I’ll be honest, other than being a billionaire in the first place all I know is the stuff following the student protests at Harvard over the genocide in Palestine.

The summary (as I remember it, someone else please chime in and correct inaccuracies because no way in hell am I re-reading this garbage):

Ackman had been very publicly in support of the Harvard president’s decision to crack down hard on students protesting the genocide. Very shortly after bad publicity over expulsion threats (there might have been an actual explulsion? don’t remember) had forced her her to cede ground on Harvard’s ban on protesting, some right-wing personality dropped a discovery that she had plagiarized portions of her dissertation. Ackman was undoubtedly already peeved at her and went all-in on publicly calling for her to resign over this plagiarism.

Bill Ackman’s wife is an MIT researcher, and when Ackman started leading a crusade to get the Harvard president to step down over plagiarism a couple people pointed out “hey, wasn’t your wife’s dissertation the topic of a plagiarism discussion too?” Ackman addressed this in a totally measured way by basically spending months tweeting out a full novel every day to explain how his wife plagiarizing is totally different from the Harvard president doing it. I remember someone at the time pointing out that googling his wife’s name went from not having any mentions of her plagiarism scandal in the top 100 to having like 70% of the results be about that.

I dug back up this article to give my favorite quote showing his attitude towards this:

“There were times when she said, ‘Please don’t tweet anymore’” — but he defended himself by pointing to memes online suggesting he had become a hero to wives everywhere. “There’s a meme going around that apparently I’m causing a lot of marriages to have trouble,” Ackman said. “Like this one where a husband emails his wife, ‘Honey, I did the dishes.’ And she’s like, ‘Big fucking deal. Did you see what Ackman’s doing for his wife?’”