| It’s really impossible to single out just one memorable moment from Reeves Wiedeman’s deliriously entertaining profile of Bill Ackman, the manic billionaire investor engaged in a war on multiple fronts against Harvard, Joe Biden, the media industry, DEI initiatives, and plagiarists of every stripe — except, notably, his wife, “the glamorous and slightly uncategorizable scientist-architect Neri Oxman,” as Reeves describes her, who has been caught doing a fair amount of plagiarizing herself. Ackman is a refreshingly game interview subject, offering anecdotes about everything from his personal motivations for taking on his alma mater (his eldest daughter came home from Harvard “practically a Marxist”) to Oxman’s response to his incessant posting on X (“Please don’t tweet anymore”). But for my money, the revelation that says the most about Bill Ackman is his professed belief “that people become their names” (“Like, I’ve met people named Hamburger that own McDonald’s franchises”), which is how Ackman believes he became Activist Man. Does it make any sense? No. Does it make him more relatable as a human being? Also no. But that’s kind of the point: that we all have to deal, whether we like it or not, with the whims of the ultrawealthy. |
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