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The arc of @BillAckman’s influence is a cautionary tale about ego, the limits of power and how quickly a crusader can become the butt of his own crusade.
Just weeks ago, William Ackman, the billionaire Wall Street hedge fund whale, looked almost omnipotent, on a dangerously powerful win streak.
(Which in hindsight appears to have been the apex of his authority and ability to shape public opinion).
Directing a full frontal assault on the nation’s top universities over their alleged mishandling of speech and protest on their campuses in the wake of October 7th, Bill harnessed social media to compel both @UniversityofP’s & @Harvard’s presidents to resign (the latter was heavily influenced by subsequent allegations/proof of plagiarism).
Then allegations/proof of his own wife’s plagiarism were exposed and his blistering offensive quickly morphed into a pitiful defensive woe-is-me posture.
His ‘masterful’ tirades on @X gave way to hypocrisy-screeds belabored with emotional drivel and endless whining about how his wife was off limits and unfairly targeted, underscoring how she was not a public figure but an incredibly “private” person.
He would attempt to turn the tables on the outlet that broke the news, @BusinessInsider, lobbying their parent company’s owner who he was allegedly chummy with to kill the story (to no avail), while mocking the outlet’s integrity, challenging its credentials, threatening law suits for defamation and going so far as suggesting the timing of the release of the exposé was antisemitic because the story dropped late on a Friday afternoon going into Shabbat—giving him, his wife @NeriOxman and their lawyers little time to respond before they were prepared to celebrate the Sabbath.
(The implication being that journalists must break stories based on mythology time and defer to the observation schedules of various religious adherents — or at least the believers in Judaism — or be branded bigots).
Meanwhile, on the merits of the accusations, little was said to challenge their validity, minus trying to argue Wikipedia, a source his wife allegedly used and failed to properly attribute, did not need to be cited like other sources because it is a website filled with common knowledge often drafted by anonymous users—which led Bill to question rhetorically, who would you cite anyways?
Moreover, the argument was made that at the time of his wife’s dissertation, there were no explicit standards in the MIT handbook on how to quote Wiki, so clearly quoting the Wiki source was not necessary bc it was not prima facie spelled out—disregarding the fact, as many detractors have subsequently noted that everyone who has ever taken an English composition course, whether at a community college or MIT, has been drilled with the inflexible rule that you MUST always cite a source no matter the medium when quoting/paraphrasing someone else’s words/ideas.
This would go on day after day. Bill’s endless rants, equivalent to temper tantrums, decrying how unfairly he and his wife were being treated.
How he was going to take a flamethrower to every dissertation from every elite institutions’ faculty and administration and burn down every heretic who ever dared cross the line.
And yet the more he wrote, the more people noticed what his allegedly private wife had done and how unhinged he’d become.
And the more he wrote, the more everyday folks grew disgusted with the first-world problems of this ivory tower finance-swine that he’d manifested.
Even his peers and allies in high places sympathetic to his campaign and privacy grew tired of his tedium and airing of dirty laundry so publicly and unintelligently, and questioned his judgement, mental stability and focus (as someone who manages other people’s $$$).
There was a way to finesse these things and Ackman, following in @elonmusk’s careless footsteps, was making a mockery of the image of the composed and calculating billionaire class with his sledge hammer and hubris.
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