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William Cohan, the author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World”, has a fantastic anecdote in his piece in the April issue of Vanity Fair  about an ill-fated Hamptons bike ride Bill Ackman took with Daniel Loeb last summer.

Cohan writes: 

…The plan was for Loeb, who is extremely serious about fitness and has done sprint triathlons, a half-Ironman, and a New York City Marathon, to pick up Ackman at Ackman’s $22 million mansion, in Bridgehampton. (Ackman also owns an estate in upstate New York and lives in the Beresford, a historic co-op on Manhattan’s Central Park West.) The two would cycle the 20 or so miles to Montauk, where they would meet up with the rest of the group and ride out the additional 6 miles to the lighthouse, at the tip of the island. “I had done no biking all summer,” Ackman now admits. Still, he went out at a very fast clip, his hypercompetitive instincts kicking in. As he and Loeb approached Montauk, Loeb texted his friends, who rode out to meet them from the opposite direction. The etiquette would have been for Ackman and Loeb to slow down and greet the other riders, but Ackman just blew by at top speed. The others fell in behind, at first struggling to keep up with the alpha leader. But soon enough Ackman faltered-at Mile 32, Ackman recalls-and fell way behind the others. He was clearly “bonking,” as they say in the cycling world, which is what happens when a rider is dehydrated and his energy stores are depleted.

While everyone else rode back to Loeb’s East Hampton mansion, one of Loeb’s friends, David “Tiger” Williams, a respected cyclist and trader, painstakingly guided Ackman, who by then could barely pedal and was letting out primal screams of pain from the cramps in his legs, back to Bridgehampton…

Read the rest at Vanity Fair >

Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, is shorting more than 20 million shares of Herbalife.  He believes the mutli-level marketing firm that sells nutrition products is a “pyramid scheme.” 

After Ackman shared his short case, Loeb, the CEO of Third Point LLC, disclosed a big stake in Herbalife and said Ackman’s thesis “lacks merit” and his pyramid scheme claim is “preposterous”.

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