YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Ackman

lines on the record: 257
first: 2024-02-20
most recent: 2024-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Looking to advance work. We sort of thought it was over. We head home. Flight on the way home, although we didn't realize this until we got back the following day, Business Insider published another article and said, Nary Oxman admits to plagiarism. Plagiarism, of course, is academic fraud. And this thing goes crazy viral. Oh, Bill, the title is Bill Ackman's Wife. Celebrity academic Nary Oxman, and they use the term celebrity because there are limits to what legitimate media can go after. But celebrities, there's a lot more leeway in the media into what they can say. That's why they call her a celebrity. First time ever she'd been called a celebrity. And they basically's admitting to academic fraud.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we were presented with this and told they're going to publish in a few hours. And we're like, well, can we get to the next day? We're just about to head home. And they're like, no, we're publishing by noon. We need an answer by noon. And so we downloaded the copy of her thesis on the slow internet. And, you know, Neri checked it out and she said, you know what? Looks like they're right. And I said, look, you should just admit your mistake. And she wrote a very simple, gracious yes, I should have used quotation marks. And on the author I failed to cite. She pointed out that she cited them any other times and wrote her several paragraph section of her thesis acknowledging his work. And none of these were important parts of her thesis, but she acknowledged her mistake. And she said, apologize for my mistake. And I apologize to the author who I failed to cite. And I stand on the shoulders of all the people that came before me.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't think about Neri, of course, who has whatever 130 academic works. And so we were just at the end of a vacation for Christmas break. And I was early in the morning for vacation time. And all of a sudden I hear my phone ringing in the other room or vibrating in the other room multiple times. I'm like, I pick up the phone and our communication guy Fran McGill. And he's like, Bill, business insider has apparently identified a number of instances of plagiarism in Neres dissertation. Let me send you this email. He sent me the email. And they had identified four paragraphs in her 330-page dissertation where she had cited the author, but she had used the vast majority of the words and that those paragraphs were from the author. And she should have used quotation marks. And then there was one case where she paraphrased correctly an author, but did not footnote that it was from his work.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew when I did so, I assumed I was actually a bit paranoid about that thesis I had written. I only had one academic work, but I hadn't checked it for plagiarism. And I thought. That's going to happen. Actually, I had it, I did not have a copy on hand, so I got a copy of my thesis. And I remember writing it. Harvard at the time was pretty, they kind of gave you a lecture about making sure you have all your footnotes and quotation marks. I learned later that apparently they had a copy of my thesis at the New York Public Library. And a member of the media told me he was there online with a dozen other members of the media all trying to get a copy of my thesis. To run it through some AI, they had to first do optical character recognition to convert the paper document into digital. But fortunately through a miracle, I didn't have an issue.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I did not actually surface the pleasures and allegations against President Gay that surfaced by Aaron and maybe Christopher Rufo as well, or maybe Chris helped promote what Aaron and some anonymous person. But I certainly, it was a point in time where the board had said we're 100% behind her and unanimously. And I really felt she had to go. So it didn't bother me at all that they had identified problems with her work. So I shared, I reposted those posts. And then when the board, she ultimately resigned and she got a $900,000 a year professorship continuing at Harvard, I said, look, in light of her limited academic record and these plagiarism allegations, she had to go.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that hasn't really been the case for a while. I've had relative peace for a long time because as I stopped being, as I haven't had to be the kind of activist I was earlier in my career, I think since October 7th, yes, I do feel like I've been in a war.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which we were not, but we share incredible commonality on values. We are attracted to the same kind of people. You know, she lost my friends. I love hers. We love doing the same kind of things. We're attracted to, you know, we like spending time the same ways. And she Yeah, it's more emotion, more elegance. She doesn't like battles, but she's very strong, but she's more sensitive than I am.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, interestingly, we have a lot of We come from very similar places in the world. There are times where we feel like we've known each other for centuries. I met her parents for the first time a long time ago, almost six years ago as well. And I knew her parents were from Eastern Europe originally. So I asked her father, what city did her family come from originally? And I called my father and asked him, you know, dad, what's Grandpa Abraham? Where's he? What's the name of the city? And then I put the two cities into Google Maps and they were 52 miles apart, which I thought was pretty cool. Then of course at some point we did genetic testing. Make sure we weren't related.