Everyone Bill Ackman Is Fighting

When a Wall Street celebrity crosses over to the public consciousness, there tends to be some other factor at play beyond just outrageous wealth, or keen business acumen, elevating their profile. Warren Buffett has his folksiness (as well as his Dairy Queen and Coca-Cola stakes) to make him relatable; Jamie Dimon, who keeps teasing that he’ll run for president, is the outer-borough success of his generation; George Soros, the investor and philanthropist, has been a right-wing bogeyman for decades. And then there’s Bill Ackman, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Pershing Square. He has been straddling that line of public recognition for some 20 years now. His formula for notoriety has involved two main elements (apart from being very rich): making big controversial calls and picking messy, high-profile fights. In March 2020, he warned that “hell is coming” during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic — he had positioned himself accordingly beforehand and booked a neat $2.6 billion on the trade. Until recently, his biggest fight was arguably against the supplements seller Herbalife — in that case, he lost on his $1 billion bet against the stock in what became a sprawling proxy ego battle against corporate raider Carl Icahn. These were important events in the financial world, and were covered deeply in the business press, but generally did not capture the interest of many people outside the world of finance.

Since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Ackman has embraced a series of causes that has put him in a much bigger spotlight. Ackman, who is Jewish — and who made the Jewish and Asian college experience the subject of his undergraduate thesis — is married to Neri Oxman, a technologist, former MIT professor, and former first lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force. Following the Hamas attacks, he went on the offensive against what he perceived as tolerance of antisemitism and genocidal rhetoric at a number of top American universities, including Harvard. Those battles have earned headlines for weeks.

In that time, the list of people and institutions that Ackman is in some kind of feud with — whether it’s one-sided or not — has continued to grow. He has attacked news outlets that have covered him and Oxman critically, accused various university officials of corruption, and attempted to shame his fellow Wall Street bigs for being insufficiently supportive of him. This is part of his playbook and, like his bet against the U.S. Treasury market, could end quickly if he gets what he wants. But for now, at least, he has vowed to keep the wide-ranging hostilities going.

Some have questioned my commitment. They don’t know me. https://t.co/4Jmaam148x

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 8, 2024

Here, who Ackman is currently fighting: 

Harvard

Ackman’s problems with Harvard, where he received his undergraduate degree and an M.B.A., go back to at least 2017, he has said. Although it has come to light only recently, for years he has been involved in a dispute with the university over a $10 million donation of a private company’s stock, which, he said, the school sold during the early months of the pandemic against his wishes and without his knowledge. The hedge-fund manager had hoped to use the proceeds of the gift — which, he said, had increased in value to $85 million by January 2021 — to fund a chair in his name.

His most recent dustup, however, began after October 7. He wanted Harvard to name any students who blamed Israel for the attack. The rationale, he said, was to make sure that he and other like-minded CEOs didn’t “inadvertently hire any of their members.”

His attacks against the university picked up steam following the December 5 congressional hearing with the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During questioning from Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, Harvard president Claudine Gay didn’t explicitly agree that calling for genocide against Jewish people would violate Harvard’s speech standards. (She said it was “personally abhorrent” to her and later apologized.)

Ackman then amplified Stefanik and conservative activist Christopher Rufo in attacking Gay, as well as Liz Magill of UPenn and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, for equivocating about antisemitism on campus. In this, Ackman was not quite a leader in the crusade but a strong supporting member of the team in demanding the resignations of all three presidents. Magill would step down on December 9 after donors, including hedge-fund manager Ross Stevens, threatened to withhold $100 million from the university. After Harvard first said it would support Gay, Ackman broadened his attack against her as being unqualified and amplified accusations that she had plagiarized, or failed to properly cite, her sources more than 50 times. (Gay submitted corrections to at least three papers, including her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation.)

On January 2, Gay stepped down, marking the shortest tenure for a president in the college’s history. “The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader,” she wrote in an op-ed published in the New York Times the following day. “For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.”

Ackman called Gay’s resignation as “an important step forward” for Harvard, though he criticized the university for keeping her on as a faculty member.

Business Insider

On January 4, Business Insider published a story with the headline “Bill Ackman’s Celebrity Academic Wife Neri Oxman’s Dissertation Is Marred by Plagiarism.”

After reviewing academic writing by Oxman, BI’s reporters “found a similar pattern of plagiarism” as those accusations Ackman had amplified against Gay.

The next day, the site published a follow-up story accusing Oxman of even more instances of failing to properly cite her sources. Among the accusations are that Oxman, who left MIT in 2020, had written a 2011 paper that “included more than 100 words exactly as they appeared” from a textbook without proper attribution and hadn’t included proper citations, quotation marks, or credit in her bibliographies — before and after getting her Ph.D.

