How Bill Ackman’s $14,000 Harvard job led him to Warren Buffett’s investing philosophy and eventually built his billion-dollar career

Bill Ackman’s path to becoming one of America’s best-known investors did not begin with a giant Wall Street deal. It started with a $14,000 college sales job at Harvard and a book recommendation that connected his career to legendary investor Warren Buffett.

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Before building Pershing Square Capital Management, Ackman spent his student years selling advertising, explored his father’s real estate business and eventually discovered Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. Graham’s ideas had a major influence on Buffett, and the book helped Ackman realise that investing was the career he wanted.

Bill Ackman’s $14,000 Harvard job

While studying at Harvard, Ackman worked for Harvard Student Agencies, selling advertising for the Let’s Go travel guides.

The commission-based job gave him an early lesson in turning commercial skills into money. By the time he finished, Ackman had earned around $14,000.

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As Ackman later recalled on the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, “One early formative experience was at Harvard, where I took a job at Harvard Student Agencies selling advertising for the Let’s Go travel guides, a series of books where Harvard students wrote reviews of hotels around the world.”

It was a modest beginning compared with the billions that would later be associated with his investment career, but the experience showed him that he had an appetite for business.

How Ackman discovered Warren Buffett’s investing roots

After Harvard, Ackman joined his father’s New York commercial real estate business, Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group. But he became more interested in the entrepreneurs and developers he encountered than in the property business itself.

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Through his father, Ackman was introduced to Leonard Marks, who recommended Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. That recommendation became a major turning point.

Graham is widely regarded as the father of value investing and was also Warren Buffett’s mentor at Columbia Business School. His philosophy encouraged investors to focus on the underlying value of businesses rather than simply following market prices.

For Ackman, Graham’s book helped clarify that investing was where his interests belonged.

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Warren Buffett became an important influence

The Graham connection also explains one of the more interesting threads in Ackman’s career: his admiration for Buffett.

Ackman has looked closely at the way Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway, particularly its ability to operate with permanent capital rather than relying entirely on a traditional fund structure.

That thinking became especially relevant as Ackman worked toward taking Pershing Square in a more public direction.

The idea is relatively simple: instead of constantly worrying about investors withdrawing money from a traditional fund, a permanent-capital structure can allow an investment firm to hold businesses for much longer periods.

From Harvard to Pershing Square

Ackman went to Harvard Business School with a clear objective — to learn how to become an investor.

In 1992, he cofounded Gotham Partners with fellow Harvard graduate David Berkowitz. After Gotham Partners was eventually wound down, Ackman launched Pershing Square Capital Management in 2004.

The firm became known for activist investing, with Ackman taking significant positions in companies and pushing for changes he believed could unlock shareholder value.

Some of Pershing Square’s notable investments included Chipotle and Canadian Pacific Railway.

The $27 million trade that became $2.6 billion

Ackman’s career has also produced some extraordinary bets.

During the market turmoil caused by the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, a position in corporate credit reportedly turned about $27 million into roughly $2.6 billion within weeks.

That kind of trade is worlds away from the Harvard student who earned $14,000 selling travel-guide advertisements.

Yet the underlying story is less about one spectacular win and more about the progression of Ackman’s career, from sales, to real estate, to Graham’s value-investing principles and eventually activist investing.

From a Harvard side job to a billion-dollar investment career

Ackman’s story offers an unusual Warren Buffett connection.

His first taste of making money came from selling advertisements. His father exposed him to entrepreneurs and deals. Leonard Marks introduced him to Graham. And Graham’s investment philosophy had already shaped Buffett.

Decades later, Ackman was running Pershing Square and looking toward a model that borrowed another lesson from Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway: long-term, permanent capital.

In that sense, the journey from a $14,000 Harvard job to a multibillion-dollar investment empire was not one giant leap. It was a series of influences that gradually pushed Ackman toward the investing philosophy that would define his career.