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's the most beautiful person I've ever met. And I mean that from the center of her soul. She's the most caring, warm, considerate, thoughtful person I've ever met. She couples those remarkable qualities with brilliance, incredible creativity, beauty, elegance, grace. I'm talking about my wife, but I'm talking incredibly dispassionately. But I mean what I say. She's the most remarkable person I've ever met. And I've met a lot of remarkable people. And I'm incredibly fortunate to spend a very high percentage of my life time with her ever since I met her six years ago.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very important for research, very important for advancing ideas. And yes, and shaping dialogue and the next generation of Supreme Court justices. And the members of government, politicians. So yes, it's critically important. Doing the job it should be doing.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I went to Harvard, there were 1,600 people in my class. I think today's class is about the same size. And their online education really has not sort of taken off. So I heard Peter Teal speak at one point in time. And he's like, what great institution do you know that's truly great that hasn't grown in 100 years? And the incentives in some sense of the alums are for it. It's a bit like a club. If you're proud of the elitism of the club, you don't want any that many new members, but the fact that the population has grown of the country is so significantly since certainly I was a student in 1984. And the fact that Harvard recruits people from all over the world, it's really serving a smaller and smaller percentage of the population today. And some were most talented and successful entrepreneurs anyway. It's a token of success that they didn't make it through their undergraduate.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. It's a 400 odd year institution. It enormously helpful to me in my life, I'm sure. My sister also went to Harvard and the experiences, learnings, friendships, relationships. Again, I'm very happy with my life. Harvard was an important part of my life. I went there for both undergrad and business school. I learned a ton, met a lot of faculty, a lot of a number of my closest friends, so I still really keep in touch with I made then. So yeah, it's a great place, but it needs a reboot.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, for sure. When a company fails, most people blame the CEO. I generally blame the Because the board's job is to make sure the right person is running the company, and if they're failing, help the person. If they can't help the person make a change. That's not what's happened here. The board's hand was sort of forced from the outside, whereas they should have made their own decision from the inside.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the strange thing is that they didn't do due diligence on President Gay and that it was a relatively quick process. So the whole thing, I think, is worthy of further exploration.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I learned was Harvard actually ran a process. Had a diverse new president of Harvard In the due diligence on that candidate shortly before the announcement of the new president, they found out that the presidential candidate had a plagiarism problem. The search had gone on long enough, they couldn't restart a search to find another candidate. So they picked Larry back out the board. Off the search committee to be next president Harvard as kind of an interim solution. And then there was that much more pressure to have a more diverse candidate this time around because it was a big disappointment to the DEI office, if you will, and I would say to the community at large, the Harvard of all places couldn't have a racially diverse present. It sent an important message”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I think it would have sent a better message. If a leader fails as a leader. And that's the reason for their resignation or dismissal. Then she gets, if you will, caught on a technical violation that had nothing to do with failed leadership. Because I don't know what lesson that, you know, what lesson that teaches the board about selecting the next candidate. I mean, the future of Harvard, a lot of it's going to depend on who they pick as the next leader. Here's an interesting anecdote that I think is not surfaced publicly. So a guy named Larry Baccow was the previous president of Harvard. Larry Baccow was on the search committee. And they were looking for a new president. And what was strange was they picked an old white guy to be president of Harvard when there was a call for a more diverse president.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone's going to have missing quotation marks and footnotes. I remember writing my own thesis you couldn't take out of Widener Library, so I'd have index cards and I'd write stuff on index cards and I put a little citation to make sure I remembered to cite it properly. And, you know, scrambling to do your thesis, get it in on time. What's the chances you forget at what point? What are your words versus the author's words and you forget to put quotation marks? Just the humanity, you know, the human fallibility of it. So you don't get, it's not academic fraud to have human failibility, but it's academic fraud if you take someone else's ideas that are an integral part of your work.