we will receive from the entity. The $40 million will not cover our allocable costs, the allocable time and energy that we're going to put into making this company successful. We've also said that that $900 million investment is a permanent one. We will never sell it. We're going to own it forever. And you can judge us based on the success of the stock over a very long period of time. I wish I could take the job for $100,000 like Mr. Buffett did 60 years ago. And I could do it on my own. And I had nothing else going on. But even then, I would have to hire a real team. People think perhaps Mr. Buffett just working away in a small office, and that's creating all the value at Berkshire. The reality is there are a lot of very highly compensated people at Berkshire who make millions and tens of millions of dollars running their various businesses, investing the capital of the company, executing transactions. Howard Hughes could not afford to hire this team internally. So certainly at the start, we were giving a deal where Howard Hughes can get the full benefit of the team without bearing the full burden of the costs associated with the team. The other point I would make is as a pure-play real estate company, two-thirds of its market value in land that does a lot of development that doesn't pay a dividend, that's a C Corp. It's a relatively small market cap entity that has a geographically dispersed collection of assets that does not report a metric that you can really model the company on. It's a very difficult company for analysts to cover. It's a very difficult company for a new shareholder to do due diligence on. And that really hampers the universe of people who can own the stock. We think there are a much, much larger group of investors that would like to invest alongside Pershing Square that will buy and hold the stock for the very long term and that will overwhelm the pure-play real estate investors that will choose to sell. We also importantly believe that while we can't guarantee we're going to hedge every black swan risk that occurs over the next 30 years, we've done a very good job over the last 21. That hedging capability we bring to Howard Hughes. One successful hedge pays for 20 years of service fees. With that, we're going to go to Q&A. We'll give everyone a break. Why don't we resume at 10:15 A.M., and we will do Spaces, and I will launch that Spaces from my accounts. Just go to Bill Ackman, and there will be a Spaces that you can follow. We're going to take the questions we receive in the order in which we receive them. I appreciate your patience. Thank you so much. [audio distortion] Capital, the way we invest capital today at Pershing Square, which is we look for what we call simple, predictable, free cash flow, generative, durable growth companies, businesses that we think can compound their value at high rates over a long period of time that have very significant barriers to entry. And we want to buy those businesses at prices that make sense. And we want to make sure they're run by people that we like, trust, and admire. And we want to give them the right incentives. That's the strategy. Now, we want to find those investments wherever they exist. They could be private companies where people like the idea of Pershing Square as an anchor or an anchor investor, a controlling investor, an 80% shareholder. And when they need capital to continue to grow their business, it could be an existing public company, a bit like Howard Hughes. It could be a very good business, but in the public markets, the shareholders have not given it the recognition it deserves. The public company costs and oversight and governance and other issues have been sort of challenging for the company. There's an interesting opportunity to buy a great business at a very attractive valuation in the public markets. So I would say public, private doesn't matter to us. These are control situations. We want to own, call it, 50%+ of the common stock of the company. But they're businesses that meet Pershing Square's long-term historic criteria. Thank you for your question. And I'm going to ask Charles, BWI. Please go ahead and unmute and ask your question. Go ahead, Charles. Oh, thank you. Hello, Bill. I have a quick question. So listening to your presentation, my wife is a shareholder of HH H. And she likes the idea in general. But I have a specific question. The $90 premium, I'm just curious how that number rather than the others, because your presentation, you came in, you had to backstop a lot with cash. There's things like that. There's already the premium that you mentioned is trading at premium since your August 1st announcement. So how specifically did you guys come up with 90 over current market plus 10 or whatever the case may be? Sure. Actually, the history here is an unintended. We started out with a going private transaction. We were considering a going private transaction. We had to file an updated 13D that reflected that thinking. That, of course, had an impact on the stock price. And that set at least some benchmark, that sort of unaffected price set a benchmark for a premium for a going private transaction. We explored a going private transaction. We were unsuccessful at raising sufficient capital to take the company private. So then we considered Plan B. And Plan B was sort of a change of control transaction because we were going to own between 61% and 69% of the company. And usually, in transactions like that, it's got to be a pretty substantial premium. And so we felt 85 was an appropriate premium relative to the 61. And then the more we looked into that transaction, the more we realized that the company wasn't going to be generating a lot of cash, particularly if we added another $500 million worth of debt. And then we went to, I would say, Plan C, which we think is the best plan we've come up with so far. And we wanted to have it be an improvement versus our previous transaction, even though normally in a stock purchase transaction from a company, you would pay a discount to the market price. And if we had planned to do this from the beginning, we would have bought in the open market at $61, the 2-point whatever% that we could have to get to 40%, which was our permitted threshold. And at some later time, we could have offered to buy more shares. Now, I don't think the company would have issued primary stock at $61. So we think a premium is appropriate. We want to set a high bar from where to the point of a previous questioner is we're happy for the public to buy the stock at $75 and for us to pay $90 because we're confident that we can compound the equity of the company at a high rate from our $90 threshold price. And that's really how we think about it. Why don't I now go to William D. Cohan? I'm going to add you as a speaker, and Christian, I'm going to remove from speaker. Go ahead, Mr. Cohan. Hey, Bill. Thank you. So how does this fit in with your long-term goal to create the next Berkshire Hathaway? I know you referenced it, and you said it's a high bar to compare yourself to Warren, but you've been doing that for decades now. And how does this transaction get you there as opposed to the one that you proposed last month that seemed to be more of a direct line to get there? Sure. That's also a couple of things. Buffett was an inspiration to me when I was in my early 20s. It matters which books you read first or which shareholder letters you read first. It affects how you think about things. And he's been an inspiration ever since. And I decided when I was 26 years old and I started my first fund that I wanted to have a better record than Buffett. It's good to set a high bar. And one thing that Buffett had that I learned pretty quickly was valuable was permanent capital. When you start a hedge fund, you have impermanent capital, meaning if your investors get disappointed with you or the markets blow up or you have a bad quarter or whatever, they can take their money. And it's much harder to manage capital when your money can disappear overnight. I mean, one big advantage retail investors have over institutional investors. You run a mutual fund and your clients panic, they take their money. If you're an individual investor, it's your money. There's no one to pull it from you as long as you're not investing money that you can't afford to lose. I wanted to get to permanent capital over time. Our way to get there was ultimately to take a European closed-end fund public. Our strategy to date has been about [audio distortion]. I already staked some public companies. It was my daughter calling on my phone. Then we got to figure out some other Spaces is pretty good except when the daughter calls. The difference with our existing permanent capital vehicle is the big advantage Buffett has beyond permanent capital is he owns businesses that generate cash and generate excess cash that he can redeploy into buying new businesses. The Holy Grail is to have a public entity, i.e., permanent capital that owns operating businesses that generate more cash that they can use in their own business that you can redeploy in buying new companies. The structure of this transaction versus the previous one, the previous one, we were buying out other shareholders. We were squeezing them out, so to speak, at $85 a share. We were tendering for stock at $85 a share. We weren't putting any new money in the company. In fact, we were draining the company of cash, $500 million of its borrowing resources. Now what we're doing is we're buying $900 million worth of stock at a big premium. That puts immediately $900 million of cash on the balance sheet of the company. We're not doing a self-tender, which means we do have borrowing capacity, which means we've got $1.4 billion plus of buying capacity to make or a company that can grow at a nice rate over a long period of time if we do a good job. That's why it works. Thanks for your question, Bill. Feel free to ask another once I get back in line here. So next up, Vic Keller, please ask your question. Unmute. Hey, Bill. This is very exciting. I had the privilege of founding three companies that were acquired by Berkshire Hathaway in 2015. And it was a fantastic transaction and just a great partnership overall. And I'm very interested. I'm still building companies today. I'm very interested in what your approach will be with potential acquisition opportunities that you seek and really for sellers that have an opportunity to sell to your entity versus Berkshire Hathaway. Sure. So I think obviously you can get Warren to buy your business. It's a very good thing. But what's interesting about Howard Hughes is we're going to start out as a very small company. Whether you're our first deal, our third, or our fifth, you're going to be incredibly important to us. It's going to be incredibly important to us that the business succeeds over time. We like the model of buying companies that continue to be they're going to be run by the people who sell them to us, where they retain a stake in the business and they continue to run it going forward. Like Berkshire, we're going to offer a permanent place for people to sell their business. We're not going to buy from you and flip it three years later at a profit. We're going to buy a business that we can own and compound over a very long period of time. We hope to be competitive in terms of pay, fair price, give people a rapid response, kind of a yes or no, and then be a good partner or a great partner over the long term. That's the business model. I think Berkshire really can't move the needle unless the business today, a $10 billion business, doesn't even move the needle for a trillion-dollar company. It's a 1%er, right? A several hundred million-dollar enterprise is material to a company starting out with 4 billion or 5 billion of equity. I couldn't agree more. Fantastic. Thank you. Thanks so much. Okay. I like this one. We're going to go to Curious George Capital. Next up. Did you disappear on