Wall Street short seller Bill Ackman learned the hard way, after pushing hard for the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay due to plagiarism, that one has to be careful about such things, as last week, Business Insider had a series of articles describing his wife’s, former MIT professor Neri Oxman, plagiarism in her own work (and it seems worse on the whole than Gay’s but that’s a separate topic). Ackman then melted down online with a 5,139-word Xitter screed in which he concluded, essentially, ‘everybody does it.’

In all seriousness (or with as much seriousness as the topic actually warrants), the business press usually fawns over and gives great deference to guys worth billions. How much of an asshole must Ackman be for Business Insider to go after his wife like this?

As some asshole with a blog Bluesky feed put it:

One understated, but important, reason to tax the crap out of the rich is so the rest of us don’t have to worry about what assholes like Ackman think.

But it’s all just about ethics in footnoting anyway…