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, the common understanding of plagiarism, if you look in the dictionary, it's about theft. Theft requires an intent. The person intentionally take someone else's ideas or words Now if you're writing a novel, words matter more if you're taking Shakespeare and presenting it as your own words if you're writing about ideas ideas matter but you're not supposed to take someone else's words without properly acknowledging them whether it's quotation marks or otherwise But in the context of academics life's work before AI”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intentional theft of another person's idea. That's academic fraud, or was this sloppy, you know, you missed, or just humanity, right? You miss a footnote here or there. And I think once it got to a place where people felt it was theft of someone else's intellectual property, that's when it became intolerable for her to stay as president of Harvard.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they call plagiarism in, I think eight of eleven of her articles. And one of the other things that came forth here is as President of the University, she had sort of the thinnest transcript academically of any previous president, you know, very small, relatively small body of work. And then when you couple that with the amount of plagiarism that was pervasive, and then I guess some of the other examples that surfaced were not missing quotation marks where the authors of the work felt that their ideas had been stolen. And really plagiarism is academic fraud. Their indicia, one Indicia plagiarism is a missing footnote. That could also be a clerical error. And so when professor is accused of plagiarism, university does sort of a deep dive. They have these administrative boards and it can take six months, nine months, a year to evaluate intent matters.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Aaron Serbarium and Christopher Rufo, one from the Free Beacon, Chris surfaced some allegations or identified some pleasures and issues that I would say the initial examples were use of the same words with proper attribution, some missing footnotes, and then over time with, I guess, more digging, they released, I think ultimately something like 76 examples of”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to really know, right? It's not like a provable fact. I would say at a certain point in time she lost the confidence of the faculty, and that was ultimately the catalyst. And whether that was how much of that was the plagiarism issue and how much of that was some of the things that preceded it, or was it all of these issues in their entirety? There's no way to do a calculus.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biology and gender, they're a faculty, there's a woman at Harvard who was literally canceled from the faculty as a member, I think she was the med school. And she was, you know, she made the argument that there are basically two genders determined by biology. She wasn't allowed to stay.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That match their political objectives. It's not a great way to build an institution which allows for Allows for diversity. And diversity, by the way, is not just race and gender. And that's also something I feel very strongly about.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's sort of the business of the university, right? And then there's the academics of the university and having a, I would argue, having a business leader run these institutions and then having a board that's a board that has itself diverse viewpoints. And by the way, permanently structured to have diverse viewpoints is a much better way to run a university than picking an academic that the faculty supports. Because one of the things I learned about how faculty get hired at universities, ultimately it's signed off by the board, but the new faculty are chosen by each of the various departments. Once the departments tip, there's sort of a tipping point politically once they tip in one direction, the faculty recruit more people like themselves. And so the department's become more and more progressive, if you will, with the passage of time. And they only advance can't.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's two things. I think it's governance structure. I also think universities are selecting, they're not selecting leaders. It's not clear to me that University should necessarily be run by academics. The dean of a university, the person who helps”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the next generation of leaders. Normally, if you think about, I wrote my college thesis on University of Missions, the reason why controlling the gates of the Harvard institution, the admissions office is important. Isn't many of these people who graduate end up with the top jobs in government and ultimately become judges? you know, permeate through society. And so it really matters what they learn. And if there are limited to one side of the political aisle and they're not open to a broad array of views and this represents some of the most elite institutions in our country, I think it's very problematic for the country long term.