me? Okay. I'm going to go to MSRX8. Go right ahead. Oh, hey, Bill. If this transaction is successful, what might be the long-term implications for Pershing Square Holdings? Sure. So Pershing Square Holdings business will not change. It will continue to be about buying minority stakes in large-cap and mega-cap public companies. You can envision a world in which you could have Howard Hughes Holdings and the other Pershing Square funds co-invest in a transaction and work together. That could happen. But I think with respect to the Pershing Square funds generally, I don't really see any material change. From a strategy perspective, Pershing Square Holdings and our other Pershing Square funds are about buying what are large stakes in very large companies. Large meaning large dollar amounts, but generally relatively small as a percentage of the shares. And here, what we're doing is buying controlling stakes in small businesses. So they're really two different worlds. And Pershing Square funds don't invest in private companies, whereas this entity will target, of course, private companies. Okay. It looks like I got Curious George back. One of my favorite books. Curious George, why don't you go ahead and ask your question? Unmute, please. Make sure to unmute. Okay. We're going to go to Rajasekar. If I got that right. Hi, Bill. Can you hear me? Yes. I guess that's Curious George. Go ahead, Curious George, and then Raja goes next. Still can't hear you. Okay. Raja, can you go ahead? And Curious George will be next. Okay. We're going to go to Sierra Catalina. Why don't you go ahead? Unmute, Sierra. Oh, hey, Bill. Thank you so much. I actually just came up to let you know that there's a 15-second delay when you bring speakers up from the listeners lounge, so they can't immediately hear you. Thank you so much for hosting. And that's why people aren't answering right away. So just give them like 15 seconds, and they can't hear anything until they're up in the speakers panel. Thank you. Okay. Great. Thanks so much for that. I did not realize that. So Raja, can you go ahead? You're now a speaker. Hi, Bill. I'm Rajasekar, founder of Simule. And we are working on a product called Digital Land. And it's a programmatic land can be programmatic using code. And any chance that I can get investments for my company through Pershing Square Holdings? Sure. So I would say it sounds like sort of a venture-backed company. Our focus is going to be on, call it operating companies that are at the stage of the business where they're generating cash, growing at a very nice rate, as opposed to kind of earlier stage businesses. So I think unlikely for us. Okay. Let's go to John Thomas. Go ahead, John Thomas. Please unmute and ask your question. And for being so transparent. I appreciate it. I have a question. Given the fact that your management fees are lower than perhaps other private equity firms and your carry seems to be relatively low, how would President Trump's striking of the carried interest law change your alignment or incentives? Yeah. So one, Howard Hughes is not going to pay any incentive fee, carried interest, or otherwise to us. So obviously no impact. And two, I've actually been supportive of the tax legislation. I've never believed that carried interest in the alternative asset management space should get a tax preference. So it has really no impact. Certainly, I have no impact on this transaction and no impact really on our business generally. Let's go to Joey Knight. Joey? Okay. Let's try. Hey there, Bill. Can you hear me? Yes, I can now. Hey, Bill. I am an investor in ARK Funds, where they do the venture capital. And it's been great for someone who's not an institutional investor. What is your ratio, you think, of the new fund between private and public companies? So it's a good question. It's not something we're going to know in advance. We're going to explore the public universe as well as private companies. And when I say the public universe, we're going to be looking for transactions where we can take a business private or buy a controlling stake. And while there are some things on the private side, we have sort of on a list of potential things for us to take a hard look at. We have not yet started identifying public company transactions. But it could be a mix of both. It could be all of one, none of the other. It depends where the opportunities exist. Why don't we add, if Olumide Adesina, and I hope I didn't get your name pronounced. I'm sure I got your name pronounced wrong, but if you could do it for me so I know your name, and then please feel free to ask a question. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be in your space. Just a very short question. I wanted to know, do you have plans to be exposed to the African financial market, particularly Nigeria, where opportunities are coming up and so many major businesses with strong KPIs? Do you have consideration on those? Yeah. So thanks for the question. Our focus has historically always been kind of very much companies that are headquartered in the United States, principally North American businesses, where we have obviously an advantage in terms of the language, relationships, understanding the law. So we have really not done a lot outside the U.S. And I would say extremely unlikely that we would do anything on the African continent, even though there are probably some, as you say, very interesting opportunities. It's just too far for us, particularly if we're buying a private business. With that, Amir Sayedi, I can't see you, but I did authorize you if you'd like to ask a question. Okay. I may have lost him. Zach Burr. Want to go ahead and ask a question? Hi, Bill. Thanks for allowing me to ask a question. I'm a big Berkshire fan as well. I'm just curious what your views on fee minimization is? I saw you're planning on charging a 1.5%, I guess, management fee of percentage of assets. So I'm just curious how that will evolve over time. Thanks. Sure, so I don't know if you listened to we had a pretty big section in the first part of the presentation on fees and what we tried to do here is try to so just the background here is we're in the alternative asset management business. We charge a 1.5% management fee to the funds we manage, and we charge an incentive fee anywhere between 16%-20% to the public and private entities that we manage. The bulk of our compensation comes from the incentive fee. The management fee, principally, is a smaller component of our overall compensation. So here, we're charging no incentive fee, and we're charging a management fee not based on assets, but based on equity and based on the market value of that equity. So if the stock is 75 and there's 60 million shares after the transaction, let's call that a $4.4 billion equity cap, the management fee will be in the, call it, $66 million range. What I also explained on the first part of the presentation is that we're rebating, I think, about a third of that fee to our investors in the Pershing Square Funds because they own Howard Hughes. We don't want them to pay a fee to us twice. And the balance, another whatever, 16% or so of fees is a fee on the $900 million that we're investing in the company, which is really a fee we're paying ourselves. The net to us is half of that $66 million, or call it $33 million. As a percentage of Pershing Square's overall revenues, because we charge management incentive fees through other funds, that's something in order of 5% of the revenues of the firm. And this will be this transaction where we represent generated about 26%, will become 26% of our equity and more like 40% of our assets if you look at the asset value of the company. And it's going to take time, and it's going to take resources. And the 30-odd million of net fees is not going to compensate us for the resources we put to bear here. We'll make the vast majority of our profit, assuming we are successful, based on how our $900 million will compound over time, the $900 million incremental investment. We're also doing this because the Pershing Square Funds are a major shareholder of Howard Hughes. While the funds have done very well over the last 14 years, I picked that period because that's when Howard Hughes came into existence. Howard Hughes has not been a contributor. It's been a big detriment to Pershing Square's performance over time. And our business model is about finding great businesses that have underperformed their potential or been unrecognized by the markets, and then buying a significant stake and oftentimes stepping in and changing management and governance. Here, we're not changing the existing management because existing management will continue to run the core operating subsidiary of the company. We're adding a layer of management at the holding company level. The company's going to assume a certain amount. Someone sent me during the break. I saw a J.P. Morgan analyst said, "Well, it's hard to envision the stock trading better with a "layer of fees" on top." That's really not the right way to think about this. We're completely changing the strategy of the company. We're building a diversified holding company. We're injecting $900 million of capital. By the way, the $900 million of capital while it sits there is going to earn the $36 million of incremental management fees just on U.S. Treasuries. We're going to take that capital, and we're going to grow this business by investing in very high-quality, high-return on capital, durable growth companies. That's going to make this company a much more profitable company. It's going to grow in market cap. Again, all assuming we are thoughtful and smart about the investments we make. And as long as we generate 1.5 percentage points of incremental return versus the status quo, this is a good decision for the company. And if you look at our results over time, if you look at our results since we've had permanent capital, we've generated about a 1,300 basis point per annum excess return over the stock market. Can we generate 150 basis point return over the status quo for Howard Hughes? I certainly think we can. And beyond that, I believe that this transformation of the company, the universe of shareholders that want to invest in a small-cap real estate development C Corp, where you have to do your due diligence, you have to do research on multiple property types, you have to understand land, apartments, storage, office. Today is a really bad day for the Home builders. They're getting crushed. Howard Hughes, if we were not talking about this transaction today, the stock would be down, I don't know, something. Obviously, if we walked away from the transaction, the stock would be in the low 60s pretty quickly. Why? Because the Homeb uilders are getting killed, and Howard Hughes has exposure to the Home builders. There's a limited universe of people that want to own a company like that, which is why the stock has really never traded well. Over time, as we diversify the business by buying other great businesses and the real estate subsidiary becomes a smaller percentage of the overall assets and the company has diversified exposures and we're thoughtful about how we're hedging risk, I believe Howard Hughes will re-rate to a higher valuation. In the meantime, we're going to compound our equity. That's sort of the business plan. I think, to quote the first caller, the management fee is a sideshow. Obviously, if people say, "Okay, Mr. Buffett collects $100,000 and gets a few hundred thousand dollars of benefits from Berkshire," I'm taking zero compensation from the company. I'm not going to be the incremental management fees we collect here are going to go to pay other people's salaries, overhead, et cetera. I'm not taking personal compensation for running this company. I'm making a $440 million investment in the stock at $90 a share, a very significant 20% premium to where the stock's trading today, a 46% premium to where it's trading before. I've said publicly we intend to hold those shares forever, and we're pretty good at what we do. I think that's a pretty attractive proposition. So maybe a long-winded answer to your question. Why don't we go to Saket Rotra? Looks like it's trying to connect you. Saket, why don't you unmute and ask your question? Okay. Saket looks like he's having difficulty. So let's go to Connor. Connor McGuire. Hi, Bill. Thanks for your time and for hosting the spaces. Just a question I had. Just noted your earlier comments regarding focusing on North American-based businesses. I'm just curious to know whether the mandate with the Howard Hughes transaction might extend to European or U.K.