BORED BILLIONAIRES: Let's Work On Something More Productive Together, Bill Ackman
The limits of tribal politics at elite institutions.
My friend Arthur Bloom has some interesting things to say about Bill Ackman, Neri Oxman, and all the weird German-Israeli ties going on behind the scenes.
I can’t really add much to it other than to say that I find the whole affair rather ridiculous. There’s my Canadian friend Chris Brunet who exposed Claudine Gay (along with a host of other academics) and found himself having his research quickly repurposed by Chris Ruffo of the Manhattan Institute to take down Gay. The Washington Free Beacon got in the act and they are effectively a front for Israeli activity, which we’ve talked a lot about before. I don’t want to self plagiarize so go through the archives.
I had a conversation with someone the other day about Rufo essentially plagiarizing the plagiarism accusations against Gay. I think there's a "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" play there but you have to share the same standards for that sort of thing to work. It turns out, that in the modern world it’s not turtles all the way down but plagiarists. And don’t even get me started with Chat GPT which is a kind of plagiarism on crack.
What’s really going on here is that we’re having a debate about who shall control the resources of the elite universities especially their endowments.
And the pro-Zionist forces are using their networks to inflict maximal reputational damage on Gay and Harvard and other anti-Zionist college kids to punish them for being insufficiently Zionist. College kids don’t like Israel, that’s true, but there’s no need to make a blacklist to get them to hate Israel. Don’t prove the anti-Semitic conspiracy of the Jews controlling the world by trying to control the world of young people who disagree with you.
We need to pretend that we live in a world where “elite” people have interesting things to say. The reality of the world we live in is that they often don’t and that their eliteness is as fake as their businesses or their credentials.
Look too closely and nothing quite works. But no one really looks too closely. That’s “unfair.” More often than not, this fairness is a cover for something far more disturbing — what if the bigger scandal is that so much of academia, the media, and the business world has no original ideas in the first place?
And what if in an Internet connected world ideas could travel faster than ever but reveal that we have nothing but tribal animus actually driving us? What if Harvard — whose motto is veritas or Latin for “truth” — is uniquely terrible about actually getting to the truth of things?
What both Bill Ackman and I understand: The Internet rewards those who gamify it. Everybody wants in on a game.
I’ve been happily outing the various fifth columnists who shill for Israel online and especially on X, the website formerly known as Twitter. Knock one down and another one pops up, though. It doesn’t quite work, alas, fun though it is.
The tools have gotten easier and easier to expose frauds and what we’re realizing is that we’re all frauds to some degree or another.
A few years ago Ackman donated $1.2 billion to his own foundations. Doesn’t he have better things to do? Like get to the task of actual charitable giving? Or does he simply have too much time on his hands?
I’ve come to think there’s something more interesting going on — namely that a lot of donors aren’t as rich as they previously were. How to get out of donating those promised donations? Voilà! Anti-Semitism! J’accuse!
And I could no doubt point out that his own daughter had seemingly descended into the campus comfortable Marxism that afflicts so much of her co-ethnics but the more I’ve researched it the more I feel bad for Bill Ackman.
This seems the natural progression of most billionaire family these days. Grandfather is a real estate financier, father is a hedge funder, daughter is a college Marxist, and second wife is an Israeli spy academic.
Of the bunch, the women seem to be having the most fun. At least they’re reading! Even if some of that material ends up being plagiarized. But isn’t this all so clichéd?
Marx at least had a sense of progress. Ackman is just navel-gazing. That’s the real tragedy.
All that money, no power, no vision, too much Twitter. Many such cases. Not yet sixty he casts out into the world, looking about for causes.
Well at least Ackman has good taste in women.
Gee, if only there were a pugnacious WASP who had companies which needed capital and which really worked and which would help Ackman make still more money… maybe he wouldn’t be such a bored billionaire, tweeting into the void.