Bill Ackman's Pershing Square buys six new stocks and skips music entirely

Bill Ackman's Pershing Square has disclosed six new stock investments, and none of them is a music company, Music Business Worldwide reported on August 14. The positions, in Visa, Mastercard, Netflix, S&P Global, Intercontinental Exchange and Alcon, appeared in the fund's first quarterly letter to shareholders since Pershing Square Inc. listed on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year.

Ackman's fund once held a major stake in Universal Music Group, acquiring around 10% from Vivendi in 2021 for roughly $4 billion. In March 2025, as Pershing Square began selling that position, Ackman praised UMG as among the finest businesses his fund had ever held. He resigned from UMG's board that May, and in April 2026 Pershing Square made a $64 billion offer for the company, which UMG's board rejected as undervaluing the business.

Pershing Square sold its remaining roughly 80.6 million UMG shares soon after the rejected offer, closing out a relationship with the music industry's largest recorded-music company that had run for more than four years and had, for a time, made Ackman's fund one of UMG's largest outside shareholders.

In the new letter, Pershing Square said market volatility this year let it deploy nearly $5 billion from Pershing Square USA, the vehicle that raised $5 billion in an April IPO, at attractive prices. Netflix is the only one of the six new positions in entertainment; the fund called it the dominant global streaming platform with more than 325 million subscribers.

The letter was signed by Ackman and Chief Investment Officer Ryan Israel. Universal Music Group had put plans for a US stock listing on hold in March 2026, even as the company has kept buying back its own shares on the Amsterdam exchange where it is already listed.