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me ask, okay, how can you explore how to think when you're only a shared certain point of view? How can you learn about leadership when the governance and leadership of the institution is broken and exposure to ideas? If you're limited in the ideas that you're exposed to. So I think universities at risk. I mean, the concerning thing is if 34 student organizations that each have, I don't know, 30 members or maybe more that's a thousand, that's a meaningful percentage of the campus, perhaps, that ultimately respond. Now, 10 or so of the 30 withdrew the statement once many of the members realized what they had written. So I don't think it seems like the statement was signed by the leadership and not necessarily supported by all the various students that were members. But if the university teaches people these precepts,”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've been the victim of a couple of interesting articles in the last few days, or at least one in particular in The Washington Post, written by what I thought was a well-meaning reporter, but it's just clear that I've taken on some big parts of at least the progressive establishment DEI. I'm also a believer that Biden should have stepped aside a long time ago and it's only getting worse. So I'm attacking the president DEI, elite universities, and you make some enemies doing that.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same way this was an eye-opening event for me. It has been for a very broad range of other people. I've never gotten, you know, I mentioned general growth. I got a lot of nice letters from people for making money on a stock that went up 100 times. But I literally get hundreds of emails, letters, texts, handwritten letters, type letters from people the ages of 25 to 85 saying, Bill, this is so important. Thanks for speaking out on this. You were saying what so many of us believe but have been afraid to say I described it as almost a McCarthyesque kind of movement and that if you challenge the DEI construct, people accuse you of being racist. It's happened to me already. I'm perhaps less vulnerable than a university professor who can get shouted off campus, canceled. I'm sort of difficult to cancel. But that doesn't mean people are going to try.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's someone who believes in that diversity is a very good thing for organizations and that equity, fairness, is really important and having an inclusive culture is critical for a function of organization. So here I was someone who was like, okay, D, I sounds good to me, at least in the small D, small, the I version of events, but this DI ideology is really problematic.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kind of sociological backdrop, but to what it meant on campus and faculty, Harvard faculty were telling me that there's really is no such thing as free speech on campus and that there was a survey done a year or so ago of the Harvard faculty and only 2% of the faculty admitted even in an anonymous survey, admitted to being having a conservative point of view. So we have a campus that's 98% non-conservative, liberal, progressive that's adopted this DEI construct. And then I learned from a member of the search committee for the Harvard president that they were restricted in looking at candidates, only those who met the DEI offices criteria. And I shared this in one of my postings and I was accused of being a racist.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, what Rufo argues is that the black power movement of the sixties really failed. It was a very violent movement, and many of the protagonists ended up in jail. And out of that movement, a number of kind of thought leaders, this guy named Marcuse and others, built this framework kind of an approach. Say, look, if we're going to be successful, can't be a violent movement number one. And number two, we need to infiltrate, if you will, the universities. And we need to become part of the faculty. And we need to teach the students. And then once we take over the universities with this ideology, then we can go into government, and then we can go into corporations, and we can change the world. So I thought an important book. And the more I dug in, the more I felt there was credibility to this, not just...”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed, and you take the side of the oppressed, and any acts of the oppressed to dislodge the oppressor, regardless of how vile or barbaric broquet. Like, okay, this is a super dangerous ideology. And so I wrote a like questioning post about this. Like, here's what I'm hearing. Is this right? Then I had someone, a friend of mine sent me Christopher Rufo's book, America's Cultural Revolution, which is sort of a sociological study of the origins of the DEI movement and critical race theory. And I found it actually one of the more important books I've read. Also found it quite concerning. And really, it's sort of a ultimately DEI comes out of a kind of a Marxist socialist backdrop way to look at the world. And so I think there are a lot of issues with it, but unfortunately it's advancing, I ultimately concluded, racism as opposed to fighting it, which is what I thought it was ultimately about.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's when I went up on campus and I started talking to faculty. And that's when I started hearing about actually builds this DEI ideology. I'm like, what? DEI, like diversity, equity, inclusion. Obviously, I'm familiar with these words. And I see this in the corporate context. And they say, yeah. And they started talking to me about this oppressor, oppressed framework, which is effectively taught on campus and represents the backdrop for many of the courses that are offered and the various, some of the studies and other degree offerings. I had not even heard of this. And I'm pretty aware person, but I was completely unaware. And basically they're like, look, Israel is deemed an oppressor.