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
Right, because you want to be precise here. Well, it's not even that. I mean, yes, I have said that we're going to sue Business Insider. And in 35 years of my career of someone who has not every article has been a favorable one, not every article has been an accurate one. I've never threatened to sue the media and I've never sued the media. But this is so egregious.
It's not just that she did nothing wrong, but they accused her of academic fraud. They did it knowing. They referenced MIT's own handbook, so they had to read all the same stuff that I read in the handbook. They did that work. Then, after I... you know, escalated this thing to the, you know, Henry Blodgett, the chairman of Business Insider, to the CEO of Axel Springer.
I even reached out to Henry Kravis at a certain point in time, one of the controlling shareholders of the company through KKR, laying out the factual errors in the article. Business Insider went public after they said Nary committed academic fraud and plagiarism and said, we didn't challenge any, the facts remain undisputed. in the article. So it's basically, Neri committed plagiarism.
That's story one. Neri admits to plagiarism. She admits to plagiarism. She admitted to making a few clerical errors. That's the only thing she admitted to. And she graciously apologized. So they said, Neri admits to plagiarism, apologizes for plagiarism. That's incredibly damning. And by the way, we're doing an investigation, because we're concerned that there might've been inappropriate process.
But the facts of the story have not been disputed by Neri Oxman or Bill Ackman. And that was totally false. I had done it privately. I had done it publicly on Twitter, on X. I laid out, I have a whole tech stream, a WhatsApp stream with the CEO of the company. And they doubled down and they doubled down again. And so I don't sue people lightly. And stay tuned.
It's a certainty we're moving forward. There's a step we can take prior to suing them where we basically send them a letter demanding they make a series of corrections. That if they don't make those corrections, the next step is litigation. I hope we can avoid the next step. And I'm just making sure that when we present the demand to Business Insider and ultimately to Axel Springer,
that it's incredibly clear how they defamed her the factual mistakes in her stories uh and what they need to do to fix it and if we can fix it there we can move on from this episode and hopefully avoid litigation um so that's where we are i don't know you're smarter than me there's technical stuff there's legal stuff there's journalistic stuff but just you business insider for doing this i don't know
No, look, we're going to surface all this stuff publicly, ultimately. The email was not to Nary saying there was plagiarism in her work. The email came from a reporter named Catherine Long. And the headline was, your wife committed plagiarism. Shouldn't she be fired from MIT? Just like you caused Claudine Gay to be fired from Harvard. Yeah. It was a political... Agenda, she doesn't like me.
Okay, and she was trying to hurt me and they couldn't find plagiarism my thesis and you know being the subject of Short, you know being a short seller the Herbalife battle went on for years They tried to do everything to destroy my reputation. So they're already gone to my trash. They're at work. So Anything they could possibly find, you know I've always lived a very clean life Okay, thankfully.
And if you're going to be an activist short sell you better because they're going to find out dirt on you if it exists. And so they're like, how can we really hurt Bill? By the way, Nary had left MIT years earlier. Yes. When the reporter found out she was no longer a member of the MIT faculty, they were enraged. They didn't believe us.
They made us like, you know, prove to us she's no longer on the MIT faculty because they wanted to get her fired. And by the way, malice is one of the, you know, important factors in determining whether defamation has taken place. And this was a malice driven, this was not about news. And the unfortunate thing about journalism Business Insider made a fortune from this.
This story was published and republished by thousands of media organizations around the world. It was the number one trending thing on Twitter for like two days. Every newspaper, it was on the front page of every Israeli newspaper, you know, it was on the front page of the Financial Times. Okay, so this... And she's building a business.
And if you're CEO of a science company and you committed academic fraud, that's incredibly damaging. But I ultimately convinced her that this was good. I said, sweetheart, you're amazing. You're incredible. You're incredibly talented, but you're mostly known in the design world. Now, everyone in the universe, okay, has heard of Neri Oxman, okay? We're gonna get this thing cleared up.
You're gonna be doing an event in six months where you're gonna tell the world, you're gonna go out of stealth mode, you're gonna tell the world about all the incredible things that you're building and you're designing and you're creating. And it's gonna be like the iPhone launch, because everyone's gonna be paying attention, and they're gonna wanna see your work.
And that's how I try to cheer her up, but I think it's true.
She's full speed ahead in her work. She's built an amazing team. She's hired 30 scientists, roboticists, biologists, plant specialists, material scientists, engineers, really incredible crew. She's built this 36,000 square foot lab in New York City that's one of a kind. They're working out of it. It's still under construction while they're working out of it.
Um, and so she's going to do amazing things. But, um, as I said, she's an extremely sensitive person. She's a perfectionist. Okay. Imagine thinking that the entire world thinks you committed academic fraud. And so that was very hard for her. She's a very positive person, but I saw her and I would say her darkest emotional period for sure. She's doing much better now, but you can kill someone.
You can kill someone by destroying their reputation. People commit suicide. People go into these deep, dark depression.
It's not going to happen.
like nary young nares that are that this sends a signal to um that might scare them and you know journalism shouldn't scare aspiring young scientists the problem is the defamation law in the us is so favorable to the publisher to the media and so unfavorable uh to the victim And the incentives are all wrong.
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