American hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman predicts a $1 trillion Israeli company

American billionaire Bill Ackman, the founder and chief executive of hedge fund firm Pershing Square, said artificial intelligence will help Israel produce a company worth $1 trillion, and that he has invested close to $100 million in the country so far.

Ackman, who spoke during a visit to Israel last week for the ARC innovation summit at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, said a company of that size would "emerge from Israel within a few years." He then set an outer limit. "If not within the next five years, then certainly within a decade," he said in an interview published on Sunday.

His argument rests on the idea that AI cuts the advantage that big countries get from big workforces. "Yet, thanks to AI, large numbers of people are no longer required," Ackman said. "What matters is a concentration of talent: small, high-caliber teams capable of achieving extraordinary results."

He said the biggest winners will not be the companies that build large language models. "LLM companies, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, are not the ones that will capture the bulk of the value," he said. "The vast majority of value will be created by companies that apply this technology."

Close to $100 million in Israel

Asked how much he has put into Israel, Ackman said: "Close to $100 million, and I am still actively seeking further investments."

The biggest single bet came shortly after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, when Ackman and his wife, designer and former MIT professor Neri Oxman, bought about 5% of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. "That $25 million stake is now worth $250 million," he said.

He has since backed Israeli cybersecurity companies and joined a $200 million funding round this year for Kela, a defense technology startup that builds software to link drones, radar and other sensors into a single command system. The round valued Kela at more than $1 billion. Ackman is also an investor in Two Delta, a young Israeli AI startup working on ways to make AI models run faster, which raised tens of millions of dollars in a seed round last week alongside former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Ackman is setting up a venture fund, Pershing Square Ventures, which he plans to use for more Israeli deals. He also said he is in talks on a gift to Israeli academia. "We are working with two universities in Israel. We might make an announcement toward the end of the year," he said.

A $400 million push into medicine

The visit to Sheba was tied to a separate project. Ackman has committed $400 million to the Ackman Oxman Institute, which he set up after his daughter Lucy, 26, suffered a brain hemorrhage in February. The institute will fund startups and try to get new medical technology into hospitals faster, with an early focus on brain-computer interfaces. It is modeled in part on Sheba's ARC innovation center.

"Currently, it takes an average of 17 years for a new technology to be adopted in hospitals," Ackman said.

Ackman, 60, founded Pershing Square in 2004 and built his name on large, public bets on a small number of companies. The firm manages about $33 billion. In April, he took both Pershing Square USA, a closed-end fund, and its parent, Pershing Square Inc., public on the New York Stock Exchange in a combined offering that raised $5 billion.

He also used the interview to warn about the U.S. economy. He called political polarization its biggest risk and criticized the rise of democratic socialism, singling out the tax plans of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He pointed to wealthy residents leaving high-tax states such as New York and California for Florida.