The U.S. stock market is close to a record high as the summer begins, but it’s been a topsy-turvy ride to get there. When Donald Trump began imposing or threatening heavy tariffs in February and doubled down on “Liberation Day” on April 2, the S&P 500 index fell as much as 19%. It has since recovered most of those losses while Trump’s stance has softened for now.
Volatility creates opportunity, and Forbes again convened dozens of investors and business leaders for the fourth annual Forbes Iconoclast Summit at Cipriani Wall Street on Thursday. Billionaires Ken Griffin, Bill Ackman, Larry Fink, Todd Boehly and many more are taking the stage, and we’ll be covering all the conversations in real time throughout the day below.
Ken Griffin Slams Tariffs
Citadel’s Ken Griffin sharply criticized the Trump administration’s pursuit of tariffs, after celebrating the president’s election by trumpeting that America was “open for business” last December. “I thought we were looking at four years of tremendous growth and tremendous American economic vitality,” Griffin said in a discussion with Forbes editor-at-large Maneet Ahuja on stage. “We’re leaving so much opportunity on the table.”
Griffin said the use of tariffs comes at a “dear price” to the U.S. economy and American consumers facing higher prices. While he is still hopeful the administration will pivot to a more business-friendly, deregulatory posture, he said Citadel’s best estimates for growth this year are only about half of what he expected following Trump’s election.
On the subject of Trump’s funding bill, which Elon Musk has slammed as an “abomination,” Griffin also views overspending as a critical concern. “You cannot run deficits of 6 or 7% at full employment after years of growth. That’s just fiscally irresponsible,” he said. “There will come a time when we have to have our fiscal house in order.”
Don’t Count The U.S. Out
Mary Callahan Erdoes, JPMorgan’s CEO of asset and wealth management, sounded a note of optimism against a backdrop of tariff-fueled anxiety. “The U.S. consumer is fine,” she asserted on a panel moderated by Moira Forbes. “We’re not seeing stress almost anywhere.” While acknowledging that inflation due to tariffs may be likely, it hasn’t taken hold yet.
Alex Clavel, CEO of Softbank Vision Funds, also thinks it’s a “terrific time” to invest in the U.S. “As a global technology investor, the U.S. is our big fish. This is the market where we are over-allocating capital.” Eric Wilmes, president and head of private equity for the Americas for GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, concurred, says there’s “a ton of opportunity in the U.S.”
Erdoes pointed out that the bullishness on the U.S. from her co-panelists’ firms based in Japan and Singapore exemplified the idea that American exceptionalism is alive and well. No other country has the same entrepreneurial support, capital markets liquidity, transparency and rule of law, and that advantage shouldn’t be taken lightly. “We have to be really careful when we read these headlines and we start hand-wringing about what’s happening, because it’s on the margin,” she said.
Lessons In Leadership And Optimism
Larry Fink, Blackrock’s chairman and CEO, spoke with Rockefeller Capital Management CEO Greg Fleming about how Blackrock’s growth has continued and accelerated since its origins in 1988. Last year, Blackrock agreed to buy private credit firm HPS for $12 billion and Global Infrastructure Partners for another $12.5 billion, adding to its $11.6 trillion in assets under management. “We spent a lot of time talking about culture and team, and if we could not find connectivity and a unity of opinions and ideas, we were not interested,” Fink said of the acquisitions. “Valuation is actually pretty darn easy if you get the culture and the team correct.”
Fink said he’s broadly optimistic about the direction of the economy, but that uncertainty is taking a toll. “If you study behavioral science, when there’s an uncertain period of time, your decisions are negatively biased by that uncertainty,” he said. “We’re going to start seeing the impact of these tariffs. It’s going to start impacting the economy over the course of the next five months.”
He said “unlocking” private capital is the key to jumpstarting growth again and limiting the damage of the deficit, hoping that some of the $12 trillion currently sitting in money-market funds gets put to work. “We need our savers to be long-term believers in our economy,” Fink urged. “Over the last 40 years, pessimism has not worked.”
Building Winning Teams
Sports team valuations have continued to soar in the last year, and Clara Wu Tsai, co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets and the reigning WNBA champion New York Liberty, is upbeat about the prospects of both her NBA and WNBA assets. “Women’s sports is a growth asset with a lot of long-term upside potential,” Tsai said. “The viewership is growing. The revenue hasn’t quite caught up.” She pointed out that viewership is now at about 30-40% of NBA games, but revenue is still only 2% of the NBA’s media deal, indicating that the WNBA will be set for a meteoric increase when it negotiates its next TV rights contract.
