Business
Column: Will billionaire Bill Ackman ever learn to shut up?
There was a time, I must admit, when the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was one of my Wall Street heroes.
It started in December 2012. Ackman had decided to take a short position in the shares of the multilevel marketing firm Herbalife.
Ackman justified his bet with a heroic 334-deck Power Point presentation laying out all the features of the Los Angeles company that he said made it indistinguishable from a scam: It marketed its nutritional supplements as unique products when they were actually commodity supplements sold at premium prices, he said. It was a pyramid scheme in disguise, and more.
Students are forced to withdraw for much less…Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.
— Bill Ackman attacks Claudine Gay for plagiarism, before his own wife was also accused
Some of Ackman’s points dovetailed with reporting by me and my colleagues at The Times — that its widely touted “affiliation” with UCLA was a penny-pinching attempt to gain reflected scientific credibility from the university’s reputation (to UCLA’s discredit) and that it exploited Latinos in its marketing, for example.
In short, I saw Ackman’s campaign as an effort to take down a company that needed taking down. That was the good side of Bill Ackman — willing to take a short position in a highflying stock and back it up with solid research. Only someone with a lot of money and even more personal vanity seemed capable of this audacious approach.
As it happened, however, Ackman’s campaign also revealed the drawbacks of Ackmanism. He was so confident that government regulators would seize on his claims and bring the stock — then trading in the mid $40s — to zero, that he publicly disclosed that he had placed a $1-billion short bet against the company. (Short investments make money if the shares fall.)
His audacity brought Ackman haters out of the woodwork. Among those who harbored old gripes about Ackman was the storied investor Carl Icahn, who evidently (as I wrote) “relished the opportunity to put the squeeze on a short-seller who had been unwise enough to proclaim his vulnerable position to the world.” Icahn took the other side of the bet, propping up Herbalife’s price.
Ultimately, the company settled a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit by paying $200 million to 350,000 consumers who had been gulled by “Herbalife’s deceptive earnings claims” into signing on as Herbalife marketers. The company agreed to restructure its business.
That didn’t save Ackman, because the company survived. He disclosed in early 2018 that he finally had exited his short investment in Herbalife, taking a loss that some investment analysts estimated at the full $1 billion.
Obviously, Ackman’s mistake then was braggadocio. Had he kept his short bet quiet, he might have been able to ride Herbalife’s price decline down to a healthy profit. But he couldn’t resist boasting about how smart and audacious he was.
The same character flaw has been on display in Ackman’s latest crusade, which began as an ultimately successful effort to oust Claudine Gay as the president of Harvard. This effort necessarily had to be waged in public, since it was clear that only public pressure would force the hand of Gay and Harvard’s leadership.
Ackman began his crusade with complaints about Gay’s response to purported antisemitism on the Harvard campus and her flatfooted response to a tendentious question from right-wing Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) at a congressional hearing. After her resignation as president, Ackman latched onto accusations of plagiarism in some of Gay’s academic writing to assert that she should also be fired from the university’s faculty.
“Students are forced to withdraw for much less,” Ackman tweeted. “Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
That’s the public position that has come back to bite Ackman where it hurts the most. By pushing on the plagiarism accusations against Gay, Ackman opened the door to a broader inquiry into plagiarism in academia — specifically, in the work of his wife, Neri Oxman, a former professor at MIT.
The publication by Business Insider of allegedly plagiarized passages in Oxman’s work has set Ackman off on a delirious public snit against Business Insider and contortions about what is and isn’t plagiarism and what volume of it warrants professional extermination, all played out in extended tweets. The battle has led to further examination of Oxman’s work, which doesn’t always impress with its coherence.
A few other billionaires with ambitions of running the world have learned that they have a better chance of getting what they want out of life by remaining in the background. One is Peter Thiel, who privately and quietly bankrolled a privacy lawsuit brought by wrestler Hulk Hogan against the celebrity website Gawker.
Thiel’s role in backing Hogan’s lawsuit with a $10-million donation remained a secret until after a jury returned a $140-million judgment against Gawker. Would Gawker have lost if it could have made Thiel’s role public? Possibly not. By remaining behind the curtain, Thiel got what he wanted, which was effectively to put Gawker out of business.
