Bill Ackman gives tournament ten million dollars to prove to the world that he did not bribe tournament to get in

Details here.

Like so many other possible examples from our depraved era, this whole incident is the kind of thing you couldn’t put into a satirical novel because it would be too ridiculously over the top.

Some highlights of Ackman’s ongoing compulsive social media comments about this fiasco include:

(1) The claim that he was playing D-1 college players and recently retired pros on even terms in practice. Bill Ackman is 59 years old. The greatest 59 year old tennis player in history would get destroyed by the most marginal 30 year old professional, because as the saying goes Father Time is undefeated. It’s not surprising that multi-billionaires in particular are in denial about this — that’s why Peter Thiel drinks the blood of children every morning after all — but Ackman’s very public delusional ideation on this particular point is really extraordinary, especially given that he was an average high school tennis player as opposed to, say, the greatest player of all time, who again would not be able to compete in this context unless his opponents were trying as hard as possible not to embarrass him, which is exactly what happened here.

(2) The claim that the reason he played so badly was that his opponents were hitting the ball very softly instead of actually trying, so that threw his timing off.

(3) The claim that purportedly playing competitively with other 55+ year old players somehow has relevance to competing with actual current pros (see 1).

(4) The claim that someone made “a mini-documentary” about the match that went viral, which was great publicity for the tournament and the Challenger tour. Here is the “mini-documentary,” which I will admit is within its own genre a work of genius:

A friend and colleague of mine recently earned a lump sum of serious money from his work (low eight figures, so obviously not serious money to a plutocrat as opposed to a normal human but still), and he was immediately struck by how all sorts of service people — lawyers, investment advisors, real estate creatures — instantly started treating him with markedly more respect and deference. “My jokes have become much funnier” he told me.

I can just barely imagine what this means for the experience of being Bill Ackman et al.