Bill Ackman
speaker
1,217 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 3 Jun
Bill Ackman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And what do people really want? They want a place. They want a home. They want to be able to feed their family. They want a job that generates the resources to feed their family. They want their kids to have a better life than they've had. They want peace. I think these are basic human things. I'm sure the vast majority of Palestinians share these views.
But it's such an embedded situation with hatred and, as I say, indoctrination. And then, you know, going back to incentives, you know, terrorists generate their resources by committing terrorism. And that's how they get funding. And that's, you know, there's a lot of graft. You know, it's a plutocracy, right?
The top of the terrorist pyramid, you know, if you accept the numbers that are in the press, right? You know, the top leaders, you know, have billions of dollars, you know, 40 billion or so has gone into Gaza over the last and the West Bank over the last 30 years, a number like that. And a lot of it's disappeared into some combination of corruption or tunnels or weapons.
And the tragedy is, you know, you look at what Singapore has achieved in the last 30 years, right?
So not just peace, but... Peace comes with prosperity. Um, you know, people are, you know, under the leadership of terrorists, you're not going to have prosperity and you're not going to have peace. And I think the, you know, the Israelis withdrew in 2005 and fairly quickly Hamas took control of the situation that would, that should never have been allowed to happen.
Um, and I think, you know, if you think about, I, I had the opportunity to, to spend a, what I'd call it an hour with Henry Kissinger, uh, a few months before he passed away. And we were talking about, uh, Gaza or in the early stage of the war, he said, look, you know, this is not, uh, you can think about Gaza as the, as a test of a two state solution. It's not looking good. These were his words.
Uh, so the next time round, you know, the Palestinian people should have their own state, but it can't be a state where, you know, 40 billion resources goes in and is spent on weaponry and missiles and rockets going into Gaza. And I do think a consortium of the Gulf states, the Saudis and others, have to ultimately oversee the governance of this region.
I think if that can happen, I think you can have peace, you can have prosperity. And I'm fundamentally an optimist. So a coalition of governance groups. Governance matters, you know, going back to what we talked about before.
I mean, look at what Dubai has accomplished with, you know, nomads in the desert, right? And that's become a major, it's a tourist destination. Gaza could have been a tourist destination.
So it begins on October 8th, probably, and You know, you can do a compare and contrast with how Dartmouth managed the events of October 7th and the aftermath and how Harvard did.
And on October 8th, or shortly thereafter, the Dartmouth president, who had been in her job for precisely the same number of months that the Harvard president had been in her job, the first thing she did is she got the most important professors of Middle East studies who were Arab and who were Jews and convened them and held an open session, Q&A, for students to talk about what's going on in the Middle East.
and began an opportunity for common understanding among the student body. And Dartmouth has been a relatively benign environment on this issue. And students are able to do work and there aren't disruptive protests with people with bullhorns walking into classrooms, interfering with, you know, people pay today $82,000 a year, which itself is crazy to go to Harvard.
But imagine your family borrows the money or you borrow the money as a student. And your learning is disrupted by constant protests. And the university does nothing. You know, when George Floyd died... the Harvard president wrote a very strong letter denouncing what had taken place and calling this an important moment in American history and took it incredibly seriously.
Her first letter about October 7th was not that, let's put it that way. And then her second letter was not that. And then ultimately, she was sort of forced by the board or the pressure to make a more public statement. But it was clear that it was hard for her to come to an understanding of this terrorist act. And then the protests erupted on campus, and they started out reasonably benign.
And then the protesters got more and more aggressive in terms of violating university rules on things like bullying. And the university did nothing. And that, obviously, for the Jewish students, the Israeli students, the Israeli faculty, Jewish faculty, created an incredibly uncomfortable environment. And the president seemed indifferent.
And I went up to campus and I met with hundreds of students in small groups and larger groups. And they're like, Bill, why is the president doing nothing? Why is the administration doing nothing? And that was really the beginning. And I reached out to the president, reached out to the board of Harvard. I said, look, this thing is heading in the wrong direction and you need to fix it.
And I have some ideas, love to share. And I got the Heisman, as they say, you know, they just kept pushing off the opportunity for me to meet with the president and meet with the board. And a certain point in time I pushed, you know, I'm kind of a activist when you push me. It reminded me of early days of activism where I couldn't get the CEO of Wendy's to return my call.
I couldn't get the CEO of Harvard to take a meeting. And then finally, I spoke to the chairman of the board, a woman by the name of Penny Pritzker, who I knew from I'm on a business school board with her. And it was, as I described, one of the more disappointing conversations of my life. And it did not seem, she seemed a bit like, if you will, deer in the headlights. They couldn't do this.
They couldn't do that. The law was preventing them from doing various things. And that led to my first letter to the university. And I sort of ended the letter, you know, sort of giving this president of Harvard a dare to be great speech. This is your opportunity. You know, you can fix this. This could be your legacy.
And I sent it to the, I emailed it to the president and the board members whose email addresses I had. I posted it on Twitter. I got no response, no acknowledgement, nothing. And in fact, the open dialogue I had with a couple of people on the board basically got shut down after that. And that led to letter number two.
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