Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square has submitted an offer to buy Universal Music, the world’s largest music company.
The investment fund offered a mix of cash and shares for Universal, which represents artists including Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Harry Styles, and Kendrick Lamar. The bid is for €9.4 billion ($10.9 billion) in cash plus shares, which would value the group at $63.5 billion.
It comes as Ackman is looking to take Pershing Square public, with the company filing for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in March.
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Bill Ackman’s hedge fund, Pershing Square, is going public.
The company said in a Tuesday statement that it has filed for an IPO on the NYSE.
Pershing Square is seeking to raise at least $5 billion in the IPO, it said.
Pershing Square, the investment fund run by famed investor Bill Ackman, has filed for an IPO, it announced on Tuesday.
Ackman’s fund is planning a dual listing of Pershing Square and a closed-end investment company, Pershing Square USA, on the New York Stock Exchange.
The company is seeking to raise at least $5 billion in the IPO, it said in a statement announcing the planned listing.
“Shares are being offered at a price of $50.00 per PSUS Share and investors in the PSUS IPO will receive, for no additional consideration, 20 PSI Shares for every 100 PSUS Shares purchased,” the company said.
The planned company will be listed under the stock market tickers “PS” and “PSUS,” the statement added.
Passion could be the best defense against AI taking your job, Bill Gurley says.
“The people that are most at risk are the ones that are sitting idly in the job and don’t really have a why or a purpose for it,” the legendary venture capitalist said during the latest episode of the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast.
“I think a lot of the people that go through that college conveyor belt, that are chasing a safe job, that end up working as a widget or a cog in an industry they may not love — I think they are ripe for disruption,” he added.
Advances in AI have spurred numerous high-profile companies to slow hiring or make layoffs in anticipation of cheaper, more productive digital workers replacing human ones.
Technology giants such as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are also spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure, fueling widespread concerns of future job losses.
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Gurley is a general partner at Benchmark who’s known for placing early bets on businesses such as Uber, Nextdoor, OpenTable, and Zillow.
He recently published a book titled “Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love.”
The veteran investor said on the podcast that young people should choose careers they enjoy and care about. Warren Buffett, who famously “tap dances to work” at Berkshire Hathaway, has long offered similar advice.
“For people that are in a job they love, the honing’s free,” Gurley said. He explained that when someone is passionate about what they do, they don’t need to set aside time or convince themselves to polish their skills and knowledge; they naturally prioritize improvemen and feel energized by the process.
“It really becomes an unfair advantage in almost any industry if you’re that person because you’re learning constantly,” Gurley said.
One key thing they should learn is how to harness AI to bolster their efforts, he said.
“Be the most AI aware person in your job,” Gurley said. “And you’re going to then be the last person that they want to get rid of.”
Gurley compared AI to “jet fuel” that can expand a worker’s capabilities. Employees can now learn more quickly and thoroughly than ever before, he said, so if they’re focusing their learning on AI, they’re “going to have even better chance of winning,” he added.
At the start of his Congressional deposition Friday, Bill Clinton addressed the trove of photos of himself with Jeffrey Epstein released by the Justice Department last year.
In opening remarks posted on social media, the former President said he didn’t have any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation — despite anyone’s “interpretation of those 20-year-old photos.”
“I had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing,” Clinton said of the convicted sex offender, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. “No matter how many photos you show me.”
Clinton posted the remarks ahead of his closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, New York, before members of the House Oversight Committee, which has been investigating Epstein’s connections to powerful people.
In December, in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Justice Department released several photos showing Clinton with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for trafficking girls to Epstein for sex. The photos show Clinton and Maxwell swimming together in a pool, along with a woman whose face is redacted. They also show Clinton in what appears to be Epstein’s private jet with a female, whose face is redacted, on his lap.
The photos also show Bill and Hillary Clinton at parties and dinners with Epstein.
A photo of former President Bill Clinton, Ghislaine Maxwell, and an unidentified woman was included in the Justice Department’s Epstein files.
Department of Justice
The former president has long maintained he had no knowledge of Epstein’s sexual abuse. Epstein occasionally visited the White House while Clinton was president, and Clinton has said he traveled internationally with Epstein on his private jet four times between 2002 and 2003, following his presidency, for Clinton Foundation initiatives. There’s no indication the two were still in contact by the time Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in Florida in 2008.
“As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing — I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals,” Clinton said in the opening statement of his deposition.
Maxwell appeared to have her own relationship with the Clintons.
Epstein files previously released by the House Oversight Committee include a photo of “Margaritaville” singer Jimmy Buffett, his wife, Bill Clinton, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein.
House Oversight Committee
She worked to obtain funding for the Clinton Global Initiative, records released by the Justice Department show. Maxwell also said in an interview with Justice Department Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last year that she was closer to Clinton than Epstein was.
