Last week, I published a cover story about billionaire hedge fund manager-turned-anti-DEI crusader Bill Ackman:
I hope the story is helpful in explaining some of the issues already roiling 2024—thanks to my editor Ryu Spaeth for helping me navigate the thicket—and in understanding Ackman, who I expect to continue playing a part in the discourse this year. If you need a teaser, this paragraph seemed to get a lot of attention online:
Ackman believes that our lives are often fated from birth. “I have a view that people become their names,” he told me. “Like, I’ve met people named Hamburger that own McDonald’s franchises.” We’d been talking for nearly an hour and a half when Ackman asked me what my name was, hoping to offer a diagnosis. After he seemed momentarily stumped by my surname, I offered him my first name, which he misheard as Reed. “Read … write,” he said, before turning back to himself. “So, my name is Ackman — it’s like Activist Man.”
I also took questions from Choire Sicha, the ringleader of New York’s very fun Dinner Party newsletter—the only evening newsletter I look forward to every day:
Bill Ackman is in “a WhatsApp group with probably 50 billionaires” that is “very focused on Israel,” you write. What more can you tell us about this, and is he in any other group chats that you know of?
Great question — it’s one I had! Ackman mentioned this to a group of Harvard students, but when I followed up with him and said I would love to know more about what kinds of things were popping off in the chat, Ackman was on the phone while flying to Miami for a conference and the reception was bad so I didn’t get an answer. I believe we can safely assume the group is largely made up of the kinds of people who have the ability to make phone calls on airplanes. And Ackman did say the group was mostly Jewish billionaires. Forbes says there are 267 in the world, so we can peruse that list for possibilities and then feel sorry for the 217 who didn’t make the cut.
And my friend Max Read identified something interesting in his response to the story: the common path Ackman and others have taken in revolting against “wokeness.” Max’s post from his Substack includes this wonderful graphic, a ReadMax specialty:
What else? A few things:
I was sad (for myself) at the news that my longtime editor Marisa Carroll is getting a well-deserved promotion to become the executive editor at The Cut. But I was also excited: for Marisa, who is a genius; for The Cut, which gets to benefit from her genius; and, in a roundabout way, for me, because it means I’ll still get to work with her from time to time. The results are already proof that this is going to be good: my profile of Ackman is in the same issue as The Cut’s spring fashion issue, which includes its own cover story on Julianne Moore by Jazmine Hughes; a great essay by Emily Gould about marriage and mania; and this wild story about a scam gone horribly wrong. If you’re not subscribing to NY Mag/Marisa’s version of The Cut, what will you even talk about in your group chats?
I published a short review of the audiobook version of Martin Baron’s journalism memoir, as read by Liev Schreiber, who played Baron in the movie Spotlight. My thanks to Baron for giving me a reason to rewatch a great movie. (And to Bill Ackman for giving me reason to rewatch Gladiator.)
Thanks for reading.