The Astounding Hypocrisy of Bill Ackman

America's leading warrior against anti-Semitism gives Elon Musk a get-out-of-jail-free card because, well, business is business.

Last April I quit what was then called Twitter and is now called X because I didn’t want to associate myself with the offensive online rantings of its owner, Elon Musk. These included Musk’s smearing of Paul Pelosi; Musk’s labeling NPR “state-affiliated media” (NPR’s $126 million subsidy is dwarfed by the $4.9 billion in government subsidies that the Los Angeles Times calculated Musk’s own companies have received); and Musk’s gleeful violation of labor law. Shortly after I left Musk posted a hateful anti-Semitic tweet, prompting me to report on Mastadon that if I hadn’t quit the place already I’d be quitting it then. That first anti-Semitic tweet didn’t cause much of a ruckus, but when he did it again last month, advertisers started leaving X: Disney, Lionsgate, Paramount Global (which owns CBS), Apple, Walmart, IBM. Musk’s response to his critics was first to apologize and then to tell them to go fuck themselves. Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that X’s ad revenues are this year down 40 percent. Couldn’t happen to a nicer fella.

But Musk has one highly valuable ally who’s willing to say he isn’t anti-Semitic, and you’ll never guess who it is.

Bill Ackman is chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management. He is worth $3.9 billion, according to Forbes. And lately he’s been fighting anti-Semitism. When a bunch of Harvard students put out a (pretty offensive) letter right after the Hamas massacre saying Israel was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” Ackman demanded that Harvard release the names of students in the sponsoring organizations so that future employers could blackball them. When that attempt failed, Ackman set about trying to get Harvard President Claudine Gay fired for failing to punish anti-Semitism on Harvard’s campus. That also failed. But no one can doubt that Ackman will bear any burden and pay any price to fight the plague of anti-Semitism.

Except when the anti-Semitism is emanating from Elon Musk.

As corporate America was packing its bags and leaving X in droves, Ackman took to X to defend Musk. “Musk is a free-speech absolutist,” Ackman wrote, “which I respect.” I’m sorry, what? You respect free-speech absolutism for an obviously toxic bigot worth $254 billion but not for some over-excited college teenagers? What are you even doing still maintaining an account on X?

It isn’t personal, as they say in The Godfather, it’s just business. Ackman has nearly one million followers on X, or Twitter, or whatever the hell it’s called, and lately he’s been using it to exercise an astonishing (and highly profitable) control over the bond market, which Ackman sent into a tailspin in August and restored to health in October largely because the situation in the Middle East demanded his full attention. Ackman is a bona fide American oligarch, which explains why he thinks Harvard and everybody else should do his bidding. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.