“President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend,” she said.
“President Clinton liked me, and we got along terribly well. But I never saw that warmth, or however you want to characterize it, with Mr. Epstein — so I didn’t see that,” Maxwell said in her interview. “I didn’t see President Clinton being interested in Epstein. He was just a rich guy with a plane.”
Bill Clinton’s deposition on Friday follows Hillary Clinton’s on Thursday. She said she didn’t think she ever met Epstein. She has said she met Maxwell on “a few occasions” in social settings.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee said they would publicly release videos of the depositions of Bill and Hillary Clinton, as they did with a deposition of Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of L Brands, who previously hired Epstein as a financial fixer.
Clinton’s deposition marks the first time a former president has been compelled to testify to Congress pursuant to a subpoena.
Democrats on the committee say Clinton’s deposition marks a precedent that should require President Donald Trump, who has also been photographed with Epstein, to testify before the committee.
If you are a survivor of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673) or visit its website to receive confidential support.
Bill Gurley has some suggestions on how you might invest in the so-called SaaSpocalypse if you believe the companies still have value.
Software-as-a-Service stocks have stumbled to start 2026. Investors worry that new AI generative tools — particularly Claude Code’s latest app-building update — could become direct competitors with legacy SaaS giants like Salesforce, Atlassian, and DocuSign.
Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Gurley, the longtime Benchmark general partner, acknowledged the concerns and compared it to another disruptive moment in tech.
“Right after Facebook went public, there was a concern about this mobile transition, and their stock went from $42 to like $18. That was fear of a technology disruption,” he said.
Still, Gurley emphasized that today’s SaaS fears feel unusually widespread.
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“I’ve never seen a disruption that had this much anxiety and go across so many companies,” he said.
Yet he noted that even AI-native companies aren’t abandoning traditional software vendors. Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, uses tools from Workday and Salesforce, he said.
“They’re paying for these things,” he said.
If the stocks continue to fall, Gurley suggested that investors who believe in the SaaS companies channel Warren Buffett, who has long argued that moments of panic are the perfect time to buy.
“You shouldn’t be blogging about what’s wrong with the prices,” he said. “You should be quiet and picking them up off the floor.”
He’s worried about circular investment
AMD and Meta just announced a deal on Tuesday morning. Gurley said he is worried about the deal’s structure.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Gurley expressed concern about the increasing circularity of deals between AI companies and the firms building their massive physical infrastructure.
“This is a little bit odd that we got started this way from the very beginning,” he said, referring to early transactions between Microsoft and OpenAI that involved cloud credits flowing back into Microsoft’s Azure business.
There’s a fresh example of intertwined AI and infrastructure agreements on Tuesday morning: Meta and Advanced Micro Devices announced a deal in which Meta would buy six gigawatts of computing power from the chipmaker.
The arrangement could also result in Meta owning up to 10% of AMD’s stock.
Gurley said he once described similar AI and infrastructure deal structures to ChatGPT without naming the companies involved.
“It spit out words like Enron and WorldCom,” he said. “All I did was describe the structure of the deals. I didn’t say which companies they were.”
Gurley said he doesn’t think regulators will step in to fix the circularity issue.
“When it comes undone — and it will come undone one day for reasons we can talk about — I think people are going to point these things and say they shouldn’t have existed,” he said.
AI as ‘jet fuel’
For workers worried about AI’s impact on their jobs, Gurley was far more optimistic.
He called AI “jet fuel” for people passionate about their work (something he has also said on X), and argued that the tools can dramatically accelerate skills and productivity.
“You can learn faster than you could have ever learned at any point in history right now,” he said. “You can fire this thing up and get it on your side.”
I 100% agree with @mcuban on this. If you are on a custom career path where you aim to differentiate yourself, AI is “jet fuel” – you can learn and soar faster than ever before. https://t.co/uxWs2l5Igq
Even in an era of sweeping technological disruption, Gurley said he wouldn’t choose a different path if he had to start all over again.
“If we lived in a society where all jobs paid the same, I would have still done venture capital,” he said. “I just had so much fun being a part of it.”
Gurley didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square has invested roughly 10% of its capital in Meta.
The fund told investors Meta is set to be “one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI integration.”
Meta has been plowing cash into data center projects, which Ackman’s firm expect to pay off long-term.
Bill Ackman is betting big on Meta — saying it believes it to be “one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI integration.”
The billionaire investor’s Pershing Square hedge fund revealed Wednesday that it has invested around 10% of its capital in Meta, or approximately $2 billion, as of the end of December.
“We believe Meta’s current share price underappreciates the company’s long-term upside potential from AI and represents a deeply discounted valuation for one of the world’s greatest businesses,” the presentation said.
