Bill Ackman Took on Plagiarism. Then Plagiarism Came for His Wife.

If you thought you’d heard the last of Bill Ackman, following his self-appointed stint as the internet’s Main Character in the right-wing crusade to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay, well, I regret to inform you the man is at it again—this time, to whine loudly (and lengthily) about how he’s found himself at the receiving end of the very battle he kicked off.

At this very moment, the billionaire hedge fund manager is probably typing out another near-5,000-word tweet to add to the slew of lengthy, aggressive diatribes he’s posted over the past few months on X, raving against Ivy League presidents who don’t respond to his “letters,” academic departments supposedly infiltrated by a nefarious diversity cult, and now, the very mainstream media whose close coverage of his tactics significantly increased his general name recognition and Twitter follower count.

This time, the role Ackman has taken on is Toxic Wife Guy. He’s full-throatedly defending his partner, famed computational designer Neri Oxman, from reports that she committed the very misdeed Ackman disparaged Gay for: plagiarism in her academic work.

Business Insider published two stories that demonstrated Oxman had committed multiple instances of plagiarism in her 2010 doctoral dissertation, as well as in two other peer-reviewed papers she respectively wrote in 2007 and 2011. These included entire paragraphs copied and pasted from other scholarly papers, academic books, Wikipedia articles, and random websites. Neither Ackman nor Oxman has disputed the specifics. But Ackman “can’t believe this is happening” and is posting nonstop about his attempts to intimidate the publication by haranguing its parent company. He also doesn’t seem to think that copying text verbatim from Wikipedia is a big deal—or at least wasn’t when Oxman did so—but we’ll get to that later.

Remind me why I should care about this guy again?

Ackman is an extremely wealthy financier who came to prominence in the 2000s as an asset manager and short-seller with a keen sense of stock market patterns and company health. As such, he has amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune.

In recent years, he’s also fashioned himself into something of a sociopolitical pundit and blogger, endorsing a Michael Bloomberg presidency in 2016, defending a prominent biologist who’d been fired from three different institutions for sexual misconduct, referring to Kyle Rittenhouse as a “patriot,” proposing that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon run for president, endorsing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s COVID-vaccine skepticism, insisting upon Sam Bankman-Fried’s innocence up until his conviction, and investing in “anti-woke” initiatives like Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover as well as the asset management firm started by Vivek Ramaswamy to counter “socially conscious” corporate practices.

You can see where this is going: Despite being a reliable Democratic donor and eager philanthropist for much of his career, Ackman, along with more than a few of his venture capital and tech-world friends, has taken the red pill as of late. This manifested itself most openly during the November congressional hearing where the presidents of three elite universities—Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT—were taken to task by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik over their perceived failure to combat antisemitism on their respective campuses. Stefanik, a frequent regurgitator of antisemitic conspiracies around George Soros’ influence and the influx of migrants through the southern border, was hardly the most appropriate figurehead for such an event. Nevertheless, the academics tried to offer careful, nuanced answers to hypothetical questions and ended up on the wrong end of a sound bite. And it was a sound bite that outraged Bill Ackman, leading him to amplify it repeatedly. UPenn’s president resigned in the days following the resulting uproar, but Harvard’s Claudine Gay did not, leading Ackman to pen open letters (tweets) to her, accusing the prominent and accomplished Black academic of only attaining her position due to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives, and calling on her to be fired.

Yes, I remember that, but he didn’t succeed there, right?

Well, it became pretty clear, when right-wing agitprop specialists like Christopher Rufo and Elon Musk (whose own virulent antisemitism and racism Ackman tends to dismiss) joined the fray, that this was perhaps not exactly about antisemitism. For Ackman, the outrage at the president of his alma mater appeared personal. The New York Times reported on Ackman’s longtime frustration with Harvard, resulting from how the folks in charge didn’t much care for his general advice or input on how to spend the donations he made to the school. (Ackman denied the premise of the Times story on Twitter by … explaining why he was so mad about how Harvard handled one of his donations. Anyway, he’s also trying to elect his own hand-picked candidates to the board.)

Harvard’s governing board initially stood by Gay, but Rufo and his pals lodged more accusations of plagiarism in Gay’s past academic work, some of which were more credible than others. That was what ultimately undid Gay and led the board to request her resignation. (According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the Harvard board members whom Ackman most frequently contacted had been simultaneously serving on the board of Ackman’s financial firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, until last month.) Gay stepped down from the presidency on Jan. 2, though she remains on Harvard’s faculty, something Ackman is pointedly unhappy about.

OK, still not connecting this with him being a Toxic Wife Guy.

We’re getting there. After Gay resigned from her post as president, Ackman continued to call for the ouster of MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth, the only participant in the congressional hearings to retain her position thus far. That campaign, however, was derailed a touch last Thursday when Business Insider reported that Ackman’s wife had plagiarized several passages in her 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT, where she later worked as a professor.

So, she did the same thing as Gay? And Ackman obviously isn’t mad about that …

These revelations, combined with the much-anticipated unsealing of various Jeffrey Epstein court documents …

Wait! What? Epstein is involved in this?

