Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman called out the New York Times for publishing a “false and misleading” story about why he’s been outspoken about on-campus antisemitism at Harvard.
The Times article published Tuesday, headlined “Bill Ackman’s Campaign Against Harvard Followed Years of Resentment,” reported that Ackman’s campaign to oust university President Claudine Gay has been motivated by “personal grievances that predate the uproar” since Hamas’ ambush attack on Israel two months ago.
In recent years, Ackman — who earlier this week suggested that Gay may have kept her job despite disastrous congressional testimony because the school’s board didn’t want people to think it was “kowtowing” to him — has been “privately steamed” over the his alma mater’s lack of engagement with him, according to The Times.
Ackman’s anger was piqued when his suggestions for how to set up a testing lab to get Harvard students and staff back to campus during the pandemic were “brushed off,” according to the story.
Ackman was also reportedly upset that Gay passed off his input on how Harvard should respond to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks to other staff members — even after he met with Gay at his Manhattan office a year before to discuss his plans to donate more money.
“The premise of the story is false. I have held no resentment toward Harvard ever. And I have none now,” Ackman shared in a lengthy post on X on Tuesday.
Ackman did admit, however, that he still has “a serious issue with” a donation of stock he made to the school in late 2017.
At the time, Ackman admitted to struggling with “personal and business challenges,” including his divorce from Karen Ann Herskovitz, which “consumed more than all of” his liquidity.
At the time, the 57-year-old Pershing Square Capital Management founder said he wanted to fund a key chair at the university, Raj Chetty, which he did by giving Harvard $10 million of stock in a then-private company, which he “expected would be worth many multiples of that value in only a few years.”
Ackman said he and Harvard came to an “unusual development agreement:” If the stock in the company — Coupang, a South Korean e-commerce giant — ended up being worth more than $15 million once it went public, he had the right to allocate the extra money to an initiative of his choosing at the university.
If the stock was worth less, he promised to make up the difference with another donation.
By 2021, when Coupang debuted on the New York Stock Exchange valued at $50 billion, Harvard’s gift from Ackman would be worth a staggering $85 million.
But when Ackman contacted the school to relay the good news, he learned that Harvard had sold the stock back to Coupang for $10 million the year prior.
“I was not happy as you might expect,” Ackman wrote in his Tuesday tweet.
“Harvard missed out on $75m of potential gains, and I lost the opportunity to allocate $70m of those gains to the Harvard-related initiative of my choice,” he added.
Unlike other deep-pocketed donors of under-fire universities, including the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ackman — whose net worth was pegged by Forbes at $3.8 billion — hasn’t explicitly mentioned his donations to Harvard or threatened the school with his checkbook.
When The Post reached out to The Times for comment, a spokesperson said: “We stand by our reporting.”
Ackman concluded his tweet by saying that “the stock sale issue has never been resolved and nearly three years have gone by,” though continued insisting that the costly snafu has “absolutely nothing to do” with his “advocacy on behalf of antisemitism, free speech on campus and my concerns with DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] at Harvard.”
Representatives for Harvard and Ackman at Pershing Square did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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December 13, 2023 at 10:14PM
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Bill Ackman bashes NY Times' 'misleading' story on his stance on Harvard's antisemitism - New York Post
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