Is Bill Ackman the financial world's answer to tech's Elon Musk?

Sure seems like it. After declaring war on MIT and Business Insider for exposing his wife's less-than-plagiarism-free doctoral thesis, which came as payback for his calls to end antisemitism on elite campuses, he hasn't wasted a minute of time, working to expose MIT, its professoriat or its leadership. 

Yesterday, he announced this:

 

My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.

Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 5, 2024

Today, he dashed off a 2,500-word piece on what he thinks he's doing, focusing on the power of artificial intelligence to keep wokester academic research honest:

Last night, no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep.

Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 7, 2024

It's quite a word-gusher to complete in such a short period of time, but it has substance and you can tell he's thought about these things for at least a while.

Helloooo, red pill.

Then he gets into the first tranche of his research, using his formidable hedge-fund guy knowledge:

No, I did not.

The Chairman of @MIT Mark Gorenberg committed tax fraud (based on all the available facts and he has not responded to my request for a correction if I got anything wrong) using the @MIT donor advised fund to fund his wife’s charity.

I had to mention that it was… https://t.co/rBL0JGxHrS

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 7, 2024

Well. And that is just his starting off point, he hasn't gotten to the professors yet, but based on his tweets, he's clearly looking for the most efficient "Oppenheimer" way, as he put it.

But another finance guy did lay out why he thought MIT and the others had things to worry about:

Going after @BillAckman’s wife is one of the dumbest moves I’ve ever seen. MIT and Business Insider don’t understand the force of nature that’s about to come after them.

This guy literally beat out Brad Pitt competing for his wife. While you were losing sleep over not having… pic.twitter.com/LQdJfYMYF0

— Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) January 6, 2024

Robert Sterling writes:

Going after @BillAckman’s wife is one of the dumbest moves I’ve ever seen. MIT and Business Insider don’t understand the force of nature that’s about to come after them. This guy literally beat out Brad Pitt competing for his wife. While you were losing sleep over not having toilet paper during Covid, he was making $2.6B shorting the entire economy. The dude is just built different. Ackman is righteously pissed off. He’s motivated. He’s rich af, and he’s got some of the best research analysts in the world working for him (I worked in military intelligence, and DOD/IC analysts don’t come close to Wall Street short-sellers when it comes to autistically meticulous research). You think Gen Z clickbait journalists and MIT deans more comfortable in chemistry labs than in tense board-room proxy fights are ready for a guy like this once he gets on the war path? Yeah, right.

The piece gets funny when one reads all the curt, clipped, and witty comments from people who at least know of the guy, and who appear to be linked to financial markets, particularly with interest in that phrase "autistically meticulous research." For me, an old bond-market reporter, it's something I recognize as bond-trader humor; maybe its name is "finwit" as one commenter put it.

As a lot of them tweet back, it's popcorn time because Ackman is a man of action out to clean up wokester academia the way Elon Musk cleaned up free speech, and like Musk, he has been roused to the warpath. He's in beast mode now.

Image: Twitter screen shot