Bill Ackman, billionaire investor, is facing a tough battle with the press after his wife — Neri Oxman — was accused of plagiarism by Business Insider.
Bill Ackman — “Wall Street Wolf” and his massive influence on the financial world
As someone passionate about finance, you're surely very familiar with the work “The Big Short", where Michael Burry's success is hyped above all.
However, another figure also sniffed out the real estate bubble at the same time as Burry — it was Bill Ackman — investment genius and one of the most ambitious traders that Wall Street has ever produced.
If Michael Burry is the speculative genius through the 2008 short position, then Bill Ackman is the “boss" of Wall Street speculation.
Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, is a professional investor, billionaire, and renowned hedge fund manager.
He possesses a fortune of more than 3.5 billion USD and is famous for leveraged short selling deals with stocks and bonds.
Bill Ackman's influence on the financial market
It's not wrong to say Ackman is the one who wiped out 50 billion USD of Adani Group in less than 360 minutes.
When Hindenburg Research released a report claiming that the value of Adani Group — one of India's largest companies owned by billionaire Gautam Adani — had been inflated many times over through market manipulation and accounting fraud, Bill Ackman shared on X that the details of the report were “very credible and thoroughly researched”.
According to Bloomberg, Bill Ackman's statement about the Hindenburg report immediately caused shares of three Adani companies, Adani Transmission, Adani Total Gas, and Adani Green Energy, to plummet sharply.
The total market cap of Adani Group evaporated by more than 50 billion USD in just 6 hours…
… pushing Gautam Adani down to 7th place in the top 10 billionaires in the world.
This is also recorded as one of the fastest market cap evaporations ever witnessed in the financial markets.
It can be seen that Bill Ackman's influence on the financial market is very significant.
Ackman's feud with the former Harvard president — the source of the academic war
Billionaire Bill Ackman was at the forefront of the boycott against Claudine Gay due to scandals and forced her to resign. However, this animosity was not due to the plagiarism issue, but stemmed from Harvard University's antisemitism scandal in early October. Specifically:
Date 2023/10/7: when the conflict between Hamas and Israel erupted, Ackman — as a Harvard alumnus and Jewish person — wrote a 3,138-word letter to Claudine Gay — then Harvard President — to call for her to discipline and suspend students participating in anti-Semitic activities on campus.
The animosity peaked after the US Congress hearing on 2023/12/05 — when Gay had to explain how they handled antisemitism allegations:
In response to the question of whether calling for antisemitism violates Harvard's code of conduct, Claudine Gay said it “depends on the context”.
After the verbal gaffe, the former Harvard president issued an apology. However, billionaire Bill Ackman — who still donates to the school annually — criticized Gay's statement as "a moral failure".
Ackman also wrote on X that Gay was elected president only because of policies wanting a Black person in a leadership role.
Business Insider wrote that Ackman's criticism was the reason that caused Gay and other university presidents — who faced similar backlash — to "resign in disgrace".
“Hoisted by his own petard” — the plagiarism controversy of Bill Ackman's wife
On 01/05 recently, Bill Ackman's wife — Neri Oxman — was Business Insider accused in an article of plagiarism identical to that of former Harvard President Claudine Gay — who just had to resign due to a series of verbal gaffes and plagiarism scandals.
The publication stated that, in the 330-page PhD thesis titled Material-based Design Computation (2010), they found 4 passages showing signs of incomplete citations, meaning incorporating others' work into the thesis without quotation marks or source attribution.
On the same day, Ms. Neri posted on X, admitting that she had not accurately cited some content in her PhD thesis.
"With each of the 4 mentioned paragraphs, I accurately cited the authors and references at the end of each paragraph and in the appendix pages at the end of the thesis. However, I did not put the paragraphs in quotation marks. Putting the paragraphs in quotation marks is the appropriate way to acknowledge the work, I am very sorry and apologize for these errors", Ms. Oxman wrote on X.
Ms. Oxman's repentance did not stop the journalists:
On the evening of 01/05, Business Insider published another article: alleging at least 15 paragraphs in Ms. Oxman's thesis without citations, including copying from Wikipedia.
Wife accused of plagiarism, billionaire demands plagiarism check on all MIT faculty
After plagiarism allegations against his wife from Business Insider, Bill Ackman demanded plagiarism checks on the research work of all current MIT faculty, including President Kornbluth and MIT board members.
"We will share our findings on public platforms when they are completed in the spirit of transparency", Bloomberg quoted billionaire Ackman.
"Unfortunately, actions aimed at addressing issues in higher education have led to these attacks on my family", Mr. Ackman added.
Ackman's attitude on the plagiarism issue also changed 180 degrees
As mentioned above, when the plagiarism allegations against former Harvard President Claudine Gay erupted, Ackman said that the plagiarism allegations against Ms. Gay were “a serious scandal”… or “a stain affecting Harvard's reputation”.
However, after his wife was accused of similar plagiarism behavior, the billionaire unexpectedly softened his tone when speaking about academic dishonesty despite his previous very harsh statements on the issue.
After his wife was accused, Mr. Ackman posted an article longer than 5,000 words on platform X about plagiarism and the impacts of artificial intelligence on this issue.
However, the billionaire was quickly called out because he said that authors forgetting to use quotation marks when citing or forgetting to cite sources accurately can still happen, but only at a very small rate.
"Some cases of plagiarism are due to the author's laziness. Once a faculty member, laziness cannot be considered a valid excuse. But for me, this is not a crime; it reflects the faculty's competence more. In the real world, employees can be fired for laziness, but this is still difficult to implement.", Ackman said.
This statement by billionaire Bill Ackman is like a painful self-slap for himself because just a few days earlier, he made harsh comments about the plagiarism scandal of former Harvard President Claudine Gay.
“Feud” between Bill Ackman and Business Insider
In the open letter longer than 5,000 characters on X, Bill Ackman accused Business Insider of intentionally misreporting the statements of his wife, Ms. Neri Oxman.
While Neri's post on X only admitted four excerpts missing quotation marks and 1 sentence cited without source, Business Insider published that: "Neri Oxman admits to plagiarizing in her PhD thesis after Business Insider's report"
In the X post, Bill Ackman said that this caused severe damage to Neri, as the story “Neri admits to plagiarism” was republished all over the world….
… including on the front pages of leading Israeli newspapers — Neri's beloved homeland, where she spent the first 25 years of her life and has many family members and friends.
Oxman hired legal counsel on Monday and will “take many weeks to accurately respond to all the allegations as well as the actual errors,” Ackman wrote.
The scandal also featured Elon Musk when he replied to Ackman: “suggests suing”. Ackman then replied: “Thank you Elon for your support.”
Where will this matter go?
Bill Ackman is said to support his wife even more than Brad Pitt. With a colossal fortune of nearly 4 billion USD, Ackman is ready to use his money as well as his connections to seek justice for Oxman.
Although the outcome of this matter is not yet settled, the action targeting the wife of one of the world's top 1000 richest billionaires by Business Insider is rated by the media as a misguided move and with unforeseeable consequences.
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