Oxman responded on X after the story was published by acknowledging that she should have provided some citations. She said she would “request that MIT make any necessary corrections” to her papers. However, she had said that the reporters hadn’t given her enough time to respond to the full list of claims prior to publication.

Ackman had a different response. “I predict that Business Insider will go bankrupt and be liquidated. It is just a matter of time,” he wrote, quote-tweeting one of the reporters. “We will review the work of the reporters and staff at BI for completeness,” he wrote in another tweet. He said that the reporters had broken a “sacred code” by reporting on his family members and that “even the mafia operates with more dignity and respect for family, and I apologize to the mafia for the comparison.” He then went after John Cook, the executive editor at Business Insider, whom he accused of being a “known anti-Zionist.”

Business Insider’s global editor-in-chief, Nicholas Carlson, has since defended the article, saying that the “facts have not been disputed.” Ackman has since said that he intends to raise factual problems with “a substantial number” of points in the story.

Axel Springer and KKR

KKR, which was founded as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, is a giant private-equity firm with about $65 billion in assets. Among those assets is a large minority stake in the German media conglomerate Axel Springer, the parent company of Business Insider.

In a long tweet posted on Sunday night, Ackman wrote, “I had forgotten Axel Springer had acquired Business Insider. Axel Springer is now controlled by KKR. I am therefore incredibly shocked by the conduct of a company controlled by KKR, a firm that I have had enormous respect for over the years. I hope they have no idea what is going on in their Business Insider subsidiary, but I am going to look into it.”

Axel Springer is run by Mathias Döpfner, a staunchly pro-Israel media magnate who has previously told The Wall Street Journal that a prerequisite for working for Politico — which it also owns — is supporting “Israel’s right to exist.” People who disagreed with that policy “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he told the paper.

Axel Springer has since said it would investigate “the process” that led up to the story’s publication and that the story raised questions “about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting — questions that we take very seriously.” In a follow-up tweet on Tuesday, Ackman said that Axel Springer executive Martin Varsavsky had made an “unsolicited” call on January 7 to tell him that BI had launched an investigation into the reporting process. He also said that an unnamed BI director had texted him that “there’s a big difference between clerical oversights and intentional theft and misrepresentation. And there should be a clear delineation between the two.”

Sally Kornbluth

On December 5, in response to questions from Representative Stefanik about calls for genocide against Jews, MIT president Sally Kornbluth said she had not heard calls like that but that “pervasive and severe” speech against Jewish students would be investigated as harassment. Ackman has always grouped Kornbluth in with Gay and Magill, the president of UPenn, as personally responsible for fostering antisemitism on campus. “Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context,” he wrote.

Kornbluth has not had the same kind of blowback that Gay and Magill have received. For one, she is Jewish and has reportedly received backing from MIT’s faculty and students. MIT has also not seen the same kind of donor revolt that threatened Harvard. Still, Ackman doesn’t seem swayed. After Gay’s resignation, he posted on X “Et tu Sally?”

Mark Gorenberg

Mark Gorenberg is MIT’s chairman as well as a major Silicon Valley investor and Democratic Party donor. His role in the campus-antisemitism controversy is hazy, and Ackman hasn’t attacked on that basis — at least not directly. Rather, Ackman has gone after him over alleged ethical financial misconduct related to Gorenberg’s wife’s nonprofit.

The connection here is that Gorenberg’s wife, Cathrin Stickney, is the founder of parity.org, a nonprofit that advocates for women in business. To Ackman, though, parity.org is part of the broader problem on college campuses, which have taken on diversity, equity, and inclusion management philosophies. “Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people and/or women are deemed to be oppressed,” Ackman wrote.

In Ackman’s original tweet about Gorenberg, he insinuated that Gorenberg had improperly used MIT to fund Stickney’s organization: He noted that the parity.org reported no revenues and received all of its funding through MIT-associated funds. “In short, this does not look like a legitimate non-profit. Rather it looks like a sinecure for the wife of the Chairman of MIT,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet.

Ackman has backtracked on some of his accusations, however. He wrongly claimed that Stickney took a salary from her organization and that MIT had directly funded parity.org. He corrected those errors in other tweets but continued to accuse Gorenberg of tax fraud by claiming he inappropriately used an MIT-affiliated fund to donate to his wife’s nonprofit in order to get larger tax breaks. Ackman has not provided any evidence that Gorenberg has claimed those benefits. Gorenberg hasn’t publicly responded, and a request to MIT for comment went unanswered.