Business

Column: Will billionaire Bill Ackman ever learn to shut up?

Published

2 years ago

January 16, 2024

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.

Business

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

Published

6 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Press Room

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.

The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.

When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.

Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.

“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”

While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.

Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.

“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”

The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.

Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.

“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.

The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.

Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.

It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.

In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.

Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.

A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.

“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”

To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.

Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.

Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.

Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.

As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.

“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”

After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.

Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.

“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”

Business

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Published

18 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Walt Disney Co. is expanding its presence in the Middle East, inking a deal with Saudi media conglomerate MBC Group and UAE firm Anghami to form a streaming bundle.

The bundle will allow customers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to access a trio of streaming services — Disney+; MBC Group’s Shahid, which carries Arabic originals, live sports and events; and Anghami’s OSN+, which carries Arabic productions as well as Hollywood content.

The trio bundle costs AED89.99 per month, which is the price of two of the streaming services.

“This deal reflects a shared ambition between Disney+, Shahid and the MBC Group to shape the future of entertainment in the Middle East, a region that is seeing dynamic growth in the sector,” Karl Holmes, senior vice president and general manager of Disney+ EMEA, said in a statement.

Disney has already indicated it plans to grow in the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the company announced it would be building a new theme park in Abu Dhabi in partnership with local firm Miral, which would provide the capital, construction resources and operational oversight. Under the terms of the agreement, Disney would oversee the parks’ design, license its intellectual property and provide “operational expertise,” as well as collect a royalty.

Disney executives said at the time that the decision to build in the Middle East was a way to reach new audiences who were too far from the company’s current hubs in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Business

Erewhon and others shut by fire set to reopen in Pacific Palisades mall

Published

1 day ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Erewhon and others shut by fire set to reopen in Pacific Palisades mall

Fancy grocer Erewhon will return to Pacific Palisades in an entirely rebuilt store, as the neighborhood’s luxury mall, owned by developer Rick Caruso, undergoes renovations for a reopening next August.

Palisades Village has been closed since the Jan. 7 wildfire destroyed much of the neighborhood. The outdoor mall survived the blaze but needed to be refurbished to eliminate contaminants that the fire could have spread, Caruso said.

The developer is spending $60 million to bring back Palisades Village, removing and replacing drywall from stores and restaurants. Dirt from the outdoor areas is also being replaced.

Demolition is complete and the tenants’ spaces are now being restored, Caruso said.

“It was not a requirement to do that from a scientific standpoint,” he said. “But it was important to me to be able to tell guests that the property is safe and clean.”

Erewhon’s store was taken down to the studs and is being reconfigured with a larger outdoor seating area for dining and events.

When it opens its doors sometime next year, it will be the only grocer in the heart of the fire-ravaged neighborhood.

The announcement of Erewhon’s comeback marks a milestone in the recovery of Pacific Palisades and signals renewed investment in restoring essential neighborhood services and supporting the community’s long-term economic health, Caruso said.

A photograph of the exterior of Erewhon in Pacific Palisades in 2024.

(Kailyn Brown/Los Angeles Times)

“They are one of the sexiest supermarkets in the world now and they are in high demand,” he said. “Their committing to reopening is a big statement on the future of the Palisades and their belief that it’s going to be back stronger than ever.”

Caruso previously attributed the mall’s survival to the hard work of private firefighters and the fire-resistant materials used in the mall’s construction. The $200-million shopping and dining center opened in 2018 with a movie theater and a roster of upmarket tenants, including Erewhon.

“We’re honored to join the incredible effort underway at Palisades Village,” Erewhon Chief Executive Tony Antoci said in a statement. “Reopening is a meaningful way for us to contribute to the healing and renewal of this neighborhood.”

Erewhon has cultivated a following of shoppers who visit daily to grab a prepared meal or one of its celebrity-backed $20 smoothies.

The privately held company doesn’t share financial figures, but has said its all-day cafes occupy roughly 30% of its floor space and serve 100,000 customers each week.

Erewhon has also branched out beyond selling groceries.

Its fast-growing private-label line now includes Erewhon-branded apparel, bags, candles, nutritional supplements and bath and body products.

Erewhon will also open new stores in West Hollywood in February, in Glendale in May and at Caruso’s The Lakes at Thousand Oaks mall in July 2026.

About 90% of the tenants are expected to return to the mall when it reopens, Caruso said, including restaurants Angelini Ristorante & Bar and Hank’s. Local chef Nancy Silverton has agreed to move in with a new Italian steakhouse called Spacca Tutto.

In May, Pacific Palisades-based fashion designer Elyse Walker said she would reopen her eponymous store in Palisades Village after losing her 25-year flagship location on Antioch Street in the inferno.

Fashion designer Elyse Walker announced the reopening of her flagship store

“People who live in the Palisades don’t want to leave,” Walker said at the time. “It’s a magical place.”

Caruso carried on annual holiday traditions at Palisades Village this year, including the lighting of a 50-foot Christmas tree for hundreds of celebrants Dec. 5. On Sunday evening, leaders from the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Pacific Palisades gathered at the mall to light a towering menorah.

A total of 6,822 structures were destroyed in the Palisades fire, including more than 5,500 residences and 100 commercial businesses, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Caruso said he hopes the shopping center’s revival will inspire residents to return. His investment “shows my belief that the community is coming back,” he said. “Next year is going to be huge.”