Bill Ackman

On July 10, 1994, he married landscape architect Karen Ann Herskovitz. He had three children with Karen. The couple divorced in 2017.

Ackman is widely known for his philanthropic work. He has personally donated US$ 6.8 million to the ‘Center for Jewish History’ while his foundation donated US$ 1.1 million to the ‘Centurion Ministries’ in Princeton, New Jersey and to the ‘Innocence Project’ in New York City. He is one of the signatories of ‘The Giving Pledge’ campaign and has committed to donate at least half of his wealth to charitable causes.

According to ‘Forbes’ magazine, his net worth as of February 2018, is US$ 1.09 billion.

He was born on May 11, 1966, to Ronnie I. (née Posner) and Lawrence David Ackman. Theirs was an affluent Jewish family. His father served as the chairman of the ‘Ackman–Ziff Real Estate Group,’ a real-estate financing firm in New York.

Ackman grew up in Chappaqua, in Westchester County, New York. He attended ‘Harvard College’ and obtained a BA “magna cum laude” in history in 1988. In his honours thesis, titled "Scaling the Ivy Wall: the Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions," he wrote extensively about the school’s admission policies.

He furthered his studies at ‘Harvard Business School’ and earned an MBA degree in 1992.

He commenced his career in the real-estate business, working for his father at a commercial real-estate mortgage brokerage in New York, ‘Ackman Brothers & Singer Inc.,’ where he served as the chairman.

In 1992, he, along with his Harvard classmate David P. Berkowitz, established ‘Gotham Partners,’ an investment firm that made small investments in public companies. He served as a co-investment manager at ‘Gotham LP,’ ‘Gotham III LP’ and ‘Gotham Partners International’ from 1993 to 2003.

He joined hands with the New York City-based American conglomerate and investment holding company ‘Leucadia National’ in 1995, to bid for ‘Rockefeller Center.’ Although the deal did not materialize, this move attracted the investors’ attention toward ‘Gotham Partners.’ This resulted in the firm gathering an impressive clientele, leading to US$ 500 million in assets by 1998.

By 2002, ‘Gotham Partners’ was entrenched in litigation, with many people having stakes in the companies where ‘Gotham’ also made investments. Ackman had to finally liquidate the funds of the firm in 2003, owing to bad debts.

While a probe was being made on Ackman’s trading by the State of New York and federal authorities, he commenced a research in 2002 that focused on challenging the AAA rating of the financial services company ‘MBIA.’ He was charged for copying statements of 725,000 pages regarding the financial services company in his law firm's compliance with a subpoena.