Then there’s Elon Musk, who was able to bask in his public image as a brilliant engineer with the ability to solve global warming and advance the cause of space travel through his companies Tesla and SpaceX. That lasted until he bought Twitter and became the tweeter-in-chief, revealing himself as an unreconstructed right-wing antisemitic conspiracy monger.
The effects this revelation will have on Tesla’s electric vehicle sales and SpaceX’s role as a government contractor are still unclear, but they may not be good.
There’s more to this than a yarn about a billionaire hedge fund manager with terminal digital logorrhea. Ackman plainly never learned the lesson of the Streisand Effect, which describes how efforts to conceal or suppress information end up bringing that information even greater public attention.
(The term refers to an attempt by Barbra Streisand to have an aerial photo of her Malibu estate removed from a government mapping project; rather than secure her privacy, Streisand’s lawsuit turned the photo into a sensation on the internet, where it remains easily available.)
Ackman’s public conniptions on X, formerly Twitter, don’t make him, Oxman, MIT or the MIT Media Lab, where Oxman used to be a professor, look good. And none of it would have happened if Ackman had kept his mouth shut.
That brings us to what has reemerged into public awareness as a result. Oxman’s reputation as a public intellectual, such as it was, doesn’t seem to have been enhanced by the more recent scrutiny of her work. Not that doubts about her output are entirely new: In 2018, Rachelle Hampton of Slate.com memorably, and accurately, described Oxman’s Twitter feed as “a stream of majestic gobbledygook.”
The Streisand Effect demonstrated its potency as recently as Monday, when Ackman posted a fantastically lengthy tweet responding to a report in Business Insider about Oxman’s dealings with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who had been a big contributor to the MIT Media Lab. Who knew? Today, plenty of people.
Ackman objected to Business Insider’s assertion that he “pressured” MIT in emails to keep Oxman’s name out of the developing Epstein scandal. (Business Insider attributed the “pressure” claim to the Boston Globe, but the Globe didn’t use that term and merely reported the emails.)
In his own defense, Ackman posted the key email in question and urged his X followers to read it “carefully so you can see for yourself.”
Ackman must have been bluffing, on the assumption that no one would bother actually reading the email. Those who do will discover that it reads unmistakably as a threat to do damage to MIT’s reputation if Oxman’s name is mentioned in connection with the Epstein matter.
Here’s the money quote, from a message from Ackman to Joi Ito, then the Media Lab’s director:
“It is very important that you don’t mention Neri’s name or otherwise get her involved or she will have to issue her own statement to protect her reputation explaining why it was sent and at whose request, who else received similar gifts, how she met Epstein, who else at MIT received funding from Epstein … This will of course blow this up even more which we would certainly not like to see happen.”
Tell me that doesn’t remind you of that stock joke in which gangsters tell their target, “Nice place you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”
This only resurrected the noisome history of Epstein and the Media Lab, which MIT surely hoped would be dead and buried after it issued an independent report on the matter in January 2020. The report says Ito “cultivated Epstein as a donor” even after Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida for soliciting minors for prostitution. Ito resigned from MIT in 2019.
Among the beneficiaries, according to the report, was Oxman, who met Epstein on campus in 2015 and received donations from him totaling $125,000 for her research (Ackman says it was $150,000). In 2017, she arranged to have a ceremonial resin “orb,” apparently a gewgaw given to donors and other honorees that she designed, delivered to Epstein. After their one meeting in 2015, Ackman says, Oxman “never accepted an invitation or saw or spoke to [Epstein] again.” The MIT report doesn’t state otherwise.
MIT can’t be happy that Ackman has turned the spotlight again on the Media Lab, which has regularly been criticized as an overblown hive of inflated egos with the skimpiest record of accomplishments to its name. Anyway, Oxman left MIT in 2021.
The greatest damage that Ackman’s tweets have done may be to the debate over academic plagiarism. Despite asserting that Gay’s plagiarism damaged Harvard’s reputation for “academic integrity,” he now argues that allegations of Oxman’s copying of passages and phrases from other sources — including even Wikipedia — without proper attribution amount only to trivial citation errors, not plagiarism at all.
He has threatened to sue Business Insider, which says its stories on the issue are “accurate and the facts well documented.” He also has threatened to do a scrub on the academic work of MIT’s hundreds of faculty members in search of plagiarism.
Is there any clarity to come out of this mudslinging? The answer is no — just more mud. And more noise … until Ackman learns to shut up.
