Who is Bill Ackman? The hedge fund billionaire who has MIT and Business Insider in his sights

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, known for his aggressive investment strategies, is making new waves for his bullish allegations of academic impropriety among the leadership in elite college institutions.

Ackman is a Harvard University graduate, donor, and staunch critic of the school’s former president Claudine Gay‘s handling of antisemitism on campus and the allegations of plagiarism against her. On Saturday, he suggested high-level Ivy League staff should have their works checked by artificial intelligence-powered plagiarism checkers amid his defense against a Business Insider report that his wife, Neri Oxman, omitted proper citations in her 2010 dissertation.

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Here’s what to know about Ackman:

Ackman, 57, rose to prominence after netting $1 billion on a six-year “short” bet against bond insurer MBIA and struck big with a $2.6 billion profit on a $27 million investment in credit hedges in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic caused the markets to tumble, according to Forbes.

(AP Photo/Richard Drew)

The billionaire of Pershing Square Capital Management is credited for his achievements on Wall Street, though he’s had his losses as well, such as a more than $3 billion loss when he sold his entire stake in Valeant Pharmaceuticals International in March 2017 after spending months attempting to rescue the struggling drug company. The move marked one of the lowest points in his wealth history before it skyrocketed back up to a net worth of $4 billion as of January 2024.

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

More recently, Ackman said he is “much more open to Republican candidates” and has donated to outsiders such as Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former Democratic candidate and now independent.

Ackman, who first created a Twitter account in 2017, has used the platform now known as X in recent times to weigh in on contentious culture war issues, more specifically, his calls for Harvard to release the names of students who signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.

Ackman became a major critic of former Harvard president Gay before she stepped down last week amid criticism for congressional testimony she delivered about antisemitism on college campuses and later for her own academic papers, saying she should be fired due to “serious plagiarism issues.” Harvard’s student paper, reporters for the Washington Free Beacon, and numerous others revealed she had evidence of plagiarism in numerous writings dating back to the early 2000s.

On Saturday, Ackman announced a new undertaking to review the works of Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth, who also faced backlash for equivocating when pressed at a congressional hearing as to whether calls for violence against Jews violated her university’s codes of conduct.

Amid the hedge fund mogul’s goals of taking on academia, his spouse, Oxman, an Israeli-American designer and professor, has been hit with plagiarism allegations by Business Insider.

The outlet reported that Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia.” And like Gay, Oxman was found to have lifted passages from other academic papers without using quotation marks while citing authors in her 2010 dissertation at MIT, according to the report.

Oxman posted to X on Jan. 4, “I regret and apologize for these errors,” adding that in four instances, she did “not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work.”

Ackman offered a lengthy response addressing the latest reports about his spouse, posting to X on Saturday evening that Business Insider provided “only several hours to respond” to the reporter’s request for comment on the story. He added that the allegation “does not strike me as plagiarism” and that “I am sure that when Neri wrote her dissertation she thought that there was nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as a dictionary.”

Additionally, he clarified that his push for Gay’s removal was almost entirely centered on her response to Congress.

“And I didn’t just seek her removal, I advocated for the removal of all three university presidents who all happened to be women: a Black woman, a White Christian woman, and a White Jewish woman,” responding to Gay’s complaints that she’d received racist backlash since her testimony.

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Ackman’s next moves are unclear, but he vested a great amount of focus in his recent X post on the complexities of navigating plagiarism allegations in a world of new technologies and definitions for improperly cited works. While he noted AI has become a tool to spur new forms of plagiarism, he said the same technology can be utilized to detect it as well.

“I think universities will ultimately be forced to conclude that there are different kinds and degrees of plagiarism, and the punishment, if any, and the degree of its severity to the faculty member or student will have to be adjudicated based on the specific facts of each case,” Ackman said.