(Bloomberg) Last summer, shortly after Herbalife agreed to settle allegations of deceptive practices by paying $200 million and agreeing to overhaul its business model, Bill Ackman sent me a link to the settlement with a short note. “Please give this a read,” he wrote.

For better or worse, Ackman is the most swashbuckling hedge fund manager of our age. Back in 2012, he placed an audacious billion-dollar bet against Herbalife, loudly proclaiming it to be an illegal pyramid scheme rather than a legal “multilevel marketing” company. I thought then, and think now, that his argument was sound. But I doubted that he would win because his endgame required the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to put Herbalife out of business. And the FTC hadn’t even investigated — much less put the screws to — a major multilevel marketing company in over 35 years.

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