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Universities fail because of governance failures. It's not really the president's fault because the job of the board is to fire, hire and fire the president and help guide the institution academically and otherwise. So that's governance. An ideology, I was like, how can this be? October 7th, the event that woke me up was 30 student organizations came out with a public letter on October 8th, literally the morning after this letter was created and said, Israel is solely responsible for Hamas's violent acts. Again, Israel had not even mounted a defense at this point, and there were still terrorists running around in the southern part of Israel. And I'm like, Harvard students, you know, 34 Harvard student organizations sign this letter. I'm like, what is going on? WTF, right?”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By about 10% the threshold. And what did Harvard do in the middle of the election? They made it very, very difficult to sign up for a vote. It just makes them look terrible. And they've got now thousands of alums upset that, and again, this wasn't an election. This was just to put the names on the slate. So the only candidates in the slate are the ones selected by the existing members. And so it's businesses fail because of governance failures.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a group did exactly that, and it was an oil and gas kind of disinvestment group. They got the signatures, a couple of them got elected, and Harvard then changed the rules. And they said, now we need 3,200 signatures. And by the way, if there are these dissonant directors on the board, we're only going to allow, we're going to cap them at five. So if three were elected in the oil and gas thing, now there are only two seats available. And then a group of former students kind of younger alums, one of whom I knew approached me and said, look, Bill, we should run for the board. And they decided this pretty late. Only a few weeks before the signatures were due. Love your support. I took a look at their platform. I thought it looked great. I said, look, happy to support. And I posted about them, you know, did a Zoom with them. And they got thousands of signatures collectively, the four got whatever, 12,000 signatures or something like this. And they missed.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so on governance, the governance structure is a disaster. So the way it works today is Harvard has two principal boards. There's the Board of the Corporation, the so-called Fellows of Harvard. It's a board of, I think, 12 independent directors and the president. There's no shareholder vote. There's no proxy system. It's really a self-perpetuating board that elects effectively elects its own members. So once it becomes the balance tips politically one way or another, they can, you know, it can be kept that way forever. There's no kind of rebalancing system. You know, if a US corporation goes off the rails, so to speak, the shareholders can get together and vote off the directors. There's no ability to vote off the directors. Then there's the board of overseers, which is, I think, 32 directors. And there, a few years ago, if you could put together 600 signatures, you could run for that board and put up a bunch of candidates in about five or six get elected each year.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A university should be a place where you have broad views and open viewpoints and broad discussion, but it should also be a place where students don't feel threatened going to class, where their learning is not interrupted when final exams are not interrupted by people coming in with loud protest. Students ask me when I went up there, what would you do if you were Harvard president? I said, and this was before I knew what was happening on the Dartmouth campus. I said, I convene everyone together. This is Harvard. We have access to the best minds in the world. Let's have a better understanding of the history. Let's understand the backdrop. Let's focus on solutions. Let's bring Arab and Jewish and Israeli students together. Let's form groups to create communication. That's how you solve this kind of problem. And none of that stuff has been done. It's not that hard.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private corporation, they can put on what restrictions they want, and Harvard had introduced only a few months before bullying and harassment policies. And that's why Representative Stefanik focused on, it's not like she said, this calling for genocide against the Jews violate your free speech policy. She says it's calling for genocide against the Jews violate your policies on bullying and harassment. And I think everyone looked at this when they said it depends on the context. And they said, look, if you replace Jews with some other ethnic group, students have been who've used the N-word, for example, have been thrown off campus, were suspended. Students who've hate speech directed at LGBTQ people has led to disciplinary action, but attacking, spitting on Jewish students or kind of roughing them up a bit seemed like we're calling for their elimination, didn't seem to violate the policies. So it's, you know, look, I think.