At around $668 per share on Wednesday afternoon, Meta’s stock price is roughly flat in 2026 so far, and down approximately 7% from one year ago.
Pershing Square also revealed it had allocated 13% of its fund to Amazon as of the end of 2025, and a 2% position in Hertz in late 2024.
Wall Street has been less than enthusiastic about some of Big Tech’s planned capital expenditure plans, but Meta’s budget-busting $135 billion forecasted spend was rewarded last month with a short-lived 8% bump the share price.
Either way, Ackman’s team says they’re very much on board with the strategy.
“We believe concerns around META’s AI-related spending initiatives are underestimating the company’s long-term upside potential from AI,” the presentation said.
Pershing Square’s investment thesis for its stake in Meta.
Pershing Square
The presentation also said Meta’s 3.5 billion users are increasing at a steady clip, setting the company up as the “dominant” leader in digital ads.
“Meta’s business model is one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI integration,” the presentation said.
Bill Gates, through a spokesperson, issued a strongly worded denial Friday on the latest allegations to emerge about his relationship with disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The Department of Justice, as part of more than 3 million pages of documents related to Epstein, released on Friday, unsealed 2013 emails Epstein wrote to himself.
They appear to be notes he was drafting for a person named Boris, who worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to send to Bill Gates after a dispute.
One of the emails, with the subject line “bill,” suggests that Bill Gates had requested medication for a sexually transmitted disease to “surreptitiously” give to his now ex-wife, Melinda French Gates.
Another email said Boris had helped Bill Gates “get drugs,” and helped facilitate “illicit trysts” between the billionaire Microsoft founder and “Russian girls” as well as “married women.”
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The emails contain no corroboration of the claims.
“These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false,” a spokesperson for Bill Gates told Business Insider in a statement. “The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”
It’s unknown whether the emails’ text was ever sent to Gates, the founder of Microsoft, a global philanthropist, and once the richest man in the world. Since Epstein’s 2019 suicide at a federal jail, Gates has faced questions about the extent of their relationship.
In the past, Gates has said he attended several dinners with Epstein for philanthropic reasons and now regrets spending time with him.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Melinda Gates began seeking divorce counsel in 2019, around the time news of Bill’s meetings with Epstein surfaced publicly. She told CBS in 2022 that her ex-husband’s ties to Epstein were a factor in their split.
Correction: January 31, 2026 — An earlier version of this story indicated that Gates’ philanthropic foundation issued a statement. It was made by a personal spokesperson.
Paris Hilton and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are taking on AI-generated deepfake porn.
The hotel heiress and businesswoman traveled to the Capitol on Thursday for a press conference with the New York Democrat and Republican Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida to promote the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or DEFIANCE Act.
The bill would create a civil right of action allowing victims of AI-generated deepfake porn to sue the creators and distributors of those images.
“While these images may be digital, the harm to victims is very real,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Women lose their jobs when they are targeted with this, teenagers switch schools, and children lose their lives.”
Hilton spoke emotionally about having an intimate video of her shared widely online when she was 19.
“People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse. There were no laws at the time to protect me,” Hilton said. “There weren’t even words for what had been done to me. The internet was still new, and so was the cruelty that came with it.”
“What happened to me then is happening now to millions of women and girls in a new and more terrifying way,” Hilton added.
Though Elon Musk’s X and the AI chatbot Grok were not mentioned by name at the press conference, the push to pass the bill comes after the AI agent began generating sexualized images of people, including minors, in response to prompts from users on X. The AI images spurring widespread concerns and even bans on Grok in some countries.
X has since stopped the Grok account from generating sexualized images of real people when tagged on the social network — though you can still do so using the app. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has said that anyone “using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
“There is an explosion of AI generating explicit images of children,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote earlier this month in response to news coverage of the Grok-generated images. “And it’s not just actresses. Across the country, more and more teenage girls are becoming victims of deepfake harassment. Congress must step in and pass my DEFIANCE Act to ensure victims can seek justice.”
Social media companies have largely been shielded from being held legally liable for illegal content shared on their platforms thanks to Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act of 1996, though the provision has come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats in the last decade.
The DEFIANCE Act passed the Senate last week by a voice vote, meaning no senator objected. It remains unclear when the bill will come up for a vote in the Senate, though Speaker Mike Johnson told The Independent recently that he’s “certainly in favor of it.”
In May, President Donald Trump signed the “TAKE IT DOWN Act” into law, which includes a provision requiring platforms to take down AI-generated revenge porn. That provision doesn’t fully take effect until May 2026.
This isn’t the first time Hilton has come to Capitol Hill to advocate for a piece of legislation.
In both 2021 and 2023, she came to Washington to push for the passage of a bill aimed at combating abuse in residential treatment facilities for troubled teens.
