Bill Ackman has toned down his vitriol toward former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism after Business Insider reported on Friday that his wife, Neri Oxman, copied portions of Wikipedia articles and scholarly documents in her doctoral dissertation at MIT. In a long-winded, 5,139-word post on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday night, Ackman wrote that it is “a near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers.”
“Some plagiarism is due to the laziness of the author. Laziness is not a great excuse for a member of the faculty, but it does not seem like a crime to me,” he later said.
Although Oxman admitted fault on Thursday prior to the Business Insider article’s publication and has since apologized, Ackman has gone to war against MIT, saying a couple hours later on Saturday evening that he had “new information that strongly suggests that the Business Insider source(s) is at MIT.” He also called back to previous information he shared accusing Mark Gorenberg, the chair of the MIT Corporation, which is the board of trustees at the university, of committing tax fraud by using donor money to fund his wife’s charity.
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The billionaire hedge fund manager also complained on Sunday morning that Business Insider broke “the code of the road” by going after his family and called the news website’s executive editor John Cook an anti-Zionist who targeted his wife for being Israeli.
A representative for Ackman turned down questions from Business Insider regarding his Saturday evening remarks.
