Meet Bill Ackman, the controversial hedge-fund manager who made $2.6 billion off the coronavirus market crash in March

Ackman's 2012 short against multilevel marketing supplement maker Herbalife was one of the most high-profile missteps of his career, according to Investopedia. Ackman bet $1 billion that the company would fail, while fellow billionaire investor Carl Icahn made a long-term investment in the company, Business Insider previously reported. Ackman publicly accused Herbalife of being a pyramid scheme whose stock price was bound to hit zero, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Icahn and Ackman got into a public fight over the company's prospects that was called "the hedge fund equivalent of Stalingrad" by The Journal, with Icahn eventually emerging victorious. Ackman lost hundreds of millions of dollars on Herbalife, Business Insider reported.

Ackman also made a controversial investment in near-bankrupt drugmaker Valeant Pharmaceuticals that resulted in a contentious Senate hearing over Valeant's practice of buying existing drugs and selling them at inflated prices in 2016, Business Insider reported at the time. Valeant has since been renamed Bausch Health.

Pershing Square also lost money on bets on now-defunct bookseller Border's Group and big-box retailer Target Corporation, according to Investopedia. The losses put the hedge fund into what Bloomberg called a "three-year losing streak" in 2019, before Ackman's bet against the stock market.

The stock market dropped 30% in March, the fastest drop of that size in a century, according to Forbes.

Pershing Square invested $27 million in credit protection on investment-grade and high-yield bond indexes earlier in 2020, when the market was widely perceived to be healthy, according to Markets Insider. The hedge fund made $2.6 billion selling them off as the market crashed in March, Markets Insider reported.

Ackman has since used the profits to bolster Pershing Square's investments in Berkshire Hathaway, Hilton, Lowe's, Restaurant Brands International, Starbucks and Agilent, Markets Insider reported.

Ackman made an appearance on CNBC on March 18, proclaiming that "hell is coming" because of the outbreak, after tweeting similar sentiments earlier in the day. Ackman's comments sent the already volatile market down, prompting accusations from various news outlets and on social media that Ackman went on television with the intent of making his bet against the market more profitable, Forbes reported.

Markets plunged so sharply that the market hit a so-called circuit breaker, halting trading for 15 minutes, Markets Insider reported.

The billionaire defended himself in a statement to Pershing Square investors, writing that "By Wednesday, March 18th at 12:30 p.m., when I appeared on CNBC, we had already sold slightly more than half of the notional amount of our CDS, realizing a gain of more than $1.3 billion, with the unrealized portion of our hedge having a market value at that time of $1.3 billion for a total of $2.6 billion," Ackman wrote in a press release. "Importantly, our hedge had already paid off prior to my going on CNBC."

Ezra Merkin secretly invested his client's money with Bernie Madoff, losing billions after the Ponzi scheme was exposed, according to Bloomberg. Merkin was investigated by the New York Attorney General as a potential coconspirator of Madoff's but settled his case in 2012.

"I've known him for 15 years," Ackman said. "I think he's an honest person, an intelligent person, an interesting person, a smart investor. People don't want to hear that because if you invested with Ascot you lost all your money."

Fellow hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt of Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz & Co. also publicly defended Merkin, according to The Street.

"Maybe it has something to do with being loved and getting married?" Ackman said of his successes at an investor conference in April 2019, Bloomberg reported.

Ackman and his wife, retired Israeli Air Force lieutenant and MIT professor Neri Oxman (who is best known for being a rumored ex-girlfriend of Brad Pitt), welcomed a daughter in the spring of 2019, according to Bloomberg.

The couple got together in 2017, after being introduced by both Ackman's former professor and a college friend following a contentious divorce from his first wife, landscape architect Karen Ann Herskovitz, according to Page Six.

Ackman and Herskovitz have a "civil, but not warm, relationship," an unnamed source told Page Six in 2017. The former couple share three daughters, according to Page Six.

Ackman signed The Giving Pledge with his former wife in 2012, writing in a letter to Pledge founder Warren Buffett that he was "quite sure that I have earned financial returns from giving money away," because of all he learned while doing charitable work.

Ackman has given more than $400 million in grants to organizations focusing on cancer research, education, economic development, and social justice, according to his foundation's website.

Ackman and his wife also gave $26 million to Harvard in 2014, according to Philanthropy News Digest.

Ackman bought a $22.5 million penthouse in the neighborhood, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018. Ackman also owns two other units in another luxury pre-war building on Manhattan's Upper West Side that cost nearly $22.1 million combined, The Journal reported.

Ackman purchased the properties, which are located in the town of Bridgehampton, for $23.5 million in August 2015, according to The Real Deal.

The combined value of Ackman's real-estate portfolio is more than $165 million, according to The Daily Mail.

Ackman has been playing since childhood, according to Forbes.

The billionaire hedge-fund manager became an outspoken supporter of President Trump just days after the 2016 election, according to Vanity Fair. "The US is the greatest business in the world," Ackman said during an appearance at The New York Times' Dealbook conference in November 2016. "It's been undermanaged for a very long period of time. We now have a businessman as president," Vanity Fair reported Ackman said.

Ackman hasn't always been a supporter of Trump, however. In 2016, Ackman penned an essay in The Financial Times asking Bloomberg LP CEO and former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg to run for president. "America is burning," Ackman wrote for The FT. "Yet there is hope. The key is finding the right leader. And that leader is Mr. Bloomberg."