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there's certainly a tension. And I think, first of all, I think free speech is incredibly important. And I'm on the side. I'm a lot closer to absolutism on free speech than otherwise. The issue I had was the hypocrisy, right? They were restricting other kinds of speech on campus, principally conservative speech, conservative views. So it wasn't a free speech absolutist campus. And the protests were actually quite threatening to students. And there are limits to even absolutist free speech. And they begin where people feel intimidation, harassment, and a threat to bodily harm, et cetera. That kind of speech is generally, again, it's pretty technical, but people feel like they're in imminent harm by virtue of the protest. That speech is at risk of not meeting the standards for free speech. But Harvard is a private corporation.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Present day. And so clearly I was ineffective and ultimately what took her down was other, I would say, activists who identified issues with academic integrity. And then she lost the confidence of the faculty. And once that happens, it's hard to stay. And I wanted her to be fired basically or be forced to resign because of failures of leadership because that would have sent a message about the importance of leadership. You know, failure to stop emergence of anti-Semitism on campus. And there's some news today. The protests are getting worse.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that little three minute video excerpt had an impact. But it wasn't about, I mean, you can criticize me for being a billionaire, but it was really the words. It's a bit like, again, going back to the corporate analogy, it's not the fact that you own 5% of the company that causes people to vote in your favor. It's the fact that your ideas are right. And I think I was disappointed after the congressional testimony of the Board of Harvard said that they were 100% behind unanimously 100%.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I never threatened to use financial or other resources. The only thing I did here was wrote. I wrote public letters. I spoke privately to a couple members of the board. I spoke for 45 minutes of the chairman. None of those conversations were effective or went anywhere, as far as I could tell. I think my public letters and then some of the posts I do.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“President Harvard had a huge opportunity because she went third. The first two gave the world's most disastrous answers to the question. And she literally just copied their answer, which is itself kind of ironic in light of ultimately what happened.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harvard could not be further from that. And so that was a big part of it. And I was in the barber chair, if you will, getting a haircut. And I had a guy on my team send me the three-minute section. I said, cut that line of questioning. And I put out a little tweet on that. And I call it my greatest hits of post. It's got something like 110 million views. everyone looked at this and said what is wrong with you know university campuses And their leadership, and their governance, by the way. In a way, this whole conversation has been about governance. Harvard has a disastrous governance structure, which is why we have the problem we have.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harvard has become a place where free speech is not tolerated on campus, or at least free speech that's not part of the accepted dialogue or this whole notion of speech codes and microaggressions really emerged on the elite, the Harvard Yale campuses of the world. And the president of Harvard's then president of Harvard's explanation for why you could call for the genocide of the Jewish people on campus was Harvard's commitment to free expression. And one of the more hypocritical statements of all time. And you really can't have it both ways. Either Harvard has to be a place where it's a free speech. She basically said we're a free speech absolutist place, which is why we have to allow this.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If protesters are calling for genocide for the Jews, does that violate your rules on bullying and harassment? And the three of them basically gave the same answer. It depends on the context. And not until they actually executed on the genocide does the university have the right to intervene. And the thing that perhaps bothered me the most was the incredible hypocrisy. Harvard was, each of these universities are ranked by this entity called Fire, which is a nonprofit that focuses on free speech on campus. And Harvard has been the bottom quartile for the last five years and dropped the last before October 7th out of like 250.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I reached out to her, or actually, Rabbi Hershey did. And he was told she would be out of town and couldn't see it. And then I reached out to her again, said, look, I'll facilitate your attendance in the Congress. Come see the film. I'll fly you down. That was rejected. And then she testified. And I watched a good percentage, 80% of the testimony of all three presidents. And it was an embarrassment to the country, embarrassment to the universities. They were evasive. They didn't answer questions. They were rude. They smirked. They looked very disrespectful to our Congress. And then, of course, there was that several minutes where finally, at least Stephanic was not getting answers to your questions. And she said, you know, let me be kind of clear.”
2024-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source