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
you know, a dozen other members of the media, all trying to get a copy of my thesis to run it through some AI. They had to first do optical character recognition to convert the paper document into digital. But fortunately, through a miracle, I didn't have an issue. I didn't think about Neri, of course, who has whatever, 130 academic works.
And so we were just at the end of a vacation for Christmas break. And I was early in the morning for vacation time. And all of a sudden, I hear my phone ringing in the other room or vibrating in the other room multiple times. I'm like, I pick up the phone. It's our communication guy, Fran McGill.
And he's like, Bill, Business Insider has apparently identified a number of instances of plagiarism in Neri's dissertation. Let me send you this email. He sent me the email.
And they had identified four paragraphs in her 330-page dissertation where she had cited the author, but she had used the vast majority of the words in those paragraphs were from the author, and she should have used quotation marks. And then there was one case where she paraphrased correctly an author, but did not footnote that it was from his work.
And so we were presented with this and told they're going to publish in a few hours. And we're like, well, can we get to the next day? We're just about to head home. And they're like, no, we're publishing by noon. We need an answer by noon. And so we downloaded the copy of her thesis on like the slow internet. And, you know, Neri checked it out and she said, you know what?
It looks like they're right. And I said, look, you should just admit your mistake. And she wrote a very simple, gracious, yes, I should have used quotation marks. And on the author I failed to cite, she pointed out that she cited them eight other times and wrote a several paragraph section of her thesis acknowledging that. you know, his work.
Um, and none of these were like important parts of her thesis, but she acknowledged her mistake. And she said, you know, apologize for my mistake. And I apologize to the author who I failed to cite. And I stand on the shoulders of, uh, you know, all the people came before me and looking to advance work. And we sort of thought it was over. We head home. Um,
In flight on the way home, although we didn't realize this until we got back the following day, Business Insider published another article and said, Nary Oxman admits to plagiarism. Plagiarism, of course, is academic fraud. And this thing goes crazy viral. The title is Bill Ackman's Wife, Celebrity Academic Nary Oxman. And they use the term celebrity because...
There are limits to what legitimate media can go after, but celebrities, there's a lot more leeway in the media and what they can say. So that's why they call her a celebrity. First time ever she'd been called a celebrity. And they basically, she's admitting to academic fraud.
And then they said, and then the next day at 5.19 PM, I remember the timeline pretty well, an email was sent to Fran McGill saying, you know, we've identified, you know, two dozen other instances of plagiarism in her work. 15 of which are Wikipedia entries where she copied definitions. And the others were mostly software hardware manuals for various devices or software she used in her work.
Most of which were in footnotes where she described a nozzle for a 3D printer or something like this. And they said, we're publishing, you know, tonight. The email they sent to us was 6,900 words. It was 12 pages. It was practically indescribable. You couldn't even read it in an hour. And we didn't have some of the documents they were referring to.
And I'm like, Nara, you know what I'm going to do? I think it will be useful to provide context here. I'm going to do a review of every MIT professor's dissertations, every published paper, AI has enabled this. And so that was, I put out a tweet basically saying that. And we're doing a test run now because we have to get it right.
And I think it'll be a useful exercise, provide some context, if you will. And then this thing goes crazy viral. And you know, Nary is a pretty sensitive person, pretty emotional person and someone who's a perfectionist and having everyone in the world thinking you committed academic fraud is a pretty damning thing.
Now, they did say they did a thorough review of all of her work, and this is what they found. I'm like, sweetheart, that's remarkable. She did 130 works, 73 of which were peer-reviewed, blah, blah, blah, and she's published in Nature Science and all these different publications. That's actually a pretty good batting average. But, you know, they can't, this is wrong, right?
This is not academic fraud, okay? These are inadvertent mistakes. And the Wikipedia entries, Nary actually used Wikipedia as a dictionary. This is the early days of Wikipedia. And they also referred to the MIT handbook, which has a whole section on plagiarism, academic handbook. And if you read it, which I ultimately did, they make clear a few things. Number one, there's plagiarism, academic fraud.
And there's what they call inadvertent plagiarism, which is clerical errors where you make a mistake. And it depends on intent. And there's a link that you can go to, which is a section on if you get investigated at MIT, what happens? What's the procedure? What's the initial stage? What's the investigative stage? What's the procedure if they identify it?
And they make very clear that academic fraud is, and they list plagiarism, you know, research theft, a few other things, but it does not include honest errors. Honest errors are not plagiarism under MIT's own policies. And in the handbook, they also have a big section on what they call common knowledge. And common knowledge depends on who you're writing your thesis for.
And so if it's a fact that is known by your audience, you're not required to quote or cite. And so all those Wikipedia entries were for things like sustainable design, computer aided design. She just took a definition from Wikipedia, common knowledge to her readers, no obligation under the handbook, totally exempt.
on the using the same words she referred to like connect whatever some kind of 3d printer she was the stratasys 3d printer and she quoted from the manual right away stratasys is a company you consulted for the very you don't need to that's not something you're not stealing their ideas you're describing a nozzle for a device you use in your work and a footnote that's not a theft of idea right
And so I'm like, this is crazy. And so this has got to stop. And so I reach out to a guy I knew who was on the board of Business Insider, the chairman, and his name is going to come public shortly. I committed to that time to keep his name confidential. It's now surfaced publicly in the press. Can I just pause real quick here? Sure.
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