Home / General / Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool and when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled

Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool and when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled

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Paul observed this morning that a prominent force behind the push to fire the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT is plutocrat and Elon Musk ally Bill Ackman. (While we’re here, let me echo another point: it’s amazing how many people, including in our comment section, have rephrased the questions of MAGA cynic Elise Setfanik as “is genocide bad?” rather than “do calls for genocide violate specific provisions of the student code?” This is exactly the kind of distortion McCarthyite tactics rely on, and it couldn’t be more transparent. Don’t be a stooge for this. Jesus Christ.) This seems like a good occasion to share William Cohan’s classic profile of Ackman, who is considered a uniquely intolerable asshole even by other hedge fund assholes:

The supremely confident billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman has never been afraid to bet the farm that he’s right.

In 1984, when he was a junior at Horace Greeley High School, in affluent Chappaqua, New York, he wagered his father $2,000 that he would score a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the S.A.T. The gamble was everything Ackman had saved up from his Bar Mitzvah gift money and his allowance for doing household chores. “I was a little bit of a cocky kid,” he admits, with uncharacteristic understatement.

Tall, athletic, handsome with cerulean eyes, he was the kind of hyper-ambitious kid other kids loved to hate and just the type to make a big wager with no margin for error. But on the night before the S.A.T., his father took pity on him and canceled the bet. “I would’ve lost it,” Ackman concedes. He got a 780 on the verbal and a 750 on the math. “One wrong on the verbal, three wrong on the math,” he muses. “I’m still convinced some of the questions were wrong.”

Right, it was probably the test that was wrong.

Ackman says he suspected, when he “shorted” (i.e., bet against) Herbalife, that other hedge-fund investors would likely see the move as an opportunity to make money by taking the other side of his bet. What he hadn’t counted on, though, was that there would be a personal tinge to it. It was as if his colleagues had finally found a way to express publicly how irritating they have found Ackman all these years. Here finally was a chance to get back at him and make some money at the same time. The perfect trade. These days the Schadenfreude in the rarefied hedge-fund world in Midtown Manhattan is so thick it’s intoxicating.

“Ackman seems to have this ‘Superman complex,’ ” says Chapman Capital’s Robert Chapman, who was one of the investors on the other side of Ackman’s bet. “If he jumped off a building in pursuit of superhuman powered flight but then slammed to the ground, I’m pretty sure he’d blame the unanticipated and unfair force of gravity.”

Lined up against the 46-year-old Ackman on the long side of the Herbalife trade were at least two billionaires: Daniel Loeb, 51, of Third Point Partners, who used to be Ackman’s friend, and Carl Icahn, 77, of Icahn Enterprises. Along for the ride are some smaller, well-regarded hedge-fund investors—who would like to be billionaires— John Hempton, of Bronte Capital, and Sahm Adrangi, of Kerrisdale Capital.

It’s Ackman’s perceived arrogance that gets to his critics. “The story I hear from everybody is that one can’t help but be intrigued by the guy, just because he’s somewhat larger than life, but then one realizes he’s just pompous and arrogant and seems to have been born without the gene that perceives and measures risk,” says Chapman. “He seems to look at other members of society, even legends such as Carl Icahn, as some kind of sub-species. The disgusted, annoyed look on his face when confronted by the masses beneath him is like one you’d expect to see [from someone] confronted by a homeless person who hadn’t showered in weeks. You can almost see him puckering his nostrils so he doesn’t have to smell these inferior creatures. It’s truly bizarre, given that his failures—Target, Borders, JCPenney, Gotham Golf, First Union Real Estate, and others—prove he’s as fallible as the next guy. Yet, from what I hear, he behaves that way with just about everybody.”

Another hedge-funder describes the problem he has with Ackman in more measured tones. “There is a saying in this business: ‘Often wrong, never in doubt.’ Ackman personifies it…. He is very smart—but he lets you know it. And he combines that with this sort of noblesse oblige that lots of people find offensive— me, generally not. On top of that he is pointlessly, needlessly competitive every time he opens his mouth. Do you know about the Ackman cycling trip with Dan Loeb?”

I don’t even disagree with Ackman about MLM schemes, but the problem with being a huge asshole all of the time is that people will try to beat you even when you’re right on the merits. I would also recommend reading on for the bike story, in which Ackman bikes at sprint speed for many miles despite not having trained at all. Let’s just say all the money in the world won’t help you at the right level of dehydration.

Anyway, Ackman’s reaction to Harvard doing what Penn should have done and telling the McCarthyite mob to eat shit is absolutely priceless:

I think we can see why he and Elon are such good buddies.

Look, here’s the thing. If you’re a liberal and find yourself on the same side of a culture war controversy with Bill Ackman, Elise Setfanik, and Christopher Rufo, you’re also probably the reason Ackman wasn’t able to put Herbalife out of business.

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