-listed businesses, given there's many large companies in those markets that trade at meaningful discounts to their U.S. peers and also, in many instances, generate a fairly significant proportion of their revenues from within North American markets. Thanks for taking the question. Yes. I think much more likely than sort of the African continent, we have invested in European businesses historically. We have invested in UK businesses. UK, in particular, because of language and because we do have a presence there because of our European closed-end entity, is a much more likely target for us than. But I would say we're sort of North America first, maybe UK second, and Europe third is probably the best way to think about how we think about that universe. With that is Saket. Why don't you try again? I see you're trying again to connect. If you can go ahead and ask your question. Okay. If Saket's having difficulty, oh, here he is. Go ahead. Oh, okay. Fantastic. I had a question on an unrelated topic. I wanted to get your thoughts on how do you look at music labels right now, given last year we've seen, let's say, something like Spotify generate significantly higher free cash flows than what your regular music labels do. So just wanted to get your thoughts on how do you look at this middleman versus the IP owner debate that's ongoing globally. Good. Actually, why don't I give a chance for Ryan Israel? Ryan, our CIO, why don't you comment on the music space? Sure. And thanks for your question, Saket. The way we think about it is that the music labels are very well positioned. We actually think that Spotify is a wonderful company and is very well positioned as well. One of the points of differentiation that we've had over time with a lot of investors, and I think that the share price performance and the business performance has shown our thesis is correct, is we actually think that this is something where all parties in the ecosystem for music can win. And really, that's just because music itself is a growth industry. It's one of the highest value forms of entertainment at the lowest cost. What that means is that more people around the world are going to be consuming music, and they're willing to pay much higher price points. And so we think that ultimately, the labels can win and Spotify can win. Today, the way that we see that is Spotify is growing more quickly on the top line as it is able to continue to use that low price point to entice more people to sign up for its services. And it's doing an incredible job amongst its peers, its digital service providers relative to Amazon and Apple. But the labels are also doing incredibly well, and their profit margins are a multiple, about twice the level or a little bit more than what Spotify is ultimately looking to achieve. So we think that they're both very successful, and we actually expect that to continue. But thank you for the question. Thank you, Ryan. Let's go to Deadlift. I like this one. Deadlifts for BlackRock. That's an interesting one. And then Asteroid goes next. Go ahead, Deadlift. Deadlife, I guess. No, it's just a joke named Deadlift for BlackRock. But my name's Jude Sado. Hey, Bill, big fan of some of the work that you did on Herbalife. I thought that was really important. But do you mind just providing a little bit of context on how you could because I think Howard Hughes was like a spinoff of General Growth Properties or something. Do you mind providing some context on why were you initially interested in Howard Hughes and then what's changed or what maybe hasn't materialized? Because to your point earlier, it seems like the market's not really giving the company credit. And I think there's a spinoff of Howard Hughes called Seaport Entertainment Group or something. Do you mind just providing a little bit of context on some of the history of the company there for some of us who are just starting to follow along? Of course. The history goes back to November 2008. In November 2008, we started buying stock in a company called General Growth Properties. General Growth was the second largest shopping mall company in the country, kind of class A mall company after, if you know, Simon Properties. The stock had been decimated. It was down 99.5%, went from $63 a share to $0.34. And the company had $27 billion of debt. I think about $16 billion of it was CMBS debt, i.e., the market for securitized real estate debt. And it had a relatively short term. And we're in the middle of a financial crisis. People said General Growth's going to have to go bankrupt because they're not going to be able to refinance their debt, and they have a wall of maturities coming. What we saw was a company with very good assets. The net operating income of General Growth malls was actually up year on year between 2007 and 2008. The occupancy was in, I think, the 93% range, and they own some of the best malls in the country, and so our assessment of the asset value of the company was that it was much larger than the liabilities, even though the liabilities, it was true, were going to come due, and we started buying stock in the market, and we filed a 13D every other few days as we bought more and more stock and eventually got 25% of the stock in the market, I think, at an average price of $0.60, and people thought we were crazy because we were buying stock in a company going bankrupt, and then we tried to get on the board. The board pushed back. And this is one where Goldman Sachs was representing the company. And they said, "You can't invite the fox into the henhouse." I'll never forget that from Goldman Sachs. But I, through a relationship, got in touch with the chair, and his cousin forced me onto the board. And I joined the board in, I think, June of 2009. And from the position of a director, I was able to lead a restructuring of the company and a bankruptcy emergence of the company, ultimately partnered with principally Brookfield and Fairholme Capital Management or Fairholme Funds. Bruce Berkowitz is a great investor. And I met Bruce Flatt, who was then and now the CEO of Brookfield Corporation. And the idea I had on emergence was to turn General Growth Properties into a pure-play class A mall company like Simon Properties. The land holdings, in a way, if we think about Howard Hughes, the land holdings of General Growth, which was basically the Howard Hughes company, this MPC business and the lot sale business, and the development assets was an overhang on General Growth. If you go back and look, when we spun off General Growth, I'm sorry, when we spun off Howard Hughes in November of 2010, General Growth stock went up the day we spun off Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes had a meaningful positive value. It traded around $40 a share or something. It was one of the first times I'd ever seen a company. Normally, when a company spins off another company, the spinner stock drops by the market value of the thing it's spun off. It's kind of logical, right? If you got $100 in a company and you spin off something worth 20, the parent should trade at 80. Here at the company, the stock of General Growth went up, and Howard Hughes obviously had positive value. And why did General Growth's stock go up? But the story got easier to understand. It became a pure-play mall company. It could be valued based on FFO. People didn't have to worry about how much lot sales they did in the quarter. They didn't have to worry about the development, the real estate development, clouding the kind of GAAP earnings of the company. So it was created in order to make our investment in General Growth much more valuable. We did it because it was the way to create the most value. And actually, David Simon back then, who was competing with us to buy General Growth, called the SpinC o. He called it ShitC o. Excuse the expression. You can say stuff like that on X. And it was ShitC o because it owned all of the development assets of General Growth, all of the excess land, all of the other assets. And we recruited a management team led by David Weinreb and a guy named Grant Herlitz, very entrepreneurial guys, to kind of understand this thing, which took time, figure out a strategy, spin off assets, refine the company. We learned the MPC business. We learned that you don't sell assets. You want to keep your operating assets, the vast majority of them, when you're in the MPC business. We innovated the idea. Actually, one of my better ideas, I said, "Look, they were sort of marking up the land each year by 5% or something like this." I said, "Why aren't you auctioning it off to home builders?" And we started auctioning off land to home builders. And the company's land values have compounded over time. But like the way it was an overhang on General Growth, it's sort of been an overhang on itself. And we tried to refine it even more in August by spinning off the South Street Seaport, which was, we thought, an overhang on the company. And the stock went down. So we've been at it for 14 years. I chaired the board. I took no compensation for doing so, for being a director, for being a chair. I worked hard. The board's very talented, very high quality. It's got really good governance. David O'Reilly is a superb CEO. Carlos is a great CFO. That's a very strong operating team. The developers at each of the various MPCs are excellent. Our Hawaii development operation is the best condominium development operation I've ever seen. Full stop. The cities, Jim Carman managing The Woodlands has done an incredible job, so it's an amazing team. I've met many of the employees over time, but the company's been unloved in the stock market for 14 years. The old adage, "If you keep doing the same thing, you're crazy if you expect a different outcome," applies here, and that's where we said, "Okay, we got to take it private." We weren't able to raise the capital we needed to take it private, and then we said, "Let's do a transaction. We don't need anyone else." Over time, we got to here. What I like about this is, one, we're putting a lot of capital into the company, which creates opportunity. We're putting $900 million of capital in. We're not borrowing any money, but the company has had, before the $900 million contribution, about $500 million of incremental debt capacity. So with the $900 million, the company's credit profile improves. The company probably has now $1.6 billion-$1.7 billion of capacity to make investments. And the Pershing team and I are good investors. And we've got a good strategy. But we've been limited to deploying that strategy to minority stakes in public companies. And now we have an entity where we'll be a large 48% owner. We'll have significant representation on a very good board that is independent to build this into a really interesting company over time. And we're starting small. Buffett all the time talks about the burdens of being large. I look forward to that burden. Okay. The small cap space in the public markets has been a left-behind, let's put it that way, space. The skills we've developed and relationships and so on, we think apply very well. We're going to find lots of interesting things to do in the public markets, buying control of smaller companies, excuse me, and in the private markets. It should be a lot of fun. That's, I would say, the background. Thanks for your question. Let's