When there is nothing left to burn, you must set youself on fire

Timothy Noah reminds us that before his weeks-long crusade to bring down the president of Harvard — which ended up with his wife being exposed for much more egregious plagiarism than what he had asserted was a fireable offense — Bill Ackman tried to professionally blackball some students for writing a statement he disagreed with while also kissing Elon Musks’s ass while he was doing open anti-Semitism:

I’ve written previously about Ackman’s oligarchic bullying and his brazen hypocrisy on the subject of antisemitism. Even as Ackman was trying to blackball a bunch of teenagers whose Harvard student organization signed onto a foolish and offensive letter about the October 7 Hamas massacre, Ackman was simultaneously defending an antisemitic tweet made by 53-year-old Elon Musk, the richest human on Planet Earth (net worth: $241.5 billion). The offending antisemitic tweet was not Musk’s first, and it sent corporate advertisers leaving Twitter/X in droves. In a classic two-step maneuver characteristic of bullies, Ackman punched down and kissed up.

Now Ackman has extended his hypocrisy into the realm of plagiarism, a project that includes bullying Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider, into investigating the ethics of its own scoop. His new campaign is more bizarre and potentially more dangerous.

It would be inaccurate to say Ackman took the lead on publicizing plagiarism accusations against Gay; that role was assumed by the New York Post, the Free Beacon, a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo (himself guilty of exaggerating a Harvard credential in his bio), and a still-unidentified person who filed three complaints with the Harvard Corporation between December 11 and January 1. Ackman’s initial beef with Gay concerned student protests over the conflict in Gaza. But Ackman publicized the plagiarism allegations energetically on Twitter well before the most damning evidence appeared, and he made them part of his brief against Gay in his unsuccessful attempt to get her fired in mid-December. As I’ve written earlier, Gay resigned in early January not because Harvard was unwilling to stand up to Ackman about student protests and diversity, equity, and inclusion (which eventually displaced the protests as Ackman’s chief bugbear), but rather because Gay’s plagiarism turned out to be much more serious than initially believed.

After Oxman came under similar fire, Ackman abruptly and seemingly without embarrassment reversed his stance on plagiarism. 

The further details about Ackman melting down are amusing.

He is now arguing that doing accurate journalism he doesn’t like is “illegal”:

Even grading on a Hedge Fund Billionaire curve, Ackman’s narcissism and pretension-to-intellectual-achievement ratio are absolutely off the charts. Imagine having that much money and spending hours a day writing Twitter threads longer than a Tolstoy novel making some of the stupidest and self-serving arguments you’ve ever heard outside of the United States Reports. Go to a nice hotel in Paris or Florence and have people feed you grapes, man!

…Tired: plagiarizing from Wikipedia. Wired: plagiarizing your own advisees…

Plagiarizing extensively from an advisee seems especially heinous. (See the whole thread) https://t.co/Vx4EGUogAn— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 13, 2024