Bill Ackman Buys Ink by the Barrel

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Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

It’s a PR adage that suggests it’s a bad idea to pick a fight with the media because they can deny you an audience and control the flow of information.

The solution seems to be to get your own barrel.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has done just that by building a presence on X (formerly Twitter).

Ackman is one of the most active CEOs on social media. After Ray Dalio, he is probably the most visible hedge fund manager. He has 978,000 followers on X.

He started tweeting in 2017 and spent six years gradually building a following which he now uses to expound on business and social issues.

Ackman clearly understands the value of an audience.

“No one wants to have a proxy contest with someone with 900,000 followers,” he said in a recent interview on David Rubenstein’s podcast.

Ackman told Rubenstein there are two reasons he’s active on social media.

First, it allows him to voice his opinions on a variety of topics.

Second, he can communicate directly with stakeholders without relying on journalists who may not convey the message in the same way.

“Unlike the media generally where you can be excerpted or quoted inaccurately, here what I have said exactly is for the public record,” Ackman told Rubenstein.

“It doesn’t mean my point of view will be accepted by others, but at least I have a platform to do it in an accurate way.”

It’s an incredibly profound change in the landscape for business communications and one that more and more executives are picking up on.

Lately, Ackman has been using his voice to pressure Harvard’s President Claudine Gay to resign over her handling of allegations of antisemitism on campus.

Last night he posted on X a copy of a 2,000-word letter he wrote to the members of the board that governs Harvard. He argued that Gay has “done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history.”

The Harvard board will decide whether that is true or not.

What’s clear is that Ackman — already influential as a billionaire who has donated to the school — amplified his voice by posting the letter publicly to a large group of followers.

We saw a similar dynamic play out with Sam Altman, who leveraged his 2.2 million followers to pressure the board of OpenAI after he was fired.

You cannot buy that kind of visibility.

It needs to be built over time, post by post.

It’s an investment Altman and Ackman made over many years.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

Surveying the Man on the Street: The media loves to survey people and report on those polls as news. A recent CNN poll showed that substantially more people are worried about the economy now than they were in the middle of the Covid global shutdown. How can that possibly be?

Printer on Wheels: I came across a delivery bike in Harlem with a front mounted printer, locked and loaded with a full tray of legal-sized paper and a plug to connect to laptops.

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John Lennon: Last week was the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder. Frank McDonough posted a series of tweets recounting how Lennon spent the hours before his death, like getting the eggs benedict at Cafe La Fortuna. It drove home how sudden and shocking it was.

Hallucinate: The Word of the Year goes to “hallucinate,” which describes mistakes make by large language models.

Have You Seen This Man: A reoccurring theme for me is that some of the best communication is still analog even in a digital ChatGPT world. I came across this example of a WANTED poster on a pole in Manhattan.