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Bill Ackman is a brilliant fictional character (theatlantic.com)
29 points by lantry on Jan 19, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



Ackman has always had that laser focus about him. The first I'd heard of him he was waging a public war against Herbalife. He knew it was a scam, and made huge bets against it. By some miracle, it's still around and he lost a bit of money on it I imagine. But he didn't go down without a fight.

Those university presidents testimonies were awful. It's like they got together beforehand to plan their act. It's not that their answers that were so much bad, but the condescending way they said it. In either event, that apparently -really- set him off, and it wasn't just Harvard's president he went after.

Whether he's the good guy or bad guy I guess is up to the reader. One thing that's clear to me is that he has the money, time, and focus to absolutely beat you down, so it's probably best to stay off his radar.



"...he was part of the group publicly attempting to purge Harvard’s first Black president"

That's in the second paragraph. That's where I stopped reading.


Normally I'd agree, but that poor woman was really railroaded during that hearing. She didn't take the bait and was labelled as smug for it. They wore her down and eventually got her to say something they could condemn her for. When cops do this shit we call it abuse. When Congress does it they get to call a black woman with integrity an anti-Semite.

She'd been there all of six months and was being pressed to publicly support Israeli's "defensive genocide" in her capacity as a useful idiot. Let her play the oppression card since nobody seems to care about the actual truth-- Ackman is a villain with stellar PR.


She's the president of Harvard. She should be more competent, at thinking, and at politiking.

"Mr. Stefanic — we deplore antisemitism in all of it's forms. Any harassment, especially that which is motivated by bigotry is an obvious violation of our code of conduct."

not

"Hurr durr it depends"


Thank you, couldn't have said it better.

It's puzzling that we set such a low bar for the top leader for one of the top universities in the world. This person should be the Navy Seal's Navy Seal of leaders and academics, not a "please just leave this poor beleaguered Black woman alone" type. She should be running laps around your average politician, not imploding under the most basic of questions.


She was happy to lead witch hunts against professors that did research that didn’t support left wing positions.


Please post full article? I got a paywall.


here's a gift link that should be good for 14 days: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/bill-ackma...

I believe there are also other ways to bypass the paywall




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