go to Asteroid. Hello. Hi, Bill. Yeah. I guess the one thing that kind of popped into my head was there's been sort of headwinds for retail and office space. Are you expecting a big change in either or both? What do you think's going to drive that, and how fast do you think it's going to be? Because we know that there's been, obviously, digital stores moving online and people working from home and all that. Do you expect that to change? And also, would you consider ever kind of diversifying more into, I don't know HHH that well, but into medical properties and stuff like that? Because there's a lot of those medical REITs. And yeah, go ahead. Sure. So actually, Howard Hughes has built a medical office building in Columbia, Maryland. So literally, the company has every property type. What's interesting about real estate, it's the most local business in the world. You can make general statements about office. And by the way, those general remarks have always hurt Howard Hughes. So the whole work-from-home thing, Howard Hughes has a big office component. And so people value office buildings today at pretty high cap rates because of work-from-home. Howard Hughes owns a lot of office buildings. People value those buildings at a pretty high cap rate. It's a very different thing to own an office building in Summerlin or Woodlands, one of our MPCs with meaningful vertical development, because we don't have the same competitive dynamics of downtown Las Vegas or downtown Houston versus Summerlin, which itself, it's its own little mini city. And where we own effectively all the commercial land, and we don't have the same risks of the problem of the real estate business is you build an amazing building and you lease it up and you have a really attractive deal, or you build a beautiful shopping center, open-air shopping center in the middle of a community, and you make all the surrounding real estate more valuable. But you don't get the benefit of that. The beauty of owning your own city and all the commercial land is when we built the downtown in Summerlin, we made all of the surrounding commercial land we own much more valuable. And as importantly, maybe more importantly, we made it a more desirable place to live. So the home sites and the land residential lots that we sold to home builders, land values have appreciated like 14% compound in Summerlin for the last seven years or eight years since that downtown was kind of opened. So the economic characteristics of MPC real estate are superior to standalone real estate. Now, with respect to work-from-home, I've been short work-from-home, psychologically short work-from-home for a while. I'm kind of with Jamie Dimon on this one. I think it's really bad for cultures. I think it's not good for the employees working from home. It's a lot easier to fire someone when you just unplug them from the internet. And so the first employee is going to lose his job or her job is the one who's not there. And also for young people, how do you learn a business if you can't look over someone's shoulder, walk into their office, ask them questions? I think people are figuring that out. So I think now, all that being said, I think crappy office buildings, so-called B, B minus C office buildings, I think people, when they want to come into work, they're going to want amenities and food and gyms and things like this. But as long as your building offers those kind of amenities, I think it's going to be. I'm sort of bullish. But I appreciate the question and the irony of your asteroid thing. I'm following this. NASA keeps updating the probability of the asteroid hitting. So again, this is why hedging is important, okay? Because sometimes really unpredictable things unfortunately happen. And with that, let's go to Darren. Why don't you go ahead and ask your question? Hi, Bill. It's good to hear you today. I hope that the comments I sent you privately were helpful in thinking about your proposed transaction today. I had one observation and three short questions. The first one, I wanted to congratulate you. I applaud the decision to inject the $900 million as it really changes the ratio of post-transaction deployable capital versus the management fee charged than you had in the first proposal. So I thought that was a huge change, big improvement. Thank you. Sure. The first question is, would you say it's fair to say that the decision to charge the management fee on the market cap instead of on book value eliminates the moral hazard that our friends over at AQR sometimes talk about with volatility laundering? Okay. I'm not sure I know what volatility laundering is, but I would say the reason why I think market value is appropriate is it's the best measure by the public of how we're doing. And if I'm wrong and the stock trades at a discount, well, then the fees are lower. And we had to pick some kind of benchmark that made sense. And as the company scales, it is going to require more resources, more time, et cetera. But again, the $900 million, if we were investing $50 million, okay, and we were generating net $40 million of management fees, I would say if you're a shareholder, you'd say, "Okay, Bill, the management fees overwhelm any return you can earn on your investment, so your interests are not aligned with shareholders." Here, the management fees will not, the net management fees we generate, again, about half of the management fees we collect are net because we're rebating the balance or their fees on our own capital. That will not compensate us for the time, energy, and resources we're going to put into the company. That compensation, at the end of the day, it's going to help defray some of the costs associated with overseeing this entity, the human and principally human costs. That's our biggest line item on our expense statement. But the potential for return on the $900 million we invest is going to drive everything, right? If we can compound at 20%, year one, that's $180 million. Year two, it's obviously the beauty of compounding, right? That's going to be, and our investment, since it's permanent, is always going to overwhelm the fees because it's going to grow in lockstep with the growth and market value of the company. And beyond just our personal investment, again, the $900 million plus, we have a look-through investment of 28% of the investment, a billion-plus investment of our funds. We're fiduciaries for that capital as well. We do earn incentive fees on that capital. So we're going to earn a promote on some of the Howard Hughes shares that we own. So I think our interests are very much aligned with shareholders. I don't know that book value is the right metric. Book value can be too high an estimate of what a company's worth, or it can be too low. And it's an accounting measure, whereas what the markets, that's why fees in the alternative asset management industry, when they're charged on public entities, many cases are based on market value. Well, that's the notion of the volatility laundering. If you're marking your own marks, then that's essentially what that's about. It smooths out arbitrary volatility that actually exists in real life. So my last two questions quickly get to, has there been any discussion about either consolidating all Pershing Square HHH holdings into a single entity rather than having them spread across multiple or distributing out the shares to the direct owners themselves? Sure. And then the last question was related to key man disclosures, since obviously this is a big change for the management company. Sure. Let's do key man first. We sold an interest in Pershing Square Holdco, which is the holding company for Pershing Square Capital Management, which is the kind of entity I work for, the team works for that receives the fees, to a group of very sophisticated investors called 20-odd family offices, many people, a number of them CEOs in the alternative asset management industry, maybe half a dozen institutions. I would say very sophisticated people. The first question, of course, when you're buying an interest in a business and with a CEO, it's a pretty high-profile person, is what happens if Bill gets hit by the proverbial pie truck? They did a lot of due diligence on the team, on the organization, on our CIO, Ryan, the rest of the investment team, and just the infrastructure of the firm. They concluded, you know what? Maybe it's fortunate they included this, but maybe unfortunately for me. Okay. If Bill gets hit by the proverbial pie truck, this firm's going to do great, which is why we were able to sell a 10% interest in the firm for $1.05 billion. That doesn't happen very often in the hedge fund world, right? And the beauty of permanent capital, by the way, is. Bill, the biggest risk in alternative asset management is the famous founder gets hit by a pie truck, and investors pull their money because of the uncertainty. And the beauty of permanent capital, 93% of our assets are in entities that the capital is forever, means that the capital doesn't disappear. If the capital doesn't disappear, the money doesn't go away, the employees can get paid, they can have capital, they can manage, we're not forced to sell anything. I think all of those considerations addressed the key man risk. I'm 58, and I'm almost 59. I'm planning to be at this a very long time. Health is a very high priority for me. Again, if I'm competing with Buffett, if that's the goal, he's 94. I got 36 more years just to be competitive. I forgot your first question. Remind me what it was. Oh, yes. Has there been any discussion about? Yeah, I can remember. For tax, regulatory, and other reasons, we looked at originally, could we bring, for example, our European closed-end entity and merge it into Howard Hughes and create this kind of company? After a long exploration, we couldn't. The regulatory barriers are just too high. The public entities that have big securities portfolios basically have to be mutual funds. Only a C Corp operating entity like this has to minimize the amount of capital it has invested in passive stakes in public companies, minority stakes. So that's a great strategy. We love the strategy of buying minority stakes in Uber and Universal Music, pick your favorite of our companies. We want to continue in that strategy. And that's a different strategy than building a diversified operating company over time. And so they really need to be in separate vehicles. But I appreciate your questions. And I'm going to go to Bill Cohan's up again. There you go. Bill Cohan. One more quick one, Bill. Thank you. How much did your interaction with the special committee at Howard Hughes influence your change of direction? Sure. I would say it was important, but not the most. We took a lot of cues from the market. We got a lot of feedback from shareholders. And we considered everything together. I would say the, and by the way, I think the market feedback is probably not dissimilar from the feedback we would have gotten from the special committee. But market feedback was, one, don't love being squeezed out, okay, at $85 a share. You want to squeeze me out, pay me more. Okay? I don't like the idea of squeezing someone out. So we took that, if you will, under advisement. From the special committee, I would say from the company special committee, they didn't love the idea of they were concerned about incremental leverage on the company and no capital coming into the business. And again, in light of the history here of the company, I certainly appreciate that consideration. Some of it was informed by more work we did. We do have another person on the board. I don't want to speak in advance of the quarter. The business is doing very, very well and has actually made some progress in getting entitlements from new development. I'll leave the details for the call. But entitlements for new development means new development. New development means more capital needs to be invested in order to keep the progress of these various, as