Tag: Bill Ackman

Mamdani v. Bill Ackman

Gazillionaire Bill Ackman says that he is “gravely concerned” by the possibility of Mamdani getting elected mayor because rich people are going to flee New York and the city will become “economically unviable.” Paul Krugman says this kind of talk is nothing more than “hysteria” from “the moguls of madness.” I know Krugman only won the Nobel Prize in Economics while Ackman is a rich Trump supporter whose major achievement is getting the first Black woman president of Harvard fired, but who are you going to believe? But here’s the really creepy thing about Ackman’s position. According to Forbes: Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman said he and his wealthy associates are ready to pour “hundreds of millions of dollars” into the […]

The Smartest Guy in the Room

The current issue of Vanity Fair has a profile of William Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who’s trying to bring down Herbalife. Ackman’s friends and enemies call him Bill; I know him as Billy. You see, Billy Ackman and I grew up together in Chappaqua, New York. He was a year ahead of me in school. Our families went to the same synagogue. I knew his parents, and his older sister and my sister were in the same class. We weren’t friends, and he never made much of an impression on me. He was smart, but in the way many kids in Chappaqua were smart: he got good grades, obsessed about college, went to Harvard. What I didn’t know […]