The Bill Ackman-Business Insider saga continues to play out, and on Sunday, the hedge fund manager issued a stark warning to the publication, owned by German multinational mass media company Axel Springer.
What Happened: ”Business Insider is toast. You will hear from us in a few weeks,” said Ackman in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Sharing a YouTube video of a scene from the 2000 movie Gladiator, Ackman said, ”It will look something like this: At My Signal, Unleash Hell,” referring to a quote from the movie spoken by protagonist Maximus, played by Russell Crowe.
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Why It’s Important: Ackman and Business Insider are locked in a bitter battle after the latter published two stories on Jan. 4 and 5, which said the Pershing Square founder’s wife Neri Oxman engaged in plagiarism in her 2020 doctoral thesis. Oxman, an American-Israeli designer and former MIT professor, allegedly copied sentences and paragraphs from various sources, including Wikipedia, for her 330-page dissertation at MIT, the Business Insider story said.
The development assumed importance because Ackman spearheaded a campaign against Claudine Gay, who served as Harvard President and has since then resigned, for plagiarizing other scholars and her inadequate response to antisemitism on campus.
Ackman fought back on behalf of his wife and said the publication did not give him adequate time to respond before putting out the story. He, however, said his wife admitted to four missing quotation marks and one missed footnote.
Business Insider stood by its reporting. Its CEO Barbara Peng issued a note Sunday, which said, ”There was no unfair bias or personal, political and/or religious motivation in pursuit of the story.”
”Business Insider supports and empowers our journalists to share newsworthy, factual stories with our readers, and we do so with editorial independence. We stand by our newsroom and our reporting, which will continue onward.”
In response, Ackman said he is likely to sue Business Insider. ”We will respond in a formal complaint which will take a few weeks to prepare,” the hedge fund manager said.
”By complaint I mean lawsuit, to be clear.”
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Collage created using photo by Center For Jewish History, NYC on Wikimedia and engin akyurt on Unsplash
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