we call them, cities. The result of that is there isn't a lot of free cash flow coming out of Howard Hughes for years. It's going to be four or five years unless Howard Hughes, they probably will find more places to put capital. So we did not want to take control of this company and have it hampered in its core business. We wanted Howard Hughes to be able to exploit every interesting development opportunity to make these small cities more valuable because that's the long-term history of the business. The beauty of the revised transaction is now we put in cash. It's all incremental to the company. We can use that cash for new investments, operating companies, et cetera, and if there's something extraordinary to do in real estate and the existing cash flow and cash we have in the real estate subsidiary is not enough, the holding company can repatriate it down. Thanks for your question, Bill. Let's go to Christian Valente. Looks like he's back. Christian. I host Spaces, and this is awesome. This is like getting in touch. I know I've seen your interviews. You love X. You love Spaces. You're like getting in touch with ordinary, everyday people and logical, intelligent people and getting these thoughts out. So I love it. So my question, I have two questions. The first question is, since you've been such a big supporter of this company in the past, and you already own 30%+ of it, and I'm assuming you have friendly relations, and the stock has kind of been languished and underperformed the S&P 500 over all these years, why would this deal not go through? To me, I'm buying HHH stock. You got me hooked. I would never look at a company like this, but it's essentially you're taking a ride with Bill Ackman. So to the retail community, I don't know if you want to pitch yourself. I mean, I guess that's what you're doing here. So why would a retail investor not want to hitch themselves to your track record? Why would they not want to get involved with a company at this level where you're going to take over, you're going to hedge the macro risk, the board, and get to focus on their business? You're not changing anything. They're essentially running their land business or lease business, and you're going to hedge the macro risk for them at a 1.5% fee. And we've talked about that. And you're also now going to use you and your team and your knowledge to go find great businesses to be either additive to the business or outrun, maybe be bigger than the business existing already. I mean, this is like a magical thing. I don't know. Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong, but I'm not trying to toot your own horn, but pitch it. Why would not retail want to get involved with you? Maybe this is not their kind of stock. Retail investors aren't really involved in maybe some of the stocks that you own in the past. I love some of the stocks. I do a little bit different. But give me your pitch why retail should want to get involved in you other than what you've already stated to get them excited to say, "Hey, do I want to attach myself to Bill Ackman and go on a 10-year, 15-year, 20-year journey that can maybe do the next Berkshire Hathaway type investment?" You know what? I don't have a good answer to that question. Look, I think we're doing this because it goes back. The drivers here are, one, I started out my career inspired by Warren Buffett. Two, I always had a, what's my dream? My dream was to have a public entity that we were a 48% shareholder of, that we could compound for the next 36 years at a high rate of return and build something really interesting. I always wanted to manage money for retail investors, but the hedge fund business limited me to super wealthy people, and I always thought that was very undemocratic. So I was kind of excited about the idea, and we thought about it various times. The stars aligned for us to do this now, so that's one inspiration. The second part of it is we have a stock that's languished for 14 years, and it's not languished because of bad management or bad governance or bad assets. It's just the history. History speaks, and it's not really gotten recognition in the market, and it's an unusual one-off business, and it takes a lot of analysis. I think the proposition we're making. I wish I could do it for free. I wish I didn't have to charge a management fee. It would make economic sense for us to devote a lot of firm resources to make this company successful. The management fee is a sideshow, as you pointed out. If we can't generate 150 basis points of incremental return, to use a term of art, we suck. Okay? We're starting from a relatively small base. Howard Hughes is a great, the real estate business is a great business. As part of a, to use a dirty word, a conglomerate, a diversified holding company, it's a great asset to own. It's not a great standalone company because of its economic sensitivity. I don't know why you wouldn't own it unless you just didn't know about it. But I do think it's an interesting opportunity. There are no guarantees in life. We're not guaranteed that every investment we make, every company we buy, we're going to get it right. But we've learned a lot. I've been at this a long time. We've worked together as a team. I don't know. Ryan, give me, why wouldn't you buy the stock? I own a lot of it, so I'm probably not the right person to ask. But I think at the end of the day, as you mentioned, what we are trying to do really over the next series of decades is we want to transform HHH from the existing real estate strategy into a diversified holding company. And I think we're very hopeful as people who will be the largest owners of this asset and this business going forward that that'll be the right strategy that'll create a lot of shareholder value. And I think the question really for shareholders is, do you want to come along and be a part of what we think is going to be a very exciting journey and a very lucrative one as well? But I think it is going to be a business transformation and buying into the team that exists here at Pershing Square and our historical strategy and what we're looking to do. I think that's the key question for people deciding if they want to come along for the ride with us. Okay. Let's go to Sherry. And then Uzi Obi is next. Hi, Bill. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. My kid s went to Greeley High School, so. Wow. We have something in common. Nice. You too. Oh, they loved it. I know you did. Forgive me if you covered this in your presentation. Are you currently in the process of building more, looking at more MPCs? And will any of President Trump's new policies affect your decisions on that? Sure. So Howard Hughes acquired what we call Teravalis, which is a 36,000-acre ranch that we just started selling lots. And it's a city. It's going to be, in 50 years, it will be a major city west of Phoenix. And it's 50 million sq ft of potential development, and it's a life's work on its own. And then the existing MPCs we have, particularly Summerlin, Bridgeland, and to some extent, Woodlands on the commercial side, Columbia, Maryland on the commercial side, there's decades of work to do. I think we're full, so to speak. Even though I love the business, I don't think we're going to buy a new one. The Phoenix asset was a really, really attractive asset in one of the best markets in the country at a very attractive valuation. To my point earlier, which you might have missed, there really is very few people in the world that can write a $600 million check and buy 36,000 acres of land in a project that's going to take 50 years. There are very few buyers for that. That's why we were able to buy it at a very, very attractive price. We don't want to own 10 more of these things. We do want the company to diversify over time because we think that's best for the shareholders of the overall company. Right. I guess I'm still curious about any new policies in the Trump administration that will affect anything you do. Yes. So I'm very bullish on the Trump administration. I think from a business standpoint, it's the most pro-business administration I've ever seen. I think DOGE is going to be an incredible home run, not just on the cost side, but more so on the deregulation front. I can't imagine a better person in the world than Elon to be running that effort and having the full support of the president. I get why certain people are fighting that initiative, but it's about time that we eliminate the massive waste in our country. If we actually are able to materially cut our expenses, that's going to inure to the benefit of the Treasuries we need to issue in the market. We'll issue fewer of them. That will create more scarcity. Interest rates will come down. That's very bullish for real estate, and good economy is very bullish for real estate. I think if you own real estate in states and cities that adopt similar principles, the economic outcomes are excellent, and we're going to be. This is a company that's going to make investments in other businesses. We are going to have a North American focus to the extent the overall climate is favorable. That's very good for people who own American companies. I think it's very good. Good. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for your question. Let's go to Uzi Obi. Hey, Bill. Thanks for hosting us again. I talked to you when you had Whitney on, and it's really commendable that you do this. Again, you do seem to get everyone on stage. I am part of the Howard Hughes team now. I mean, I will follow you into a rabbit hole. I did want to challenge you, though. You did bring up hedging earlier. And maybe like two weeks ago, you said Pershing Square was investing in Uber. A lot of X loves Elon, and they also love Tesla. So I was wondering, would you hedge with Tesla, and what's your thoughts on it? Sure. I love Elon, and I love Tesla. I drive one. I think it's a great company, and it's my bad that we didn't invest in it. But the good news is we don't think that they're in conflict. But here's what I - maybe Ryan, why don't you speak to - I don't know if Bharath is on. We could give him airtime, but I don't know. So, maybe start, Ryan, and if Bharath is on, we share some thoughts on Uber and the Tesla risk, and maybe back up so people understand what the thesis is for why it could be negative for Uber. Sure. And I appreciate the question. I think that ultimately our perspective on Uber, and one of the reasons that we like it, is we believe that it's created a very important platform to connect the millions of people, particularly in the U.S., but even around the world, who would like to take a car ride that is driven by somebody that's not themselves or would not like to own a car. And we think it also connects them with a lot of the people who would like to earn money by today currently driving those other people. In the future, it may be that they own a vehicle, and nobody is driving that vehicle, but they're able to use it as a revenue source to earn a return on that investment. And we think that Uber does a very good job of efficiently connecting those people, and therefore is a very valuable platform that will continue to grow as the overall rideshare industry, we think, could grow to multiples of its size over time. If you look at the pressure point right now for ridesharing today, it's really that ridesharing does not have the availability of cars or drivers relative to the demand for people who are there. And if you look at it on a cost per mile, it actually is a little bit more expensive than what the average person would prefer to pay. You still have a very nice base of people who are using the product, over 160 million people. But if you could lower that price point and you could bring in more drivers or more cars to drive people around, we think that that would increase the usage by multiples. The way that investors see the potential risk, as you outlined for people much like us who are fans of Tesla, is they think