Who is Bill Ackman? The hedge fund billionaire with eyes on MIT and Business Insider

Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager known for his aggressive investment strategy, is making a new splash with his bullish claims about academic fraud by elite university leaders.

Mr. Ackman is a Harvard University alumnus, donor, and vocal critic of the school’s former president Claudine Gay’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus and the plagiarism allegations against her. On Saturday, he suggested that high-level Ivy League staff should have their work checked by plagiarism checkers powered by artificial intelligence. business insider His wife, Neri Oxman, reported that he omitted proper citations in a 2010 paper.

Republicans condemn Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization

Here’s what you need to know about Ackman.

Mr. Ackman, 57, shot to fame after making $1 billion with a six-year “short” bet on bond insurance company MBIA, and turned to credit hedging in March 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. He made a huge profit by making a profit of $2.6 billion on his $27 million investment.According to the market will crash Forbes.

(AP Photo/Richard Drew)

The Pershing Square Capital Management billionaire, recognized for his work on Wall Street, spent months selling his entire stake in Valeant Pharmaceuticals International in March 2017. The company has also suffered losses, including losses of more than $3 billion. Rescue a pharmaceutical company that is in financial trouble. This move marked one of the lowest points in his wealth history, until his net worth soared to $4 billion as of January 2024.

When Ackman was a 2020 presidential candidate, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Al Gore and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, according to Influence Watch documents. was.

These days, Ackman has been “much more open to Republican candidates” and has donated to outsiders, including Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and former Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now an independent. He said he is doing so.

Ackman, who first created his Twitter account in 2017, recently used the platform, now known as They are asking Harvard University to release their names. Regarding the October 7th attack by Hamas.

Mr. Ackman, who had become a leading critic of Mr. Gay, the former president of Harvard University, resigned last week following criticism of his Congressional testimony about anti-Semitism on campus and later of his own academic writings, calling it “serious.” He said Gay should be fired because of the “plagiarism issue.”Harvard University student newspaper reporter washington free beacon, And many others have revealed that she has evidence of plagiarism in numerous works dating back to the early 2000s.

On Saturday, Professor Ackman announced a new initiative to review the performance of Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth. The university’s president also faced backlash after equivocating during a congressional hearing about whether calls for violence against Jews violated the university’s code of conduct.

As the hedge fund mogul sets his sights on venturing into academia, his spouse, Oxman, an Israeli-American designer and professor, is facing plagiarism charges in the US media. business insider.

The newspaper reported that Oxman “stole sentences and entire paragraphs from Wikipedia.” The report said Oxman, like Gay, was found to have quoted passages from other academic papers without using quotation marks when citing the author in a 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology paper. .

On January 4, Oxman posted on “This is an appropriate way to describe it,” he added.

Ackman suggested: long response Referring to the latest reports about his spouse, he posted on X on Saturday night: business insider In response to a reporter’s request for comment on this article, he replied, “I will only respond for a few hours.” He said the allegation “doesn’t seem like plagiarism,” adding: “When Neri wrote her paper, she must have thought there was nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as a dictionary.”

He also made it clear that his advocacy for Gay’s removal centers almost entirely on her response to Congress.

“And I didn’t just call for her removal, I called for the removal of all three university presidents, all of whom happened to be women: a black woman, a white Christian woman, and a white Jewish woman.” responded to the complaint. Since her testimony, she has faced racist backlash.

Click here to read the full Washington Examiner article

It’s unclear what Ackman’s next move will be, but his recent posts on There is. While he noted that AI has become a tool to facilitate new forms of plagiarism, he said the same technology can also be used to detect plagiarism.

“Universities will ultimately be forced to conclude that there are different types and degrees of plagiarism, and that penalties, if any, and their severity for faculty and students will depend on the specific facts.” “It will be determined on a case-by-case basis,” Ackman said.