Let me finish, please! The plagiarism scrutiny around Oxman and Epstein being in the news again have brought renewed attention to a 2017 incident in which she, then a professor at the MIT Media Lab, deputized a student to dispatch a thank-you gift to Epstein—who was a big donor—even after the student raised concerns over, uh, everything that everybody knows about Epstein. As the Boston Globe reported, Ackman later emailed the director of MIT’s Media Lab to request that he not mention Oxman’s connection to Epstein to anyone who might investigate the lab’s well-documented ties with the disgraced financier. So we know this isn’t the first time he has pressured someone to protect his wife from bad press.

Goodness. OK.

Yes. But back to the plagiarism accusation. Ackman tried to stave off further embarrassment by, embarrassingly, posting a lot. He tweeted that Oxman was the subject of a follow-up investigation: She’d been “contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.”

This request for comment fueled a vengeful diatribe: “This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” Ackman wrote. “We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism.” He then asked that companies willing to “help” his effort reach out to a senior analyst at Pershing Square (no, I don’t know what a plagiarism task force has to do with asset management), declared he would expand his plagiarism “investigation” to Business Insider journalists, started harassing individual reporters there, defended Oxman’s connections with Epstein, and claimed that she couldn’t have plagiarized if she copied passages from Wikipedia because the online encyclopedia is in the creative commons. (Experienced Wikipedians would like to differ.)

All this was followed by another much-too-long attack on MIT in which he proposed using artificial intelligence to ferret out plagiarism incidents at more colleges, the end goal of which would be that “universities will ultimately be forced to conclude that there are different kinds and degrees of plagiarism.” Hard to get into how dumb that is, especially in light of how notoriously awful A.I. text detectors are.

Uh-huh.

In a separate tweet, Ackman called out Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, noting that it is controlled by private equity giant KKR, “a firm that I have had enormous respect for over the years.” After more public whining from Ackman, Axel Springer announced Sunday evening that while it did not “dispute” the “facts” of the Business Insider pieces about Oxman’s scholarship, it wished to address the concern that “questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting.” CNN’s Oliver Darcy then reached out to the company to ask whether Ackman’s singling out of KKR had anything to do with this, which a spokesperson denied; Darcy did hear, however, from multiple Business Insider reporters who were “alarmed” by this development.

But did Ackman actually try to strong-arm Axel Springer into undercutting its own journalism?

Hey, don’t take it from me; take it from the man himself. On Tuesday, Ackman leaked an email that Business Insider’s editor in chief sent to staff Sunday afternoon, noting that “the facts of the stories have not been disputed by Oxman or her husband Bill Ackman. Ackman and others have raised concerns about our reporting process, as well as the motivation for publishing the stories.” After accusing the EIC of “lying,” Ackman laid out the timeline of his pressure campaign. He said he spoke with members of the board of directors of Axel Springer on Sunday morning, including Martín Varsavsky, whom he admits to having pressured repeatedly throughout the day to announce publicly that Axel Springer was investigating the circumstances around the Oxman reporting. Varsavsky, who reportedly told Ackman he was “working only on this,” followed through on the request.

Ackman presented the director’s allyship as a checkmate even though, once again, neither he nor Oxman denied any of the reporting on the substance. Also, directors for a publication’s parent company should not have direct influence over their reporting—sort of the first rule of a free press. Not that Ackman especially cares about a free press. On Tuesday night, he posted another tweet wondering aloud why Axel Springer and KKR haven’t “cleaned house or shut this thing down”—“this” being the journalism outlet known as Business Insider. So, yeah.

I assume Ackman doesn’t think his wife’s plagiarism should be held to the same standard as Gay’s.

He does not. He says that because his wife (who’s long been a public figure in her own right) is no longer at MIT Media Lab and is “private” and an “introvert,” her work doesn’t warrant attention the way Gay’s did. Even a staffer at the Daily Wire—not exactly a paragon of journalistic integrity—disputed Ackman and Rufo on this point. Ackman is in hot pursuit of any workable excuse, including the apparent discovery that MIT’s “academic integrity handbook” did not mention Wikipedia back in 2009, so obviously there’s no misdeed, even if whole Wikipedia passages were copied and pasted! (Ackman then states that “2009 was still pretty early days for Wikipedia,” which is a way more ridiculous excuse, but also, Wikipedia was eight years old by then.)

I … can’t imagine a more deranged way for a multibillionaire to spend his time right now.

Right? All in all, Bill Ackman has devoted tens of thousands of words to demanding a university fire its president over plagiarism; declaring his wife immune from evidence of her own plagiarism while in academia; and announcing a plagiarism-themed call to war against the institutions of American academia and media as a whole. It raises obvious concerns about how the richest people in our country bend the world to their whims, going as far as to sabotage pillars of civic society, driven merely by personal, ridiculous aggrievement. It’s also extremely funny to see this man, who clearly thinks of himself as brilliant, tripping over himself by offering the dumbest justifications possible to argue that he and his famous wife should not be held to the same standards to which he has held other public figures. For all Bill Ackman appears to care about meritocracy, he cannot seem to comprehend that with every new tweet, he’s exposing himself as someone who is nowhere near as smart as he’d like to appear.