Bill Ackman Sells Portion Of Universal Music Stake: 'One Of The Best Businesses We Have Ever Owned'

Hedge funder Bill Ackman announced the sale of a portion of Pershing Square's PSHZF stake in Universal Music Group UNVGY UMGNF Thursday, continuing his recent financial moves betting on future investments.

What Happened: Ackman, who recently showed he trimmed his stake in Chipotle Mexican Grill stock while raising his stake in Nike, announced his changes to the Universal Music Group stake in a Thursday tweet.

"We decided to sell a portion of our UMG position today. UMG has substantially outperformed the rest of our portfolio (other than the GSEs) year to date in light of its extremely strong recent results," Ackman tweeted.

The investor said Universal Music had the largest position in the portfolio, with around 27% of capital, and would maintain the top position after the sale, with around 17% of the portfolio.

"We believe UMG is one of the best businesses we have ever owned."

Ackman said he exercised registration rights for UMG to obtain a listing on a major U.S. exchange later this year, which he says, "will be extremely beneficial to the company."

"In a world of uncertainty, owning a royalty on music with the best management team in the industry is a blissfully comfortable and profitable place to be."

Pershing Square raised more than $1.4 billion from the 2.7% stake in Universal Music Group it sold according to a report from Bloomberg.

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Why It's Important: Universal Music is widely considered the largest music company in the world and is home to many of today's top musical artists, including Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan.

Ackman's sale was part of the step to get Universal a secondary listing on a U.S. stock exchange, which could mean that a potential catalyst is coming soon and would give investors more access to owning stakes in the music label of Swift and others.

News of Ackman's sale in Universal Music Group shares comes shortly after he announced he was hoping to emulate investing legend Warren Buffett and create a modern-day Berkshire Hathaway holding company with a proposal to acquire a 48% stake in Howard Hughes Holdings HHH.

“The $900 million cash infusion will enable HHH to immediately begin to pursue the acquisition of controlling interests in public and private companies as part of its new strategy of becoming a diversified holding company,” the proposal said.

Ackman tweeted that the offering will help Howard Hughes become a conglomerate similar in style to Berkshire Hathaway.

“We will make available the full resources of Pershing Square to HHH to build a diversified holding company, or one could say, a modern-day Berkshire Hathaway,” Ackman said.

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