How Low-Ego Leaders Are Outperforming the Loud Ones
05/13/2025
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Loud leaders once ruled the boardroom. Charisma was currency. Big talk drove big valuations.
July 13, 2022: -Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, raising $4 billion in the biggest-ever particular purpose acquisition company (SPAC), told investors he would return the sum to find a suitable target company to take the public through a merger.
The development is a massive setback for the prominent hedge fund manager who had planned for the SPAC to take a stake in Universal Music Group in the previous year when these investment vehicles were all the rage on Wall Street.
On Monday, in a letter sent to shareholders, Ackman highlighted numerous factors, including adverse market conditions and intense competition from traditional initial public offerings (IPOs), that thwarted his efforts to find a suitable company to merge his SPAC.
“High quality and profitable in the growth companies can typically postpone their timing to go general with demand conditions are more favorable, which limited the universe of possible high-quality deals for PSTH, particularly during the previous 12 months,” said Ackman, referring to the ticker symbol for his SPAC.
In July 2020, Pershing Square Tontine was raising $4 billion in its initial public offering. It wooed foremost investors from hedge fund Baupost Group, Canadian pension account Ontario Teachers, and mutual fund company T. Rowe Price Group. The economic case for EVs is getting improved as gas prices surge
SPACs, called on blank-check companies, are publicly-listed shells of cash created by large investors known as sponsors to merge with a private company. Similar to a reverse merger, the process takes the target company public.
SPACs peaked during 2020 and early 2021, which helped rake in paper gains worth hundreds of millions of dollars for several prominent SPAC creators like Michael Klein and Chamath Palihapitiya.
However, companies that merged with SPACs have performed poorly over the past year, forcing investors to disregard blank-check deals. That, coupled with tighter scrutiny and a downturn in equity markets, has practically shut the SPAC economy, with a few billions of dollars at stake.
Moreover, the record-breaking performance of the IPOs in the United States in 2021 posed challenges for SPAC sponsors like Ackman, as richly valued startups chose to list their shares on exchanges through traditional routes instead.
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Loud leaders once ruled the boardroom. Charisma was currency. Big talk drove big valuations.
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