that Tesla might create the fully self-driving platform that could then be used with all the Tesla cars that are out there and obviate the need for this platform that Uber provides to connect individuals and drivers. The way that we think about it is that in order for that platform to be built, it would take a very long period of time. Ultimately, we think that there will be a number of autonomous vehicle companies out there, of which Tesla will be one, that will provide a service like that. But we think a lot of them, and we have to see whether Tesla will do this or not, but a lot of them are likely to work with Uber because it's a very effective way for them to connect with customers. And Uber provides a lot of services that would make it easier for people who have autonomous vehicles and would like to pair them up with a rider. But ultimately, we think all of these things are going to advance to meet the needs of the marketplace, which is more cars on the road and ultimately lower prices as there are more cars on the road, which can bring down that cost, particularly if you eliminate the driver in many circumstances. So we think that this is an industry in which really everybody can win. Uber can win, Tesla can win, Waymo can win, and any new insurance that aren't there today can win. But thank you for the question. Okay, great. Let's go to Winston Niles Rumford. Thanks, Bill. Can you hear me? Yes. Perfect. So knowing that like $900 million is going to take some time to deploy and buy assets and get sort of cash flow generated, do you have a plan to kind of smooth over? I mean, Howard Hughes, like you said, last 14 years has kind of been a laggard. What's your plan to smooth some of that cash flow? So we don't try to smooth cash flow. That's not our approach to kind of creating value generally. We've always preferred. I know markets like smooth earnings and cash flow, and there are certain businesses that have achieved that over time. That's not an ambition we have for this company. I think years from now, let's assume this transaction goes forward, the company grows substantially, owns a diversified collection of operating companies that generate recurring cash flow, it will look a lot more. The earnings will be a lot smoother, right? But in the earlier days, it's not going to be. And I think the people who are going to own this stock are people who say, "Look, I want to invest alongside Pershing Square. I want to invest. Bill's adding an extra $440 million here. He's committing to own those shares forever. I want to see what these guys can do over time." And I would worry less. This stock's not going to trade on the basis of the smoothness, I think, of the company's earnings. Now, in the short term, in the very short term, cash sitting on the balance sheet will generate at least a 4% return. So we'll generate the $35 million or $40 million of interest income while we're sitting around. That goes a long way to covering some of the incremental management costs. And by the way, it won't take us, if we find interesting things to do, we could decide to invest $900 million in one business. We could decide to $500 million of equity for one transaction and $500 million equity for another. We could access the borrowing markets. We can grow the value of the company over time. Hopefully, do a good job causing the business to trade at an appropriate valuation. We'll have plenty of access to capital. But we won't be money burning a hole in our pocket, rushing to put money to work. But I'll say we've been around a long time. And even since we've announced this potential transaction, we're getting inbound opportunities. We've talked to some people who would say, "Look, if you get this done, I'd love to have a conversation with you." And these are businesses that we know and like. So we're going to. You've got a great track record, and Howard Hughes seems to be a good basis for that. It's just making sure that if you're going towards the Berkshire model, making sure everything sort of is generating a lot of positive cash that you can kind of deploy into other businesses, things that can generate more cash. I agree with that, except one sort of. Buffett has always. I say one difference in terms of strategy. We've been willing to pay a higher multiple for a higher growth, better business. And I've actually pitched Warren on companies over time that we've owned as potential Berkshire candidates. And he's generally always passed because there's almost like a threshold multiple that he's prepared to pay for business, whether it's 10 x operating income, some number like that, regardless of kind of the growth characteristics of the business. Whereas we're more open to buying a business at a higher multiple of its current earnings that fairly quickly becomes a low multiple in a few years. I mean, Uber being a good example. At the time we bought the stock, we were paying something like 26 x earnings. But that 26 multiple, based on our view of the company's trajectory, will turn into a very low multiple three, four, five years from now. So with that let me go to Thank you. Coods. Thanks, Bill. First and foremost, thank you for being so vocal on this platform, or vocals isn't probably the appropriate nomenclature. But the Howard Hughes contingency that you have, I'm assuming that you guys are always long-term, and the time horizon is what, five-10 years or 25-50 years. Can you at least speak to what is your thesis on time horizon in light of short-termism, which most of us have here on X? Sure. I understand the question. We're definitely a very long-term investor. We try to find businesses we could theoretically own for 25 or 50 years. But that doesn't mean we don't very closely follow the progress of a business in the short term, and because the long term is made up of the short term, the intermediate term, right? And if a company is not making the right decisions in the short term, that can have a pretty big negative impact in the long term. So in general, with us, we try to find businesses we can own "forever." There are times when we own a minority stake in a company where a business surprised us in some way, or we've had a couple of occasions where we did a lot of work on a business, bought a stake in the company, and then new facts emerge that cause us to question our thesis. When you're buying 100% of a company or control of a business, very naturally, you have to think about that as a longer-term investment. But we're buying things; the goal is that we never need to sell. So our strategy here is to own things for ultimately forever. To own things forever, you have to find businesses that have economic characteristics and that will protect them from new entrants and regulatory change and the uncertainties of the world. That's a hard thing to do. That's the hardest thing that we do. If we do a good job, we'll own things, as I say, forever. With that, let's go to AI Impact Investing Hello, Bill. Thanks for inviting me up to ask a question. I'm very curious to know what is your top priority. What keeps you up at night when you're thinking about AI? Since I've been doing too much of the talking, let's see if I can get Bharath to chip in on that. Bharath, are you out there somewhere? Have you been able to get on? Bharath, you should request to speak, and I'll see your request. But in the meantime, maybe Ryan, why don't you go to answer that question? Sure. So thank you for the question. We are very excited about the opportunity for AI, both for our portfolio in terms of the specific investments that we have, but as well as what we think the very strong potential economic impacts can be over time. We think AI is going to be able to improve a lot of productivity throughout the economy, which should ultimately help accelerate growth in a non-inflationary way. So we think it's going to be a very big positive. It's certainly something that we're thinking about very carefully for each of our companies, both for the ones that, for example, we own a large position in Alphabet, where we think that their ability to use AI as a consumer product is going to be very valuable. At the same time, though, we think AI is going to transform all sorts of businesses, even ones that have really nothing to do with sort of the first-order impacts of AI in terms of providing them as products. The biggest concern, I would say, is less about our investment portfolio, but more when we think about as AI advances, if there are not controls around it, you could envision scenarios where effectively AI would not be used for kind of the forces of good. And that could have a very large negative impact if it's not carefully controlled. We think that a lot of the people who are leading the race in AI are very cognizant of that effect and are trying to put in place the right controls in order to do so. And we think that one of the reasons why it's really great that American companies primarily have leadership in this category is we think that those are the ones that are most likely to be able to do that, representing the positive aspects of AI for society, but also recognizing that, like many new inventions, if not used appropriately, it could cause some harm. Okay, great. Let's go to Moshe Mensch. Good name. Hi. Maybe this was spoken about before, but you mentioned to own a company forever, you got to make sure it's not going to be disrupted in the future. So I'm interested about Uber. What do you think of it in terms of Tesla? Okay. I think you may have missed it, but that question was pretty directly addressed. So I apologize. Ryan actually. Okay, no problem. I'll go back to that. Thank you. Okay, thanks so much. Let's go to— is it Sam, the student of— oh, how about Cicely Fisk? Are you able to ask a question? Yeah. Hi, Bill. Thanks for putting this on. I worked in institutional finance for a little while. And before I click buy on this venture, you mentioned you had 1.5%. It kind of nets out on your fee and as much as 150 basis points over market return. What are you guys— how are you guys modeling risk? And are there any economic or what would highly impact those models on your end? Sure. So I would say we don't "model risk." It's not like we build a model and then we say an asteroid's going to hit a big city in the world. We sort of think about risk, and we try to think about what events could transpire that could, for example, we're looking at a company. What events could transpire that could cause a business to be disrupted by a competitor, by regulatory change, by moving interest rates, by a pandemic, by someone detonating, God forbid, a tactical nuclear device? We try to think about extrinsic risks we can't control. We try to find businesses that are not affected by those risks. But actually, we finally got Bharath up to the speaker role here. So I thought, Bharath, maybe Bharath is a member of the team that focuses on the hedging macroeconomic risk side. Bharath, why don't you just talk about how we do that? What do we do there and how do we do it? Yeah, that's exactly right, Bill. So we don't try to sort of explicitly model or forecast out how risk would impact the company, but we're always cognizant of the downside risk factors that can affect the business performance. And the way we try to approach those risks is to evaluate and prospect, identify asymmetric hedging opportunities where we're outlaying a small amount of upfront premium or carrying costs in sort of option-like derivatives, where if the risk that we're concerned about plays out, we have the opportunity to generate a large multiple of capital. But if those risks don't materialize, our downside in sort of the hedging cost is very minimal and limited. The other benefit with that sort of hedging, asymmetric hedging strategy, is it provides the company with liquidity during a period of market dislocation, right? The hedges become valuable when the investment opportunities we're looking at for HHH are potentially trading