With markets back in turmoil thanks to fresh COVID 19 fears, it may be worth it to open your wallet to dine with billionaire investor William Ackman.
An added bonus is also added to it, as well as a good cause.
The founder of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital launched a fourth annual charity lunch on Wednesday via Charitybuzz to support the David Lynch Foundation DLF DLF is a nonprofit that promotes and implements the practice of transcendental meditation for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD inner-city children and women who are victims of domestic violence.
In 2018 the auction sold for $57,700, $75,000 and $210,000 in 2020, and each charity lunch brings in increasing sums paid to dine with the well-known activist investor. Ackman matches the donations made by the winning bidder, who will have a guest attend a private lunch with the billionaire.
I think they're doing good and important work, and they're really focused on the first responder type - think health care workers in New York City, the fire department, the police department, these are people who are so stressed by the challenges of their day job that I think they can really benefit, Ackman told Yahoo Finance. I'm a big believer in non-pharmaceutical interventions that can help people with mental health and other issues. Ackman said he had a lot of great chats with previous auction winners.
Last month, Ackman said he met a previous year's winner for lunch and discussed their algorithmic program to bet on horses. Ackman said that Andrew Wilkinson, the first year's winner, remains a friend and he has invested in some of his businesses.
Ackman said that they really enjoyed these lunches.
Ackman s friend Mark Axelowitz, the managing director at UBS Private Wealth Management and executive chairman of the David Lynch Foundation, originally brought him into Transcendental Meditation and proposed the idea of charity lunch auctions.
Axelowitz of Transcendental Meditation told Yahoo Finance that it was a game-changing change, and that a lot of Wall Street people like Bridgewater Associates billionaire founder Ray Dalio are practitioners.
Axelowitz predicted that this year's lunch with Ackman will raise its most money yet.
Ackman's charity lunch is similar to the highly publicized one held by the billionaire investor Warren Buffett for years.
Justin Sun, a pre-pandemic cryptocurrencies entrepreneur, paid $4.6 million to dine with the Oracle of Omaha in 2019. Sun and his friends were invited to the country club dinner held in Buffett's backyard in Omaha, Nebraska, including lite coin creator Charlie Lee.
Sun told The Wall Street Journal in an interview at the time that it was one of the great moments of my life. Buffett raised more than $34.2 million in 20 annual auctions that support the GLIDE Foundation, according to a report by Reuters. The first event was held in 2000.
While the recent spate of market volatility will likely come up, it won't be the most important topic or topic of discussion at Ackman's lunch. Ackman's latest tweets about the markets and impact of the Omicron variant caused a lot of chatter in the finance community earlier in the week.
Ackman made comments on Twitter to Yahoo Finance, saying he is an optimist on the markets.
The risk for the market is how the market responds to the Federal Reserve tightening up financial conditions, Ackman said. Follow Sozzi on Twitter and LinkedIn.