Marc Lasry, cofounder and CEO of Avenue Capital Group and the former co-owner of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, didn’t express any seller’s remorse for cashing out his stake in the Bucks at a $3.5 billion valuation in 2023, even as the Boston Celtics sold in a deal worth more than $6 billion this year. “It’s never a good time to sell… I think at the time I did it, it was a good price,” Lasry said. His firm now has a fund to invest in emerging sports and leagues. While the major blue-chip leagues can produce dependable returns, for lesser-known sports, he said, “if you’re right, you can make 10 or 20 times your money.”
Lasry, Tsai and their co-panelist Alex Rodriguez, the former New York Yankees star who won an arbitration battle this year to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Lynx with Marc Lore, spoke with Forbes chief content officer Randall Lane about how their teams have become winners. Lasry spoke about how success is a combination of chemistry and talent, particularly in basketball, where there’s a hierarchy for who will have the ball in their hands at the most important moments. He said Rodriguez will have an edge at that as an owner because he knows what it’s like to play at that level.
“Some owners may not value how important a family room is or how important shower heads are. Athletes hate terrible showers,” Rodriguez said. “All these things matter.”
To address the most pressing question on much of the New York audience’s mind, Lane closed the panel by asking for a yes or no answer on whether the Knicks should have fired Tom Thibodeau, the coach who led them to their first Eastern Conference Finals appearance in 25 years. Rodriguez and Lasry dodged the question, but Tsai took the opportunity to criticize her Nets’ crosstown competitors with a succinct “no.”
Staying Ahead Of The Curve
“The way in which brands are connecting with people right now is radically different,” said Adam Katz, partner at wealth management firm Corient, commenting on how he’s surprised sometimes by what companies are connecting with his teenage children on TikTok that he’s missing.
Katz, Bilt Rewards founder and CEO Ankur Jain and Ariel Investments managing partner Jason Wright spoke with Forbes assistant managing editor Ali Jackson-Jolley about how to build a strong culture that stays connected with a broad range of customers. Jain, a billionaire whose company offers credit cards and rewards for rent payments, said he spends at least an hour a day on TikTok, saying it’s the best place to spot cultural shifts. “I would be the first person in a picket line in front of the White House if they try to ban it,” he joked.
Wright, the head of investment for Ariel’s Project Level, a fund for investing in women’s sports, said the fund is taking a particular interest in youth sports and could invest up to a third of its assets in that area. One asset he was particularly excited about was League One volleyball, a professional league which operates a large community of youth clubs. “It’ll be the NWSL or WNBA in 10 years,” said Wright. “They do it the right way and keep local owners in place with the cultural capital that makes it still feel community-based while becoming corporate.”
Inside The Boardroom
Michal Katz, head of investment and corporate banking at Mizuho Americas, Dambisa Moyo, co-principal of family office Versaca and a member of the U.K.’s House of Lords, and attorney Alex Spiro, who has represented clients including Elon Musk, spoke with Forbes CEO Sherry Phillps about how corporate boardrooms can prepare for the future.
“We’re always in the era of uncertainty,” Moyo said, citing past periods of deglobalization, geopolitical warfare and pandemics. “Our job is not to navel-gaze because of all the uncertainty that has emerged, it’s really to see through it.”
Katz emphasized the importance of transparency and communication from leaders, particularly during times of unrest like the present. “Communicating the story, developing the narrative, getting buy-in, all of that requires preparation,” she said. Spiro added that his “number one rule” he tries to express to his clients is not to panic. “It’s easier for some people than others, but the sky is not falling,” he said.
The Activist Perspective
Billionaire Bill Ackman felt an entrepreneurial itch from a young age and started a hedge fund with a classmate straight out of Harvard Business School. “We basically went through the Forbes 400 list and I cold-called and got meetings,” Ackman recalled. “The Forbes 400 is composed of a lot of entrepreneurs who liked the idea of a couple of young guys starting something and wanted to be part of it.”
Ackman made a name for himself for decades waging activist battles with companies and told Forbes chairman Steve Forbes he had to rattle some cages earlier in his career to get noticed, but three years ago he said he would step back from vocal shareholder activism. “We’ve been around long enough that today we don’t have to be an activist,” he said Thursday. “People take our call.” He added that he has “transferred my activist tendencies” to the social media platform X, where he can opine on issues he’s passionate about to his 1.7 million followers.
Most recently, he’s made headlines by upping his stake in real estate developer Howard Hughes to 47% this year, which he envisions transforming into a diversified holding company in the mold of Berkshire Hathaway. He envisions starting an insurance company associated with Howard Hughes so that “we have a similar flexibility as Mr. Buffett does to invest the assets.”
