As I found out yesterday, not plagiarism but, sometimes it's hard to have an original thought.
First up, via Mr. Ackman's eXtwitter feed:
The owner of Business Insider Mathias Döpfner engaged in plagiarism for his PhD « XJMR
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 13, 2024
How’s this for irony? https://t.co/cvG29DQFUq
Links to link to Wikipedia (English):
....Early life and education
Döpfner grew up in Offenbach am Main. His mother was a housewife and his father, Dieter C. Döpfner, was a university professor of architecture and director of the Offenbach College of Applied Arts from 1966 to 1970.[2]
Döpfner studied musicology, German literature and theater science in Frankfurt and Boston. He obtained a Ph.D. in musicology in 1990 from the University of Frankfurt. A committee of the university found in 2023 that he had engaged in scientific misconduct in the handling quotations, but that he could retain his degree.[3][4]
A few days earlier Ackman had eXtweeted:
I have heard truly wonderful things about Mathias Dopfner who is the CEO and a major shareholder of Axel Springer, from friends whose opinions I trust. I recently had the opportunity to speak to Martin Varsavsky who is on the board of AS. He seems like a first class person and we have a former friend in common. In five minutes, I could tell he was a very good man. I have also heard good things about him. AS is controlled by KKR, which is also a first class operation. What are they all doing owning Business Insider whose unethical business model appears to be based on destroying people by any means possible? How can such high quality people own such a terrible company? Why haven’t they cleaned house or shut this thing down? How can KKR be the ultimate controlling shareholder of a totally unethical and sleazy media company? What are they thinking?
Puck has very helpfully published (January 12):
The Declaration on the Rights of Ackman
More news and notes on the hedge fund manager’s very public crusade against Business Insider, Axel Springer, and KKR.
On Friday, Bill Ackman, the voluble activist investor and Ivy League president defenestrator, sat down for an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin. It was Ackman’s first televised conversation since the hedge fund manager achieved legitimate pop culture notoriety as an advocate of Israel, outspoken Harvard alum, and plagiarism aficionado. Indeed, the CNBC chat would be his first significant interview, outside of a short piece in the Times, since the October 7 attack on Israel, the subsequent displays of antisemitism on college campuses, and the resignation of Penn president Liz Magill and Harvard president Claudine Gay, for which Ackman aggressively advocated.
It was also Ackman’s first interview since the commencement of his very public battle with Business Insider regarding its multiple reports alleging that his wife, the computational designer and academic Neri Oxman, committed plagiarism in her 2010 dissertation. And his first, of course, since Ackman began sharing an internal monologue on X about his grievances with the reports and his desire to vanquish B.I.
Ackman’s many Twitter treatises would seem to preclude the need for greater excavations of his thinking, and yet Sorkin deftly probed a few of the outstanding enigmas. What’s motivating Ackman? How far was he willing to take his campaign? And, Sorkin inquired with characteristic diplomacy, was he at all concerned that he had already “taken it, to some degree, too far,” and that, “by being such a big figure in this conversation,” he had made it harder to achieve his stated goals? (“I disagree,” Ackman replied, quickly and predictably.)....
....MUCH MORE
So, not exactly 1789 and all that: Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, but then, what is these days?
Previously:
Neri Oxman’s Hubby (Bill Ackman) Sets The Record Straight About Brad Pitt