Fernando Flores can spend eight hours a day pouring the same cup of coffee.
He is not a barista. He’s a robot puppeteer, trying to train humanoids.
He manipulates mechanical arms remotely, using hand and arm sensors to make them pick up a pot of coffee, pour it into a mug and put the pot back in the coffee maker. Flores checks for spills, then empties the mug back into the pot by hand and does it again — hundreds of times.
“The repetitiveness, it can cause some discomfort,” said Flores, who has the title of senior robotic pilot at San Francisco startup Encord. “It becomes second nature after a while.”
This Sisyphus of Silicon Valley is on the front lines of a rapidly expanding industry of robot trainers, preparing to teach and operate the army of humanoid robots scheduled to march out of nearby factories in the coming year. Encord practices, records and sells data about movement to the companies racing to bring humanoids to homes, offices and factories.
If tech companies’ optimistic plans are to be believed, a swarm of American-built robots is about to hit the market.
Tesla’s Fremont factory stopped car production this year to make way for production lines for its Optimus robots, with unbelievable plans to ramp up capacity to 1 million units a year. Palo Alto-based 1X Technologies is already manufacturing its 66-pound, 5-foot-6 humanoid named Neo at its factory in Hayward. The company received 10,000 preorders, and its first shipment is expected later this year. Figure AI’s humanoid factory in San Jose has increased its manufacturing capacity to produce one Figure 03 robot an hour, with the goal of producing 12,000 a year.
Fernando Flores demonstrates the articulation of a robot performing a whisking motion at Encord on May 21.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
Goldman Sachs projects the global market for humanoids could reach $38 billion by 2035.
The AI of these humanoid robots needs an immense amount of data on human movement. How humans write, speak, code and compose was easily scraped off the internet, but the bots need more information to master how to stand, step, lift, squeeze, pour and perform other physical movements. That is where companies like Encord come in.
The $10 billion invested in robotics in 2026, according to CB Insights, has spawned an industry focused on training robots. Initially, that meant humans strapping iPhones to their foreheads, recording actions like cooking, cleaning and performing household chores. That, however, doesn’t capture the exact torque, force and grip required for a robot hand to work flawlessly.
Now, humans are directly guiding robots through expensive rigs that let them control the robots’ movements. Data collected using robot arms offer richer insights into motor skills and object manipulation. Encord charges clients up to $1,000 per hour for training data.
The information gathered from trainers controlling robots is “super important to bridge the next level of learning,” where robots will learn to correct mistakes and do the chores on their own, said Vineeth Velmurugan, head of robotics learning at Encord.
The company is already working with some of the top companies in robotics, but said it couldn’t share most names. Among the clients it could mention were Toyota Research Institute and Weave, which already has laundry-folding robots in a few homes.
Brian Gonzalez pulls an ethernet cable using a robotic arm at startup Encord on May 20.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
Many of the new robotic data companies are focusing on industrial use cases. Robots can perform better in a structured, predictable environment, like a factory or warehouse.
Home tasks are tougher, as layouts and tasks are more varied and messy. While many bots have mastered walking, they still struggle to open doors, fridges and washing machines smoothly. They don’t know where or how to grasp a doorknob, handle or door edge or how much pulling, pushing or twisting force to apply.
Flores has mastered making the robot arms pour coffee, but he still often spills. When that happens, he deletes records of the attempt.
“Typically, we don’t want any mistakes,” he said. “If we have more than three consecutive mistakes within a 15‑second window, that’s not going to be good data.”
Inside Encord’s test facility in Hayward, it has replicated a standard American home with a fully furnished living room, kitchen and bathroom.
In the living room, a pilot rearranges an untidy study desk. She first scatters AA-size batteries, pens and scissors on the table, and walks back to the nearby control rig to make the robot arms place each one inside the tray of a desk organizer.
Depending on the day’s training, the pilots could be opening and closing refrigerator doors, whisking liquids in a bowl, sorting silverware or turning a water faucet on and off over and over until the robot arms get it right.
Cortney Weintz, left, and Tony Schiller record data with cameras at Encord.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
In another corner of the facility, people wearing smart glasses place and pick up playing cards and sort plastic plates by hand, collecting first-person videos.
One key skill for the coming bot invasion: plugging in cables.
