The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has always been a master of media access, perhaps even bordering on media manipulation. He knows how to get publicity on CNBC, mostly good over the years, as he’s weaved his way in and around one minefield (Herbalife) after another (Valeant), despite losing billions of dollars along the way. In the past five years, though, his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, is up 195 percent, thanks in part to an ingenious $27 million Covid-themed hedge that generated some $3.6 billion in three weeks in and around March 2020. In the same time period, his hero Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Holdings is only up 58 percent. The S&P 500 is up 47 percent. The publicly traded holding company controlled by his nemesis, Carl Icahn, is down 72 percent. So you have to give Bill his props.

During the SPAC renaissance of 2020, he volubly launched his own blank-check vehicle designed to take a private company public through a merger. More than $4 billion poured into the SPAC, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, much of it from retail investors mesmerized by the possibility that Ackman would land a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Ackman fueled the frenzy by suggesting that he’d approached Airbnb, before it went the I.P.O. route, and Stripe, the payments company, which remains private. (At one point, the media got wind of the fact that Ackman wanted to take a stake in Bloomberg LP.; Bill still will not comment about his desire to buy a minority stake in Bloomberg.) Alas, it was not to be. In July 2022, as the SPAC frenzy faded, the time clock ran out, and Bill closed up Tontine Holdings and returned to his investors the $4 billion he raised. That gambit cost him $35 million in lost underwriting fees.