Will billionaire Bill Ackman ever learn to shut up?
There was a time, I must admit, when the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was one of my Wall Street heroes.
It started in December 2012. Ackman had decided to take a short position in the shares of the multilevel marketing firm Herbalife.
Ackman justified his bet with a heroic 334-deck Power Point presentation laying out all the features of the Los Angeles company that he said made it indistinguishable from a scam: It marketed its nutritional supplements as unique products when they were actually commodity supplements sold at premium prices, he said. It was a pyramid scheme in disguise, and more.
Students are forced to withdraw for much less...Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.
Some of Ackman's points dovetailed with reporting by me and my colleagues at The Times — that its widely touted "affiliation" with UCLA was a penny-pinching attempt to gain reflected scientific credibility from the university's reputation (to UCLA's discredit) and that it exploited Latinos in its marketing, for example.
In short, I saw Ackman's campaign as an effort to take down a company that needed taking down. That was the good side of Bill Ackman — willing to take a short position in a high-flying stock and back it up with solid research. Only someone with a lot of money and even more personal vanity seemed capable of this audacious approach.
As it happened, however, Ackman's campaign also revealed the drawbacks of Ackmanism. He was so confident that government regulators would seize on his claims and bring the stock — then trading in the mid $40s — to zero, that he publicly disclosed that he had placed a $1-billion short bet against the company. (Short investments make money if the shares fall.)
His audacity brought Ackman haters out of the woodwork. Among those who harbored old gripes about Ackman was the storied investor Carl Icahn, who evidently (as I wrote) "relished the opportunity to put the squeeze on a short-seller who had been unwise enough to proclaim his vulnerable position to the world." Icahn took the other side of the bet, propping up Herbalife's price.
Ultimately, the company settled a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit by paying $200 million to 350,000 consumers who had been gulled by "Herbalife’s deceptive earnings claims" into signing on as Herbalife marketers. The company agreed to restructure its business.
That didn't save Ackman, because the company survived. He disclosed in early 2018 that he finally had exited his short investment in Herbalife, taking a loss that some investment analysts estimated at the full $1 billion.
Obviously, Ackman's mistake then was braggadocio. Had he kept his short bet quiet, he might have been able to ride Herbalife's price decline down to a healthy profit. But he couldn't resist boasting about how smart and audacious he was.
LINK TO SEEDED ARTICLE: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/column-will-billionaire-bill-ackman-ever-learn-to-shut-up/ar-AA1n59Dt?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=3d6bf9e2d6944ea58a4e984d566d3e10&ei=26
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This is getting pretty funny or ridiculous however you want to look at it. Ackerman went after the three school presidents over their comments on Hamas/Jews/Israel and a bit later over plagiarism he finally forced the President of Harvard, Gay to resign. So everything is just fine and then comes the bombshell that his wife also did some plagiarizing which she admitted to. Oops so Bad Bill is going to put together a ''task force'' to check all the professor's writings to see who plagiarized and of course attack the media outlet that found out that his wife did herself a little plagiarizing. After a series of comments (threats) he said he was gong to sue the media outlet for something our other.
If instead of trying to be some sort of white knight saving in to save the kingdom he might has asked his wife, honey who didn't plagiarize anything did you?
So now we have a snowball rolling downhill. But Bad Bill intends to make it worse with his latest series of comments regarding MLK and DEI which has certainly upset a few people.
As Bad Bill gracefully tries to skate away from this throwing $100 bills to the peasants.
Now if things were not getting sticky enough for Bad Bill we find this out:
Scientist Cited in Claudine Gay's Ouster Wrote a Paper Supporting Eugenics
It's time to get out the popcorn since there will be many lawsuits, harsh words, and stupidity and they might throw in so good old time racism.
it's fun watching wealthy rwnj's piss away fortunes thru their own acts of ignorance...
Exactly, Bill is now almost penniless and his wife can’t earn a dime.
I don't know if he is going to piss away his fortune, but he sure looks the fool.
I was never interested in the specifics of the various issues going on, figuring it was just a dust up and it would all settle itself out. But if Ackman can't let it go then he needs to be bitch slapped back to reality and Business Insider can be the one to do it.
It seems that when you're a billionaire your ego won't let you admit you are wrong to simply drop something and stay within your field of expertise. Ackerman reminds me of Elon Musk.
The desperation has really set in among the racist left. They can't defend Gay's anti-semitism or her plagiarism on the merits so they've given up any attempt at substantive argument. First harvard threatened media with lawsuits for reporting facts. When threats didn't work, they moved onto character assassination and playing the race card. Now it's just ad hominem attacks piled upon ad hominem attacks. As Paul Graham wrote: "I s three hops a new record for guilt by association? Ousting Gay is bad because Rufo, who "helped," is bad, Rufo is bad because he "touted" a critic who's bad, and the critic is bad because he's "associated" with scientific racists. Any journalists want to try for four hops?"
All to avoid admitting Gay is a plagiarist who should have been fired nor even hired to begin with. Team over principles every time for the racialist left.
Hi Sean, I see you haven't changed at all, still the good old cheesehead doing your now famous ''Look Squirrel'' routine.
Can you prove that his wife didn't plagiarize her work? You know she admitted to it.
Can you disprove the Eugenics statement?
You can't Sean so it's back to your MO, ''look squirrel''
If you cannot disprove either of those best for you to slink off and try again on another article.
Cheers
P.S I never said Gay wasn't a plagiarist. That is pretty well established it's Bad Bill trying to cover up wifey plagiarism.
Cheers
What plagiarism by Ackman's wife?
"Ackman said his wife admitted to four missing quotation marks and one missed footnote in a 330-page dissertation."
The above quote is from the article below. You need to try harder to make a convincing argument..
Bill Ackman vows to sue Business Insider after accusations of plagiarism against his wife (msn.com)
It's amazing that some still support the incompetent imposter Claudine.
Yes, that is true but it was AFTER she was exposed as a plagiarizer by Business Insider....Try and keep up Greg.
Yup, Bad Bill is threatening to sue Business Insider and their response was ''bring it on, Bill. We have all the documentation''.
Whoa, who is doing that, point them out right now, Greg. They need to be horsewhipped, come on point them out.
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