Companies want robots that can crawl into duct spaces, identify ports and plug cables to help build the massive data centers needed for AI. Encord replicated a real data center server rack, where an operator inserts blue cables into penny-sized sockets all day.
Many companies have entered this business. Meta-backed Scale AI and Palo Alto-based Micro1 are major players in the space. China has more than 40 state-owned robot data-collection facilities where hundreds of on-site humans mimic train bots how to move in the real world.
In Watertown, Mass., Tutor Intelligence has set up a 100-robot facility dedicated to harvesting movement data. Its robot arms, which are being trained to do factory work, are controlled by a human team split across Mexico, the Philippines and Boston. This is in part to train its robot, Sonny, which will hit the market later this year.
Elaine Batchlor sorts screws and bolts with a robot in a mockup at Encord.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
“We built the Data Factory to bootstrap the initial intelligence for the Sonny robot, so that we can begin to deploy Sonny into the field,” said Josh Gruenstein, co-founder of Tutor. Ten of its remote operators are based in Boston, and the rest are international.
Remote operation is emerging as an integral part of the humanoid robot business. Employing teleoperators in countries where wages are much lower than in the U.S. could, in theory, mean a robot controlled by a human in another country could do a task at a fraction of the cost of having an American do it.
This month, a humanoid robot cleaning service in San Francisco called Gatsby completed a robot cleaning of a U.S. home using a teleoperator in Mexico.
The technology is still evolving, said Aron Frishberg, co-founder of Gatsby, but being a first mover means Gatsby is getting more training.
“There’s obviously stuff that goes wrong,” he said. “It’s really hard to get precise hand movements or arm movements and grab something.”
Encord co-founder Ulrik Hansen said it will be setting up a teleoperations center in its Hayward facility in the next three months. Even as more robots are deployed and master increasingly sophisticated tasks, they will still need humans to occasionally take control remotely.
“They will need some exception handling when they get things wrong,” he said.
Hundreds of teleoperators will learn where the system succeeds, where it breaks and step in when needed. Once those patterns emerge, Hansen said, they can move teleoperations to cheaper locations abroad or to the Midwest.
Back in Hayward, Flores created new coffee-pouring challenges for his robot arms. He changed what was on the counter around the coffee maker and moved the mug to different spots. It takes a lot of know-how to puppet and train a robot, he said.
“A lot of people would (guess) this might be easy, this is dumb,” Flores said. “There actually is thought here. There actually is critical thinking.”
A Carl’s Jr. franchisee is trying to close and sell his 59 locations in California after filing for bankruptcy protection in April.
The franchisee, Harshad Dharod, who has branches mostly in Southern California, intends to close 10 of the branches he controls and find a buyer for the remainder, according to a broker helping find buyers.
In earlier bankruptcy filings, Dharod had blamed California and Carl’s Jr. for his stores’ struggles. Dharod said a lack of support and innovation from Carl’s Jr. and an increase in labor costs from a $20 minimum wage left him unable to cover his expenses.
Dharod couldn’t be reached for comment.
A spokesperson for Carl’s Jr. and its parent company CKE Restaurants, said they are aware of Dharod’s decision to sell.
“This situation is specific to this individual franchisee’s financial and business circumstances,” said the spokesperson. “This has no impact on the operations of any other Carl’s Jr. locations.”
National Franchise Sales will oversee the sale, which spans Southern and Northern California.
A spokesperson for the broker said it already has interest from prospective buyers. The spokesperson said that when a franchise changes owners, employees and managers usually keep their jobs.
Carl’s Jr. began in 1941 as a hot dog cart on the corner of Florence and Central in Los Angeles and grew into one of the region’s best-known burger chains. It opened its first sit-down restaurants with expanded menus in Anaheim in 1946. Its smiling yellow star was born in the 1950s and rapidly spread across California throughout the 1970s.
Although it moved its headquarters from Carpinteria to Tennessee in the last 10 years, its menu still reflects its California origins, with items such as the Cali XL, a double cheeseburger. The chain was among the first to spot the meat-free trend and introduced plant-based burgers and the charbroiled turkey burger. In the early 2000s, it made a splash with commercials pointing to its California origins.
It has had a tough time this year remaining relevant amid new competitors and fast-food consumers who are becoming more picky about what they will pay for and eat, analysts say.
