Billionaire Bill Ackman has built a $35 billion hedge fund, led high-profile overhauls at companies like Chipotle, and boasts an eye-watering investment portfolio through his firm, ranging from Amazon to Microsoft. Now, he’s revealing the two things that moved the needle in his career: A book that inspired Warren Buffett and a $14,000 side hustle.
“One early formative experience was at Harvard, where I took a job at Harvard Student Agencies selling advertising for the Let’s Go travel guides—a series of books where Harvard students wrote reviews of hotels around the world,” Ackman recently told Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell during Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast.
“It was a commission-based business, and I turned out to be a good salesman,” he continued. In fact, he was so good at the job that the student agency was afraid he would out-earn his superiors. “I made $14,000, which felt like a huge amount of money.”
As a teenager, Ackman told his dad that he’d be a millionaire by 30, have $100 million by 40, and be a billionaire by 50. And that commission check was his first taste of business success.
Then, after graduating, he returned home to work for his father, who cofounded and ran New York-based commercial real estate firm Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group. Ackman wasn’t too thrilled about the job, but it pointed him toward the career he wanted to build. “I found the entrepreneurs and developers on the other side of the phone more interesting, and I decided I wanted to be an investor,” he said. And his father—an entrepreneurial success in his own right—led him further down the investing rabbit hole. “My dad introduced me to a man named Leonard Marks, who recommended ‘The Intelligent Investor’ by Ben Graham.” Graham is known as the “Father of Value Investing” and profoundly influenced the young Warren Buffett’s investing style, which Ackman came to greatly admire.
