After the resignation of the Harvard president, Claudine Gay, amid accusations of plagiarism, some might have expected Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, to step back from what became a rightwing push against academia.
Instead, Ackman, who became embroiled in university politics after students protested against Israel’s actions in Palestine, appears to have expanded his scattergun attack against other perceived liberal institutions, with news organizations and the media now in his sights.
On Monday, Ackman, who has gained more than 1.1 million followers on X, announced that he would tackle “problems with how our media operates”. It’s an issue Ackman seems to have decided to take up after Business Insider reported that his wife copied paragraphs from Wikipedia in her PhD dissertation.
On Thursday and Friday, Business Insider published reports that claimed Neri Oxman, who married Ackman in 2019, had committed plagiarism of her own.
Oxman, Business Insider reported, committed “multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way”. The outlet said Oxman, a former professor at MIT, “lifted text from more than a dozen Wikipedia articles without attribution” in her PhD dissertation and had failed to cite other sources.
In response to the first report, Oxman acknowledged that she had not credited an academic’s work in her dissertation. She also apologized for other instances where she had “omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used”.
Ackman said he and Oxman would conduct “an analysis” of the second report, which included the Wikipedia allegations, but generally responded with fury. On Friday, he suggested he would investigate Business Insider’s “reporters and staff”.
Later, on Monday, in a reply to an X post that criticized “child-abusing radical leftist losers”, Ackman wrote: “I will pursue these societally important issues including problems with how our media operates, the ideological takeover of our education system, discrimination in all forms, and free speech to the end of the earth. It is the most important battle I have ever taken on.”
Ackman’s public complaints over the weekend, which included a 5,000-word post on X claiming Business Insider was guilty of “some of the worst forms of journalism”, appear to have already found an audience.
On Sunday, Axel Springer, the German media company that owns Business Insider, told the Washington Post it planned to “review the processes” which led to the articles on Oxman.
“While the facts of the reports have not been disputed, over the past few days questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting – questions that we take very seriously,” Axel Springer said.
Semafor reported that some at Axel Springer “debated whether Ackman’s wife was fair game for reporting, and have been concerned that the report could be construed as antisemitic and anti-Zionist”.
On Tuesday, it emerged that Ackman had spoken with senior figures at Business Insider and Axel Springer before the latter announced its process review.
Ackman, writing on X, said that in an hour-long call on Sunday he had asked Business Insider to release a statement saying it was investigating the reporting. Axel Springer released a statement later that day.
He said he had also spoken with Martin Varsavsky, a director at Axel Springer who had previously expressed support for Ackman’s campaign against Harvard, on Sunday.
In the calls, Ackman said he “personally disputed the facts” in some of Business Insider’s reporting. He said he took issue with the outlet’s definition of the term plagiarism, in an article that said Oxman had admitted to plagiarizing sources.
The access and influence Ackman appears to have been able to wield troubled some.
“This is a very damning revelation about how a billionaire was able to pressure the parent company of Business Insider, Axel Springer, to publicly announce an investigation into the ‘motivation’ behind reporting that was critical of his wife,” Judd Legum, the founder of the Popular Information newsletter, posted on X.
The prospect of an ultra-wealthy campaigner attacking journalism and news organizations is a chilling one in an industry where a record number of people lost their jobs in 2023, and where an average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week over the past 12 months. The media are already dealing with one upset billionaire in Donald Trump, who has said journalists are the “enemy of the people” and whose ally, Kash Patel, said a second Trump administration would “come after the people in the media”.
The switch of focus from Ackman follows his sustained campaign against Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Ackman, who is Jewish, alleged antisemitism on university campuses, before picking up an anti-plagiarism baton after it was reported that Gay had plagiarized some of her academic writing.
Over the past month, Ackman, who has claimed he is “not rightwing”, has referenced Gay in his criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, which are designed to tackle underrepresentation and are a frequent rallying topic for rightwing politicians and commentators.
Gay, who was Harvard’s first Black president, said many of the attacks against her were “fueled by racial animus” in her resignation statement on 2 January. The issue of race has become intertwined with the movement against her, with Janai Nelson, the president and direct-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, writing on X: “Attacks against Claudine Gay have been unrelenting and the biases unmasked.”
