Bill Ackman's misguided Harvard crusade

Like many on Wall Street, the billionaire investor Bill Ackman is full of rage, fear, and sadness over the brutal and terrifying terrorist attack that Hamas unleashed on Israel. But unlike his fellow titans of finance, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management — one of the world's most powerful hedge funds — has spent the last few days taking his feelings out on a small group of students at Harvard.

Earlier this week, after 30 student groups at the university signed a deranged statement that blamed the Israeli government for the attack, Ackman responded on X, formerly Twitter, by demanding that Harvard — his alma mater — release the names of the students involved in the organizations so that he and other Wall Street executives could refrain from hiring them. "The names of the signatories should be made public," Ackman fumed, "so their views are publicly known."

A slew of X users, responding to Ackman's post, wondered why a man with almost a million followers of the platform, a net worth over $3 billion, and what seems like plenty of time on his hands would use it to delve into campus politics as a bloody conflict unfolds thousands of miles away. Even Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and president of Harvard, said that Ackman was "getting a bit carried away." Asking for the names of students, he suggested, was "the stuff of Joe McCarthy."

Ackman, for his part, was unrepentant about his effort to dox a bunch of college students. "It is not harassment to seek to understand the character of the candidates that you are considering for employment," he declared.

Ackman is right — that's not called harassment. It's called an interview process, a task which his hedge fund is perfectly capable of performing and has done for years. If he wants to ask Pershing Square candidates what they did at Harvard, he's well within his rights to do so. He does not need to attempt to rule out unworthy candidates via social media.

There are plenty of other, less creepy ways for Ackman to express his frustration as a Harvard alumni. He could address the adults who make up the school's administration, pressing them to take a stance on the issue. He could ask to speak on campus, to offer his perspectives in an educational environment and engage with students who disagree with them. Or he could follow the example set by his fellow investor Mark Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, who threatened to withhold his financial support from his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, for what he sees as the school's failure to condemn Hamas.

Look, it's classic Wall Street to complain about the younger generation being a bunch of good-for-nothing freaks. It's also classic Wall Street to throw money around as a way to exercise power over institutions, forcing rivals you dislike to bend the knee. But it's not classic Wall Street to wade into a debate on a college campus and call for the public naming and shaming of students, no matter how disgusting you find their positions.

In his initial post, Ackman said that "a number of CEOs" shared his desire to publicly out the Harvard students. But this isn't about the long-standing generational divide on Wall Street. It's about a CEO who is clumsy and careless with his power. Sure, Ackman has built one of the country's largest hedge funds. But during crucial moments in his career, he's also shown the propensity to fixate on the wrong issues and miss the forest for the trees.

That habit is how he missed the fact that adding in-store Sephoras wouldn't save his massive investment in JC Penney while malls were dying. Despite a multiyear campaign to turn around the struggling retailer, Ackman eventually took an almost $500 million loss on the bet.

It's how he missed the massive fraud at Valeant, a failed Canadian pharmaceutical company that was exposed by short sellers for a widespread kickback scheme that eventually landed some executives in prison. Ackman's blind confidence in Valeant's shady CEO, Michael Pearson, and his unwillingness to back down in the face of the initial allegations eventually cost him $4 billion.

It's how he lost his very public $1 billion bet that Herbalife — a multilevel nutritional-supplements firm with problems aplenty but a loyal customer base and a swath of committed employees — would go to zero. He failed to understand both the culture of the company, and its relationships in Washington, before launching a crusade that literally ended in tears for him.

On Wall Street, Ackman is known as the king of uninformed, unnecessary, and seemingly unlimited tweets — a breathtaking achievement in an industry full of workaholic, screen-addicted information junkies. This, after all, is the guy who posted: "Call me crazy, but I think @SBF is telling the truth," in reference to Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency CEO currently on trial for fraud.

But Israel is facing something far more serious than crypto fraud. This is a full-scale, terrifying war, one that is likely to last for years and to claim tens of thousands of lives. And in a war, it's important to keep your eye on what really matters. Hamas isn't carrying out its barbarism on Harvard's campus. Nor is Ackman or his firm in danger from the mere prospect of hiring an obnoxious, too-woke 22-year-old who happened to belong to an organization that signed a fatuous letter about it. When Pershing is bringing on its next crop of young analysts, Ackman is welcome to screen potential candidates however he wants. In the meantime, there are people in both Israel and Palestine who are in anguish from the terror unleashed by Hamas. Those people could really use Ackman's time and attention right now, since he seems to have it to spare.

Linette Lopez is a senior correspondent at Insider.