Like most restaurants, Carl’s Jr. has been struggling to attract customers at a time when many are increasingly concerned about inflation and the health of the economy. Some chains are slashing prices. Smaller chains can’t compete well in the price wars. Those without a strong brand identity and fan base have been suffering.
Dharod told the bankruptcy court that business had become particularly bad in the last two years, leaving him without sufficient access to cash to cover wages, rent, supplies and insurance. Although his outlets have generated more than $6 million in monthly revenue, they have been losing more than $600,000 per month this year.
He had to ask for special permission to use his daily cash flow to fund expenses, or risk running out of money and being forced to close his outlets.
A small group of the close to 1,000 employees working for the franchisee say the efforts to cut costs to the bone have left them overworked, understaffed and exposed to violence.
Some say they are getting injured as they have to do the work of multiple people. Some detailed violent interactions with customers, including robberies and physical assaults, and said the company didn’t provide safety training. Some have staged multiple walkouts in recent months to bring attention to their concerns.
A Delaware Court of Chancery judge delivered a blow to wrestling impresario Vince McMahon and other World Wrestling Entertainment officials earlier this week.
Judge J. Travis Laster, vice chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, issued sanctions for “spoliation of evidence” in the shareholder lawsuit over the 2023 merger between Ultimate Fighting Championship and WWE.
Laster ruled on Tuesday that WWE executives destroyed evidence by using the auto-delete setting on the messaging app Signal, enabling potentially relevant communications to be deleted.
The ruling means the court will operate under the assumption that five potentially damaging statements are true while allowing the defendants to rebut them.
The statements, according to the ruling, include that McMahon’s decision on the merger was “influenced” by Endeavor Executive Chairman Ari Emanuel’s “promise” to provide him with a continued role at the company and to indemnify him and provide legal support as federal investigators were looking into claims of alleged sexual misconduct.
McMahon pursued a deal with Endeavor in 2022 before WWE initiated its strategic review process, and both McMahon and then-WWE President Nick Khan worked with The Raine Group, a strategic financial advisor, “to steer the process to Endeavor and away from other potential bidders,” the ruling states.
In September 2023, entertainment giant Endeavor, the parent company of UFC, acquired WWE and merged the two sports entities to form a new, publicly traded company, TKO Group Holdings, in a deal worth $21.4 billion.
A month later, a group of shareholders filed suit against McMahon and other company officials in Delaware Chancery Court, claiming McMahon orchestrated a “sham sale process.”
Representatives for McMahon, WWE and TKO were not immediately available for comment.
According to the suit, McMahon, WWE’s controlling shareholder, turned down higher offers and excluded other bidders who would have ousted him and instead chose a deal that favored Endeavor’s Emanuel, a “close friend and longtime ally,” enabling McMahon to continue running WWE and shielding him from federal investigations related to a raft of sexual misconduct claims.
The complaint also alleges that the $21.4-billion deal undervalued the company and was “far below the offers” WWE’s board could have received from other interested parties had they “made any effort to negotiate in good faith.”
The litigation is related to the 2022 investigation by WWE’s board that found that McMahon made at least $14.6 million in payments between 2006 and 2022 for “alleged misconduct.” McMahon has denied claims of misconduct.
The settlements were made to women, including WWE employees, who alleged that McMahon initiated unwanted sexual contact and coerced women into performing sexual acts on him. In one case, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, a woman claimed that McMahon sent her unsolicited nude photos of himself.
McMahon’s alleged misconduct became the subject of ongoing investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice.
“I am confident that the government’s investigation will be resolved without any findings of wrongdoing,” McMahon said in a statement to The Times in 2023.
Last January, the SEC announced it had settled charges against McMahon alleging he had violated federal securities laws by failing to disclose a pair of settlement agreements to WWE worth $10.5 million.
McMahon agreed to pay more than $1.7 million in a civil penalty and in reimbursement to WWE, without admitting or denying the agency’s findings. Federal prosecutors also have dropped their criminal investigation.
In January 2024, McMahon resigned as executive chairman of the board of TKO Group, one day after a former WWE employee, Janel Grant, sued the company, McMahon and former head of talent relations John Laurinaitis, alleging sexual assault, trafficking and emotional abuse.
Grant claimed that McMahon agreed to pay her $3 million in exchange for her silence.
The shareholder trial is set to begin on June 8. McMahon, Emanuel, Khan, TKO President Mark Shapiro, and WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque are expected to testify.
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