at a very discounted valuation. So it enables us to redeploy any hedging gains we get into these control investments in high-quality operating businesses at very opportunistic valuations. So that's kind of how we approach our hedging strategy and thinking about risks to the business. Okay, great. Thank you, Bharath. Is Emma able to ask a question? Emma Smith. Nurse Emma Smith, it says. It's kind of spiraling, the connecting thing. Can anyone ask a question that I've uploaded here? Esme ralda? Nope, something wrong there. Okay. Let's go to Jeff Maluski. Let's see if it works. Go ahead, Jeff. Hey, Bill. Just a quick question. Are you interested in building an insurance business within HHH in terms of building a float like Markel and Berkshire? So it's something we've certainly thought about, and we actually know someone extremely talented in that space. So it's definitely on the list of things that we could do, for sure. It's a good question. Thanks so much. Let's go to Kunal. Come on Twitter. Come on X. Okay. If that doesn't work, let's see here. We're having some technical difficulties. Is there a problem? You think having multiple speakers on at the same time? Maybe Bharath, you might want to step off and see if that helps. Step out of the speaker category. Okay. Can anyone ask a question? I'm hearing someone. Search. Here we go. Can Search for the Truth ask a question? You're live now. Yes, Bill. Thanks for taking my question. I'm a big admirer of all your work. Right now with Berkshire Hathaway having $300-plus billion of cash on the balance sheets with valuations a little rich, what are your thoughts of perhaps if you do have a lot of cash on the balance sheet as far as Bitcoin and kind of using that as a reserve? Sure. So the problem of scale, which is what Berkshire has today, is why they have $350 billion of cash sitting on the balance sheet. It's hard for them. In order to have stuff that matters to them, it's got to be in the tens of billions in terms of scale. And it's hard to find really big things that are priced attractively, which is why I think Berkshire has built up a lot of cash. In our case, we're going to have a very modest amount of cash and a very big opportunity set. And as a result, we expect we're going to be able to find really interesting things to do. I've always believed that we keep our default assets in short-term U.S. Treasuries. Why? Because when an opportunity becomes available, you want to be able to instantly turn the U.S. Treasuries into cash and buy whatever's available that you want to buy. The best opportunities happen to take place at a time when there's the most disruption in the world. I think Bitcoin's a really interesting asset, a really interesting technology, but it hasn't really proven itself to be countercyclical to markets. So if NASDAQ blows up, Bitcoin is generally going down, right? But the world in which there's a stock market crash and Bitcoin's going down is a world in which very attractive opportunities are created. That's why you want to keep, in my view, your short-term assets in cash as opposed to Bitcoin. I think of Bitcoin as not, it's a more speculative asset as opposed to an asset that has intrinsic value, which is why we don't own it. But I understand the use case, and I understand the idea of putting some percentage of your net worth in an asset that can't be disrupted by wayward governments, et cetera. But it's not really something, it's not a great default asset for a company like what will be the new Howard Hughes. Why don't we go to Sam, The Student of Metaphysics? Hi, Bill. Thanks for letting me in. I just wanted to ask you, how much of your team are you willing to sort of allocate to HHH, and are you looking forward to sort of expanding the team? Sure. We just expanded the team. The beauty of our operation is we grew the team by 11% or 12.5% by adding, going from eight to nine. If we wanted to grow the team by another additional amount, this is a really attractive place to work. The most talented, most ambitious, hardest-working people in our industry want to come here. If we need more resources, we'll bring them on. We do not believe, we have just hired someone who's starting in May, that the incremental demands of Howard Hughes at this stage of the business will require us hiring a ton of people. If it were necessary, we'd do so. It will be some portion of everyone's time here at Pershing Square. The way we typically work is, with respect to investments, a dedicated team of two will do the deep dive and the deep due diligence. And then Ryan or I - and actually, more likely Ryan and I - will do a meaningful layer of due diligence. Ryan will build his own model. I won't. Ryan will do expert network calls. I'm less likely to. On occasion, I do. But I'll know enough to be dangerous about the business. With respect to Howard Hughes, the importance of each transaction - you're buying a company. It's private. There's no liquidity after you acquire it. I will be personally deeply involved in everything we do here. One of the reasons why we went to this service fee construct is we don't know precisely how much of each person's time is going to be devoted to Howard Hughes. And we don't want to have just two members of the investment team just dedicated to it. We want to be able to bring the full resource to bear if something really interesting and significant's going on, or have a smaller group of the firm involved until something particularly exciting happens. That's the basic idea. I appreciate it. Can we expect some short positions as well, or? No. No short positions. In stocks, we do, however, will take bets, these asymmetric hedging bets, where we might buy an option, which is betting that interest rates go down, for example, or hedging the fact of moving rates or currencies or commodity prices. We may hedge a decline in oil prices because, for example, The Woodlands, Houston has a lot of exposure to that sector. But we're not going to borrow stocks and short them. We don't do that anymore. Okay. Let's go to Richard Hartsch. Go ahead, Richard. Unmute yourself. All right. Thanks for taking my question. I'm curious in your view on how much importance you give to CEOs in companies and what you look for in CEOs in companies you want to invest in. Sure. So we give enormous importance to CEOs, but we give less importance to CEOs than we do to, I would say, business quality, durability, and growth. Because we always believe that if you have a great business, that if we have the wrong person running it, we can find someone better. As opposed to you find the world's greatest CEO, they have a bad business. That's where the old Buffett adage sort of kicks in. You got a phenomenal CEO taking over a bad business. At the end of it, only the reputation of the business remains intact. I've experienced that. You have the most talented CEO of the world. The business itself doesn't have attractive economic characteristics. It's not interesting to us. But we care enormously about what matters to us: integrity, character, energy, passion, and then relevant expertise about the business. We've had very good experience taking a restaurant company guy from Taco Bell to Chipotle. We've had a phenomenal experience taking the CEO of Canadian National and bringing that person to Canadian Pacific. I've seen less. If you have someone who's been there and done it before, the probability of success that next time in the same industry is really high. You have someone who's done a great job in one industry, and they're going to take on something completely different. The degree of certainty goes down. But sometimes really great business athletes can run anything. But you're generally better with someone who understands the business. Okay. Let's go to, here we go. I'm not sure I can pronounce your name correctly, but Kwan Jun FS. Please unmute yourself. I didn't know if I pronounced your name correctly. Junjun. Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. Can you hear me, Bill? Yes, I can. Oh, okay. So you said you want to invest in private business because they are relatively have less liquidity, so you get a better deal, and also you'll be able to hold them for a longer time. And also, you may be able to help them, I would say, as a mentor. But there is a problem because, for example, if I have a private small business, I have my own way to run things. And you are an investor. For you, the return on your investment is most important. And if I give the company to you, how do I protect my interests? Because how do I know if you will agree with the way I want to run a business? So, for example, right now, I'm looking at a certain business model that right now happened in China, and I find I was very inspired. But a lot of models are actually involving in not to be too greedy, and in fact, they actually make their margin lower rather than higher in order to make the business get more trust from the people, and they have a really good reputation. It wasn't just Xiaomi, but also there's a supermarket called Pang D ong Lai, so I was very inspired about this. But I feel like in the country like the United States, usually, it's more short-term focus, especially when you have an investor. So I said, if certain private businesses are really good and their owner is very determined and they believe in their own mission, how do you convince them to join you? Because you said if the CEO does not do very well, you can change it. So how do you build that trust with this private business? I mean, the good one, not the regular one who only wants money from you. Of course. And first of all, it's an excellent question. And two, you sound like our kind of CEO, okay, based on the way you describe the way you think about running a business. I think the answer is we get to know each other. And you look at and you pick up the phone and you call other CEOs that we've backed over time. You call Keith Creel at Canadian Pacific and ask about, "When I was on the board of that company, and we were no longer on the board, we're still an important shareholder. What are we like as a shareholder when he's proposing major CapEx investments or transactions that could take years to generate returns but will create more value for the business long-term? How do we respond to that?" And the good news about us is our track record's public. Every CEO we've ever worked with, except for ones that are no longer with us, Ewing Hunter Harrison very sadly passed away, you can talk to them and say, "What is it like to work with Pershing Square? Are they short-term? Are they trying to squeeze every nickel out of the customer? Or are they trying to build long-term value?" And then you look at our incentives, right? We've said the $900 million incremental investment we're making in the company, our shares were never going to sell. So what are the incentives of someone who's a permanent owner, who owns multiple businesses, who's going to want to acquire other businesses, who's going to want to back other management teams? Our incentive is to have a great reputation as a place where you can sell your company and you can partner with us and build a business, and we're a great partner. And it's not hard to figure that out by just making a few phone calls and spending a little time with us. But that's an excellent question. You talk very fast. Can you DM the person to me? And also, right now, I don't have a business, but if I see anybody have a private business that has a really good culture, I may be able to talk to them and see if they're interested in you. Just reach out to us. Just call the main number here, 212-813-3700, and ask for me, okay? It's a little bit too fast. Just call the main number. Just Google Pershing Square, and the main number here is 212-813-3700. Okay? All right. Thank you so much. Okay. Can we go to Sanchi Kirana, please? Hi, Bill. Thanks for the opportunity. Big fan of you. My question is, given Pershing's significant position