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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
When you went from a paper version of journalism to digital, and you could track how many people click, and it's a medium that advertising drives the economics. And if you can show an advertiser more clicks, you can make more money. So a journalist is incentivized to write a story that will generate more clicks. How do you write a story that will generate more clicks?
You get a billionaire guy, and then you go after his wife. and you make a sensationalist story and you give them no time to respond, right? You know, look at the timing here. On the first story, you know, they gave us three hours.
On the second one, the following day, 5.19 PM, the email comes in, not to Neri, not to her firm, but to my communications person who tracks us down by 5.30, you know, 10 minutes later. And they publish their story in 92 minutes. after and they sent us, we're gonna surface all these documents in our demand. Read the email they sent, whether you could even decipher it.
There was no, and by the way, there's a reason why academic institutions, when a professor is accused of plagiarism, why they have these very careful processes with multiple stages and they take, they can take a year or more because it depends on intent. Was this intentional? In order to be a crime, an academic crime, you gotta prove that they intentionally stole.
Look, in some cases it's obvious, in some cases it's very subtle and they take this stuff super seriously. But they basically accused Nary of academic crime. And then 92 minutes later, they said she committed an academic crime. And that should be a crime. And that should be punishable with litigation. And there should be a real cost.
And we're going to make sure there's a real cost, reputationally and otherwise, to Business Insider and to Axel Springer. Because ultimately, you've got to look to the controlling owner. You know, they're responsible.
My kid's school, the epithet for the school or the saying is go forth unafraid. I think it's a good way to live. And again, words can't harm me. You know, the power of X, and we do owe Elon enormous thanks for this, is now, so for example, the Washington Post wrote a story about me a couple of days ago. Mm-hmm. And I didn't, I didn't think the story was a fair story.
So within a few hours of the story being written, I'm able to put out a response to the story and send it to a million, 200,000 people. And it gets read and reread. I haven't checked, but you know, probably 5 million people saw my response. Now those are the people on X. It's not everyone in the world. There's still, there's a disconnection between the X world and the offline world.
But, you know, reputation in my business is basically all you have. And as they say, you can take a lifetime to build a reputation and take five minutes to have it disappear. And the media plays a very important role. And they can destroy people. At least we now have some ability to fight back. We have a platform we can surface our views.
You know, the typical old days, they write an incredibly damning article and you point out factual errors and then like two months later they bury a little correction on page whatever. By then the person was fired or their life is destroyed or their reputation is damaged. You know, I was with Warren Buffett talking about media, and it's something he, a business he really loves.
And he says, you know what, Bill? He said, a thief with a dagger, the only person who can cause you more harm than a thief with a dagger is a journalist with a pen. And those were very powerful words.
A hundred percent. And I think it's a really important one. And it's really been eyeopening for me to see how stories get covered in mainstream media. And then you actually, what I do on X is I follow people on multiple sides of an issue. And you can, or I post on a topic and I get to hear the other side. You know, I read the replies.
And, you know, the truth is something that people have had a lot of question about, particularly in the last, I would say five years, you know, beginning with, you know, Trump's talking about fake news. And a lot of what Trump said about fake news is true. You know, the world, a big part of the world hated Trump. and did everything they could to discredit him, destroy him.
And, you know, he did a lot of things perhaps deserving of being discredited, used by a very imperfect, in some cases, harmful leader. But, you know, everything from pre-election, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop story in the New York Post that, you know, then Twitter,
uh, you know, uh, made it difficult for people to, uh, to share and to read, um, you know, uh, COVID, you know, the, the, the Jay Bhattacharyas of the world questioning the government's response, questioning, you know, uh, you know, long-term lockdowns, questioning, keeping kids out of school, questions about masks, about vaccines, which are still not definitively answered, uh,
no counterbalance to the power of the government when the government can shut down avenues for free speech and where the mainstream media has kind of towed the line in many extents to the government's actions. So having a independently owned powerful platform is very important for truth, for free speech, for hearing the other side of the story, for counterbalancing the power of the government.
Elon is getting, you know, a lot of pushback. You know, the SpaceX's and Tesla's of the world are experiencing a lot of government questions and investigations. And, you know, even the president of the United States came out and said, look, he needs to be investigated. I'm getting my own version of that in terms of some negative media articles. I don't know what's next.
But yeah, if you stick your neck out in today's world and you go against the establishment or at least the existing administration, you can find yourself in a very challenged place. And that discourages people from sharing stuff. And that's why anonymous speech is important. Some of what you find on Twitter. You mentioned Trump.
So I was interviewed by Andrew Sorkin a week after Trump won the election. Yes. And I made my case for why I thought he could be a good president.
Look, I think what I said at the time was the United States is actually a huge business. And it reminds me a bit of the type of activist investments we've taken on over time, where this really, really great business has kind of lost its way. And with the right leadership, we can fix it. And if you think about the business of the United States,
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