Elsewhere in his portfolio, he’s made a healthy profit on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored mortgage businesses that were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Ackman’s Pershing Square has been an investor since 2012, and both stocks have grown twentyfold since the start of 2023. “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac today are vastly better capitalized than they were for the first 60 years of their existence…. The probability of default is very low,” he said.
Forbes closed the conversation by asking Ackman about his outspokenness against Harvard and higher education institutions since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel. He cited his dismay at a statement from dozens of student groups the day after the attack pinning the blame on Israel’s government, not Hamas. “October 7 was a very bad day obviously, but October 8 was worse because of how a subset of students responded,” he said. The Trump administration agrees, pledging to pull federal funding from Harvard, and Ackman said the chairman of the board should resign and its president should apologize to Trump as the first steps to get out of the mess.
What’s Next For Women’s Sports
Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit cofounder who was the lead investor in launching Angel City FC, an NWSL team based in Los Angeles, told Forbes’ Randall Lane he’s never been more excited about the potential of women’s soccer and women’s sports as a business opportunity. “When we look back at the legacy of under-investment in women’s sports, we will find a dangerous cocktail of sexism, racism and business incompetence,” Ohanian said. “That’s part of the reason we’re seeing this whipsaw now. It would not be growing this fast if it hadn’t been suppressed for so long.”
Ohanian was joined on stage by Midge Purce, who plays for the U.S. women’s national team and New York’s Gotham FC of the NWSL. She pushed back on the perception that investing in women’s sports is charitable or just a moral obligation. “To my family, marketability was marketability. Greatness was greatness, and it didn’t matter who was on television. We were just watching whatever was good, and often that ended up being women,” Purce said.
Purce urged the media and marketing industry to take note of the reality that women drive consumption and think creatively about how to package women’s sports, rather than putting it in the same box as men’s sports. Last year, she created and starred in a docuseries called The Offseason following how women’s soccer stars train and prepare before the season begins. It streamed on X and has racked up 275 million views in less than a year.
Opportunities In Credit
On the surface, equity markets are performing well and the economy remains on solid footing, making it appear hard for Victor Khosla to make the sort of opportunistic, distressed credit investments his firm, Strategic Value Partners, specializes in. But he told Forbes executive editor Matt Schifrin that below the surface, there is some turbulence. Default rates for high yield bonds are up to 5%, and private equity has a backlog of companies to sell.
“Private equity has not been able to realize assets,” Khosla said. “You have a reckoning in the private equity world now.” With $5 trillion of high yield debt to choose from and another $8 trillion in commercial mortgage debt, there’s still plenty for him to pick from across all industries to turn around distressed companies and real assets.
Playing The Long Game
Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange, Sonia Gardner, cofounder of Avenue Capital Group, and Ida Liu, former global head of Citi Private Bank, spoke with Forbes’ Ali Jackson-Jolley about how investors should allocate and position their portfolios during volatile periods.
Martin said spikes in volatility have led to trading records, with more than 30 billion shares changing hands some days, more than double the amount on a typical day. That has led to some companies being hesitant to jump into the public markets, though for some high-profile IPOs in the last year like Reddit, their patience has been rewarded. “Companies are definitely staying private for longer—I think that will be a longer-term effect of the bouts of hypervolatility that we’ve seen over the last few years,” Martin said.
Asked for what investments they think are the best bets looking forward, Liu said artificial intelligence offers the most opportunities. “The future is AI, and it’s not just AI, it’s all the industries that supply, fuel and drive AI,” Liu said. Gardner returned to another common theme of the day by trumpeting women’s sports, and European soccer in particular. “Women’s soccer is Europe is behind where women’s soccer is in the U.S., but we do think that over time, it’s going to catch up in popularity and valuations,” she said. Her Avenue Capital has invested in an ownership group called Mercury/13 which aims to build a significant presence in this area.
The Geopolitical Play
Sander Gerber, CEO and CIO of $20 billion (assets) Hudson Bay Capital, was a rare voice that voiced some support for Trump’s tariff policies for the long-term health of the U.S. economy. “We need to think about protecting our supply chains,” he told Forbes’ Matt Schifrin. “This trade policy is not about the next five years, because it’s going to take more time than that to recover our industrial base, but it’s about the long haul.”
Gerber said while the U.S. doesn’t necessarily need to bring t-shirt manufacturing back onshore to secure the country, the Midwest has already benefited from Trump’s first presidency and will benefit even more from his second term. Gerber believes defense manufacturing, construction, semiconductors, steel and aluminum will all thrive in the U.S. under the Trump tariffs.
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