in Howard Hughes, how are you factoring in the impact of sustained high mortgage rates, especially since this macro headwind is expected to persist until early 2026? Would love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, so we also agree that I don't think that there's likely to be a major decline in interest rates and necessarily mortgage rates, unless DOGE is extremely effective. But the offset to cutting costs and greater efficiency is more growth, and growth doesn't generally drive interest rates down. So I do think we're in an environment where treasury rates and mortgage rates are not likely to decline meaningfully. Now, the good news about Howard Hughes is that the markets in which the properties are, Howard Hughes' properties are located, are ones in which you can leave California and sell your home and move to The Woodlands or Summerlin, and you can buy a house that's two, three times larger. And even at the higher mortgage rate, even if you're walking away from a 4% mortgage and you're taking on a 7% mortgage, it's much cheaper to live there. These are just much lower-cost housing markets. And that's why you're seeing a lot of in-migration and people moving there. And that's why you're seeing a lot of companies locating there. Chevron left San Francisco to move to Bridgeland, one of our communities. Why? Because it's much better quality of life for employees, a much better pro-business environment. The Woodlands, Houston, happens to be a center for energy. And how much equity is required, et cetera. Howard Hughes has—they do some advertising. I've seen on X, actually, where they show you a floor plan for the home you sold in California that now here's the one you can buy in The Woodlands and put money in your pocket. So I'm quite bullish on land sales and residential land sales in Summerlin, Woodlands. We have a big condominium business in Hawaii. The team there has done a superb job. They designed a beautiful product. And when there's a rumor that we're building a new tower, people line up, and they write personal handwritten notes to the CEO, hoping they can get a certain apartment, et cetera. So I'm quite bullish on Howard Hughes' residential business long-term, even if mortgage rates rise. And homebuilders are also doing smart things. They're building more efficient homes. They're subsidizing the first number of years of interest rates. All of these things are helpful. Thanks for the question. Okay. I'm trying to go to people who haven't asked one yet. Let's go to, let's see here. Let's go to Tink. Why don't you go ahead and ask your question? Tink Effect. Good morning. I do just join on this. I appreciate the invite. This is my first time being a part of this type of space, but I am interested. If someone has a very unique and brand-new app idea, but they need, say, an angel investor, how would you suggest someone go about that way? Thank you. Okay, so thanks for your question, and this is a space really about a company called Howard Hughes Corporation, which is going to be buying much more well-established businesses. So my advice would be to go. There are angel networks in pretty much every market, and they host meetings and pitch sessions and things like this, and I encourage you to go check them out. I guess Sherry's somehow managed to find her way to the top again. Sherry, if you want to ask another question. Oh, sorry. Did you mean to? Yes, I do. Okay. You had talked about when you were looking for a new hire. I'm sure you had. I don't remember the number. Many applications. What was it about Sonal? I'm sure you had many people that had the education requirements and great resumes. What was it about—is it a man or a woman? I don't remember. Woman. A woman. It's a woman. What was it about her that set her apart? Sure. So our process is we actually use a firm that helps kind of gather up the resumes, if you will. And for our investment team, our experience is that someone, the typical profile is someone who's graduated top of their class, kind of great academic excellence, went to work often at an investment bank, right out of school, spent a couple of years grinding away there, learning the business, and then at least two years in private equity, where you get a lot of experience analyzing businesses the way that we analyze businesses, which is fundamental analysis as if you're buying the whole company, which is what you do in the private equity world. Even though at Pershing, up until this Howard Hughes transaction, we're buying minority interests. We think of it as if we're buying the entire company. Sonal's background, I think she was at KKR for, I think, four and a half years, and she went there right out of school, top of her class, hired by KKR. That's unusual. It's unusual to get hired by a private equity firm. That makes you in a really rare class. Most private equity firms want someone to have a couple of years of banking experience before they join. And then we get to meet the person. Usually, I'm not part of those early meetings. And culture fit really matters. Is this a kind person? Is this a person with great character? Is this a person? The investment team's really small. The investment team pretty much has lunch together every day. Would you enjoy spending so much time with this person? That matters. And then we test them in a way, which is we give them a take-home. A take-home is usually we give them a name of a company, and they're free to do whatever research they want. And they come back in 10 days, and they present to us. Usually, they'll put together a presentation and make a case for a company. And they sit in front of the investment team, all eight of us, throwing questions their way. And we see how they handle themselves in that kind of situation. There's a very candid, open environment here. People are very direct. I'm an extremely direct person. That culture pervades this place. So you need to be strong enough that you don't immediately back off a point of view just because someone older, been here longer, has a different, you got to be strong. And you got to present well. You got to be articulate. Confident. Yes. You have to be confident. But you don't want to be arrogant, right? Investing is about this very delicate balance, right? You got to be confident enough to know when you're right and everyone else is wrong. By the way, the best investments in the world are where you believe you're right and everyone else says you're wrong. We bought General Growth at $0.30 because it was going bankrupt. Everyone thought we were ridiculous, right? We were idiots, right, and it's the best equity investment. Stock went from $0.34 to $31 a share. It was like 97X in the public markets. That only happened because everyone else thought we were stupid. It takes a lot of confidence to take on a position like that. But you have to do what gives you confidence is it's not just based on spirit in the air. It's based on you do sufficient work that you have a differentiated view, and you just look at the facts, the empirical facts, and you draw a conclusion, and you don't get swayed by the emotions of markets and things like this. That's a really important quality in an investor. The other really important quality, let me finish this out for you. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, is humbleness, right? You got to be humble enough that a new fact appears. Even after you built a stake, you told everyone you own it, and here's why. And the new fact causes you to call into question your original thesis. And you got to be saying, "You know what? I screwed up." And so it's that delicate balance between those two things. We look for that. And then the last thing we do, or the second to last thing we do, is we give you, we put you in a conference room. We give you a laptop with no access to the internet, no phone. We give you a pile of documents: an annual report, 10-K, 10-Q, conference call transcripts, maybe a couple of analyst reports on a company that you don't know what the company is until you walk in the room. We give you like five hours. We feed you. Wow. And then at the end of the five hours, you got to present to the team. And you build a little model, and you make your case. And then you got to deal with questions from us. And so Sonal basically, and then lastly, we whittle it down to, in this case, three people. And she was the best on the hardest test, which is the last one. The take-home one, you can get help from anyone, right? So you do learn something about someone if they kind of get past test one. But the second one, you're on your own. And she was the best. And also, she has a very nice demeanor, personality, extremely smart, but humble, totally. And then we take her out for dinner, make sure she's okay. And we all went out for dinner, and she had good manners, I guess. So that was it. That's the process. Which you probably knew by the time you were taking her out to dinner, I would guess. That she had the character and the. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The way of speaking, way of being with other people. Yes, all of those things. But by the way, let me do the following. I'm going to take one more question. I did say I would take all the questions, but it looks like we still have. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I am told I have a board meeting at—I didn't think this would go as late as noon. So what we're going to do is we're going to take Edmir Thachi, if I pronounced that correctly. Yeah, that was right. And then we're going to thank everyone else, and we'll do another one of these at some point if the group is interested. Go ahead, Edmir. Okay. So my question is more on the—as we know, you also talked about that you use the philosophy of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham's investing style. But do you believe that the style still, the investing principles remain as effective now, or have these technological advancements fundamentally reshaped the hedge fund landscape or investing landscape now? All these fast-moving algorithms, AI, stuff like that. Do you think that still is relevant now and still the philosophy you're using, or has it changed? Sure. So again, simply, Buffett is an inspiration, but our investment strategy is different. Buffett doesn't do anything to hedge. He doesn't buy these sort of asymmetric credit default swaps or interest rate hedges. He generally buys businesses that trade at pretty low multiples and won't buy them if they exceed certain multiples. We're much more expansive and open about the valuation of the businesses, at least the entry multiples of businesses we buy and the kind of businesses we own. So he's an inspiration, but he doesn't drive all of our strategy. And I think our strategy is involved with time. And so I would answer it that way. But we only have, I'll call it, two minutes left. So maybe I'll just end with a thought for the group. So one, I'm very appreciative of people who started this morning at 9:00 A.M. and heard a two-hour and 15-minute presentation from us and then listened to an hour and 45 minutes. We've had anywhere between 2,000 people on this presentation, and we're grateful for the time that you spent with us. Look, this is a very important transaction to us. If it's something that you want to see happen, you should reach out to the company, their investor relations, contact the board. I think I haven't checked, but probably on the website, there's a way to do that, and share your views. Is this something Howard Hughes should do, or should it stay in its core business as a standalone company, or should they sell stock to us at a massive premium to the market price and to where the stock was before we got involved and give us the reins to lead the company to a different place? With that, I want to just thank everyone for participating. We look forward to connecting in the future. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Bill. Great day. Bye.