Taking to X, his preferred mode of communication, billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who has been at the centre of two academic controversies said he was going to “unleash hell”. Using the iconic lines from Gladiator Ackman issued a threat saying: “Business Insider is toast. You will hear from us in a few weeks. It will look something like this: At My Signal, Unleash Hell.”
He also shared a clip from the movie which has Maximus wording those lines. Ackman was referring to a couple of Business Insider pieces that accused his wife of plagiarism.
But, let’s start from the beginning. The Ackman vs Business Insider tussle started with Ackam's accusations against Harvard and other Ivy League schools.
The billionaire Ackman came to the fore over rising anti-Semitism on Ivy League campuses which snowballed into allegations of plagiarism against Harvard University President Claudine Gay. Ackman, along with many others, had argued that Gay and Harvard had failed to condemn pro-Palestine including “from river to the sea” on campus.
{{/usCountry}}The billionaire Ackman came to the fore over rising anti-Semitism on Ivy League campuses which snowballed into allegations of plagiarism against Harvard University President Claudine Gay. Ackman, along with many others, had argued that Gay and Harvard had failed to condemn pro-Palestine including “from river to the sea” on campus.
{{/usCountry}}Gay finally resigned after instances of plagiarism came to light. However, the plagiarism accusations would come back for Ackman with two Business Insider reports that said that Ackman’s wife and former MIT professor Neri Oxman stole “sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing”. Oxman posted on X that she regretted the errors while in some instances she couldn’t confirm the claims made by Business Insider.
Meanwhile, Ackman has claimed that the BI reporting was retaliation for his role in the scrutiny against Harvard. He had written: “Business Insider’s and [Axel Springer’s] liability just goes up and up and up. This is what they consider fair, sound, accurate and well documented reporting with appropriate timing."
Ackman had said that he has made several demands including, the publication removing the stories alleging plagiarism, a settlement fund to compensate all those who have been victimised by BI” and punish those responsible for reporting.
According to a report in Vox, Ackman spoke to several executives at Business Insider and its owner Axel Springer. He got in touch with Springer’s CEO Mathias Dopfner and even reached out to Joseph Bae, one of the CEOs of KKR and Axel Springer’s biggest shareholder.
Meanwhile, Business Insider’s chief executive officer said the organization stands by its report that Neri Oxman, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wife of billionaire Bill Ackman, plagiarized paragraphs of her doctoral dissertation.
Reporting for the stories showed no signs of bias, and the process the Business Insider journalists followed was sound, CEO Barbara Peng said in a memo that was posted to the company’s website on Sunday.
“There was no unfair bias or personal, political, and/or religious motivation in the pursuit of the stories,” Peng wrote. “The process we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound, as was the timing.”
Peng’s comments echo Business Insider’s global editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson, who’d previously told staff that he stood behind the story and the newsroom’s motivations.
With inputs from agencies