WATCH: CNBC Anchor Admits Bill Ackman Stood to Benefit From His ‘Hell is Coming’ Coronavirus Rant

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman made headlines with his “Hell is coming!” coronavirus rant that one CNBC anchor admitted was “a bit of a conflict” with Ackman’s position as an investor looking to buy stocks low.

During a midday interview on CNBC Wednesday, Ackman warned that “Hell is coming” if the United States doesn’t immediately and completely shut down. That portion of the interview got a lot of attention, but Ackman’s full interview was 28 minutes of abject and unrelenting doom that was peppered with bouts of near-sobbing, and which many CNBC personalities and others credited with contributing to the slide in stock prices.

And later in the day, CNBC anchor Wilfred Frost admitted that there was “a bit of conflict” in allowing an investor to potentially influence a market environment that he stood to benefit from.

CNBC host Sarah Elsen noted that during Ackman’s interview, people were contacting her telling her to “get him off the air,” and anchor Scott Wapner noted that Ackman later took to Twitter to “clarify” his statements.

“I do want to stress, because I know that he wants to get this point across and I know it sounded to some alarmist, I’ve gotten feedback from some who thought it was hysterical, he really wants to get the message across that he is super concerned that we are not doing enough, but he thinks that we will and that the stock market will have a massive upside on the other side of this, whenever that is,” Wapner said of Ackman.

Wapner said that Ackman is not “running for the hills. It’s not like he’s shorting all these stocks and then coming on and saying the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. He is a buyer, he thinks it’s one of the greatest buying opportunities he’s seen in a long time,” but went on to say that “it was a sobering, it was a scary interview.”

But Frost then pointed out that while “I’m sure he wasn’t shorting the market and trying to talk it down,” he still thought there was  “a little bit of a conflict in terms of what he was saying, given that, just as if someone came on to say company X’s stock is going to go to the moon but by the way I’m selling it, the same kind of applies, to suggest I’m buying stocks but I’m saying things that are going to push the market down to create better buying opportunities.”

“I don’t think for any second that was calculated by him, I’m not suggesting that, but I do think there’s a bit of a conflict there that we should point out to our viewers in terms of the way the market dynamics work and the typical disclosures you make,” Frost added.

Wapner then spent several minutes defending the interview, saying “Do we know how dire his prediction was going to be going into that or how scary some people would feel that his words would be? Absolutely not. But it’s also it’s worth hearing from different perspectives, and I think it’s fine that you come on the air, you can’t decide whether someone is too emotional to make their point of view, the bottom line is he’s concerned.”

The Dow continued to slide in the hours following Ackman’s rant, but at the last minute finished slightly higher than it had been before the interview.

Watch the clip above via CNBC.