Part Two: The Rise of the "Activist" Investor
Behind the Bastards
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.4 • 17.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2026
⏱️ 72 minutes
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Summary
Robert concludes the story of the rise and fall of an activist investor we can now admit was just Bill Ackman all along.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | QuarZone Media |
| 0:02.9 | Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that this week is talking about Bill |
| 0:12.1 | Ackman, the patron saint of activist investors with the great Kim Kelly. |
| 0:18.5 | Kim, welcome back to the show. |
| 0:19.9 | How are you doing? |
| 0:20.5 | How are you feeling? |
| 0:21.3 | I'm good. |
| 0:22.1 | I'm excited to talk more about this terrible man. |
| 0:25.1 | Robert, you know what I realized in between part one and part two? |
| 0:28.8 | You know that very famous movie, Pretty Woman? |
| 0:32.5 | Richard Geer's character. |
| 0:34.4 | Yes. |
| 0:35.2 | That's his job. |
| 0:36.7 | Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly like gear is, and that was still when it was like the corporate raider thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that's very much the point of the movie is that like he's kind of a scumbag businessman. Yeah. The terminology is so much cooler. Like, they should have just kept doing that, honestly. Corporate Raider, pirate, yeah. Yeah, R of us, et cetera. At least, just own it. If you're going to be a bastard, just be a bastard. Well, that was one of the more effective things about a hook is that, like, you know, Robin Williams' character who's like a grown-up Peter Pan comes back and like |
| 1:12.0 | one of his old like, for instance, like, oh, you're just like a pirate now. |
| 1:15.9 | Like that's all you're doing. |
| 1:18.5 | There was a really good one of the Monty Python movies. |
| 1:22.0 | I think it was Meaning of Life opens with like a good skit about basically that, like a like a like a high seas accounting firm |
| 1:28.9 | like like like basically being like corporate pirates uh it's very funny um yeah but then then things |
| 1:36.2 | at a certain point they're not happy being like evil monsters anymore and they have to pretend |
| 1:42.0 | to be making the world better and that's kind of like like the Bill Ackman-K-T boundary here is like corporate raiders to activists. It's funny. You know, like they want to own everything, but they want us to love them for it. And they get so mad when we don't. They don't want to, they don't want us to act like they're doing what they're doing. They want us to act like they're doing us a favor, right? And when we ended last episode, |
| 2:06.0 | we talked about how Bill's company makes a shitload of money off this Canadian Pacific deal |
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