If Ackman indeed becomes the next Buffett, you'll want to buy Howard Hughes Holdings stock hand over fist. After all, Buffett's approach with Berkshire Hathaway resulted in an average annual gain of 19.9% over six decades.

The 94-year-old oracle of Omaha is still going strong, but says “it won’t be long” before someone picks up his mantle.

A key problem is that the Howard Hughes board and the special committee evaluating the proposal may not want to turn the company into an Ackman-led mini Berkshire.

Fast forward half a century, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager behind Pershing Square Capital Management, is looking to replicate Buffett’s success by creating a “modern-day Berkshire Hathaway.

Bill Ackman proposes to increase his stake in Howard Hughes to 48%. He wants to turn HHH into a modern-day Berkshire Hathaway.

Bill Ackman's Pershing Square proposed to acquire 10 million newly issued Howard Hughes shares at $90 a share — up from $85 a share.

One contender is Bill Ackman, who founded Pershing Square Capital Management in 2004. Ackman has been a fan of Buffett for many years | Image: Bloomberg Warren Buffett's latest shareholder letter contains the usual folksy mix of wisdom and humour.

The revised proposal would increase Pershing Square’s stake to 48%.“If the transaction goes forward, I will become Chairman and CEO, Ryan Israel, CIO, and Ben Hakim President, and we will make available the full resources of Pershing Square to HHH to build a diversified holding company,

Among other trades, the hedge-fund manager sells a big-name consumer giant and buys into a real estate company.

Sixty years later, Bill Ackman wants to do something similar — but he’s starting with real estate, not textiles. Ackman’s Pershing Square investment firm has proposed to acquire 10 million new shares of Howard Hughes Holdings (HHH) at $90 each,

In a post prior to the announcement, Ackman likened his firm's move to the approach Warren Buffett has used with Berkshire ( BRK-A, BRK-B) in which Buffett turned a textile manufacturer into a holding company that owns stakes in many publicly traded equities including Apple ( AAPL) and Bank of America ( BAC ).