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 then there was that much more pressure to have a more diverse candidate this time around, because it was a big disappointment to the DEI office, if you will, and I would say to the community at large. Harvard, of all places, couldn't have a racially diverse president. It sent an important message.
So the strange thing is that they didn't do due diligence on President Gay, and that it was a relatively quick process. So the whole thing I think is worthy of further exploration. So this goes deeper than just the president. Yeah, for sure. When a company fails, most people blame the CEO. I generally blame the board, right?
Because the board's job is to make sure the right person is running the company. And if they're failing, help the person. If they can't help the person, make a change. That's not what's happened here. The board's hand was sort of forced from the outside, whereas they should have made their own decision from the inside. Do you still love Harvard? Sure. It's a 400-odd-year institution.
Enormously helpful to me in my life, I'm sure. My sister also went to Harvard. And the experiences, learnings, friendships, relationships, I'm very happy with my life. Harvard was an important part of my life. I went there for both undergrad and business school. I learned a ton, met a lot of faculty, a lot from a number of my closest friends, who I still really keep in touch with, I met then.
So yeah, it's a great place, but it needs a reboot.
You know, when I went to Harvard, there were 1,600 people in my class. I think today's class is about the same size. and their online education really has not sort of taken off, right? So I heard Peter Thiel speak at one point in time, and he's like, what great institution do you know That's truly great. That hasn't grown in a hundred years. Right.
And, uh, you know, the incentives in some sense of the alums are for it. It's a bit like a club. If you're proud of the elitism of the club, you don't want any, that many new members, but the fact that the population has grown of the country is so, you know, it's,
significantly since certainly i was a student in 1984 and the fact that harvard recruits people from all over the world it's really serving a smaller and smaller percentage of the population today and you know some of our most talented and successful uh entrepreneurs anyway you know It's a token of success that they didn't make it through their undergraduate years.
You know, they left as a freshman or they didn't attend at all. For entrepreneurs, yes, but it's still a place. Very important for research, very important for advancing ideas. And yes, and shaping dialogue and the next generation of Supreme Court justices and members of government, politicians. So yes, it's critically important, but it's not doing the job it should be doing.
I think she's the most beautiful person I've ever met. And I mean that from like the center of her soul. She's the most caring, warm, considerate, thoughtful person I've ever met. And she couples those remarkable qualities with brilliance, incredible creativity, beauty, elegance, grace. I'm talking about my wife, but I'm talking incredibly dispassionately. But I mean what I say.
She's the most remarkable person I've ever met. And I've met a lot of remarkable people. And I'm incredibly fortunate to spend a very high percentage of my lifetime with her ever since I met her, you know, six years ago.
I mean, I met her at the bottom, which is not a bad place to meet someone if it works out.
Well, interestingly, we have a lot alike. We come from very similar places in the world. There are times where we feel like we've known each other for centuries. I met her parents for the first time a long time ago, almost six years ago as well. And I knew her parents were from Eastern Europe originally. So I asked her father what city did her family come from originally.
And I called my father and asked him, you know, dad, what's, you know, grandpa Abraham, what's the name of the city? And then I put the two cities into Google Maps and they were 52 miles apart, which I thought was pretty cool. Then of course, at some point we did genetic testing to make sure we weren't related, which we were not. But we share incredible commonality on values.
We are attracted to the same kind of people You know, she loves my friends. I love hers. We love doing the same kind of things. We're attracted to, you know, we like spending time the same ways. And she has, yes, more emotion, more elegance. She doesn't like battles, but she's very strong. But she's more sensitive than I am.
You know, that hasn't really been the case for a while. I've had relative peace for a long time, because as I stopped being, as I haven't had to be the kind of activist I was earlier in my career, I think since October 7th, yes, I do feel like I've been in a war. Can you tell me the saga of the accusations against Nary?
So, I did not actually surface the plagiarism allegations against President Gay that were surfaced by, you know, Aaron and maybe Christopher Ruffo as well, or maybe Chris helped promote what Aaron and some anonymous person did. identified, but I certainly, it was a point in time where the board had said we're 100% behind her and unanimously. And I really felt she had to go.
So it didn't bother me at all that they had identified problems with her work. So I shared, I reposted those posts. And then when the board, she ultimately resigned and she got a $900,000 a year professorship continuing at Harvard. I said, look, in light of her limited academic record and these plagiarism allegations, she had to go.
Um, I knew when I did so, I assumed I was actually a bit paranoid about that thesis I had written. I only had one academic work, um, but I hadn't checked it for plagiarism. And I thought that's gonna, that's gonna happen. Actually, I had a, uh, I, I had someone, I, I did not have a copy on hand.
So I got a copy of my thesis and I, and I remember writing it, uh, Harvard at the time was pretty, uh, they kind of give you a lecture about making sure you have all your footnotes and quotation marks. I learned later that apparently they had a copy of my thesis at the New York Public Library. And a member of the media told me he was there online with
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