Wealthy, opinionated business people muscling universities and news organizations is hardly a new phenomenon in America, but some recent episodes have taken this art—if it can be called that—to another level. Ironies abound. Downside as well.
Of course I’m talking mostly about Bill Ackman, chief executive of Pershing Square Capital, and to a lesser extent Marc Rowan, CEO of
Apollo Global Management,
as well as
Tesla
CEO Elon Musk—and their campaigns against wokeness in one form or another.
The focal point here is Ackman’s and Rowan’s crusades against leadership at their alma maters, Harvard and Penn, respectively. Rowan successfully agitated for the removal of Penn President Elizabeth Magill over her handling of free speech issues on campus and then her tone-deaf, legally wrapped responses to the baitings of Rep. Elise Stefanik during Congressional hearings over campus anti-Semitism.
Ackman’s process at Harvard was somewhat parallel to Rowan’s, with a similar result—Harvard President Claudine Gay too decamped from campus. That prompted Stefanik to declare “two down, one to go,” referring to Magill, Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth, the latter being the only one of the three university presidents who testified before Congress still in office. Ackman was more outspoken and active than Rowan, reflecting the two’s personalities, as well as Ackman’s M.O. as an outspoken activist investor.
It’s also the case that with Ackman as they say in my business, the story has legs. That’s because more recently, Business Insider published two stories which accused Ackman’s wife of plagiarism in her dissertation. Multiple irony bells are pealing right now because A) she did her PhD at…wait for it…MIT and B), along with tepid responses to campus anti-Semitism and Stefanik’s questions, Harvard’s former president Gay was also accused of plagiarism, a charge which Ackman screamed from the tree tops. Ackman has taken to X to defend his wife, where he has been supported by guess who, X’s wild-and-crazy-guy owner Elon Musk, who is a UPenn graduate—just to put a bow on things.
Meanwhile, Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a designer and architect, in a post on X, has apologized for omitting “quotations marks in certain work that I used,” along with failing to cite someone whose work she had paraphrased. Ackman continues to argue the BI story was flawed for numerous reasons including that he and his wife weren’t given sufficient time to respond to it before publication.
Taking a step back, there’s a little bit of ‘Michael Jordan can’t hit a big league curveball,’ here I think. You may remember that in 1994, Jordan decided to take a sabbatical from basketball to play baseball. Jordan’s attempt to emulate Bo Jackson didn’t pan out though—baseball aficionados said it was because MJ couldn’t hit a curve—and the superstar returned to basketball where all he did was to go on to win three more NBA championships in a row.
So sure Ackman helped push out Gay and ditto Rowan with Magill (I’m less clear about any of Elon’s victories), but my point is that it might make sense for Ackman, Rowan and Musk to stick to their core competencies. Doing otherwise risks angering the Business Gods—and more to the point becomes a distraction.
Since Musk bought Twitter (now X) in October of 2022, for instance, Tesla stock is down 33.3% while the
S&P 500 i
s up 7.5%. Of course all kinds of other factors have been driving Tesla’s stock price during that time—the EV market is maturing and under pressure for instance—but my point is that running X and X-ing frequently as Musk does couldn’t be helping him focus on Tesla. Note too that Musk has SpaceX, the Boring Company and other projects to look after, never mind myriad familial obligations.
As for Apollo’s performance during Rowan’s five-month or so campaign against Penn, if one uses the performance of APO as a measure, the company has done just fine, though Rowan’s endeavor appears to have been less time-consuming. According to the New York Times last month, Rowan “told associates that he was stepping back, [from trying to bring change to UPenn] worried it could do more harm than good to associate the effort with a wealthy Wall Street investor.” When asked for comment, a spokesperson from Apollo wrote in an email: “Marc is focused on driving the strategy of Apollo and positioning the company for long-term success. He was part of a broad coalition of alumnae, faculty, students and member of the Penn community who care deeply about the university, but in no way did it impact his time and attention devoted to Apollo.”
To get a feel for Ackman’s level of involvement all you need to do is check his X feed (with its 1.1 million followers.) There are scores of posts, some mind-numbing in length laying out elaborate, nuanced arguments in which he references numerous phone calls and emails. Ackman’s fund did beat the market in 2023, (though barely), but if you’re a Pershing investor, you have to ask yourself, could he have done better and are you getting your money’s worth out of the man.
Both Musk and Ackman declined to comment.
Ackman, Rowan, Musk and the like of course are free to lobby, harangue and sound off any way they like, whether or not any of us agree with none, some or all of what they say. At a certain point though, it simply becomes too much. That and these CEOs risk making their companies appealing only to those of a particular political persuasion. Going back to Michael Jordan, when asked why he wouldn’t support a certain Democratic candidate for office, MJ responded: “Republicans buy sneakers too.”
To me it’s simple: If a CEO wants to agitate 24/7, fine. They should quit their day job and become a full-time zealot.
Write to Andy Serwer at [email protected]
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