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By: Benyamin Davidsons
A month earlier, billionaire Bill Ackman, chief executive officer of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, had reportedly threatened to sue Business Insider. Then, last week Ackman was spotted at a posh restaurant being cordial with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, which is Business Insider’s parent company.
As reported by Page Six, the two went to dinner together at Daniel, the upscale Upper East Side eatery, and were “seated together in a corner of the restaurant.”
“They were very much noticed. It looked cordial — like they were having a good time — it was certainly a nice exchange,” a source for the Post said. The source added that Döpfner paid the tab for the table. It is not clear what was discussed by the duo at the restaurant, but they seemed to get along well, and it certainly created a lot of buzz.
Ackman, 57, who boasts a net worth of $4.2 billion in 2024, per Forbes, has been in the news of late for standing up to anti-Semitism by threatening to pull his generous donations from Harvard University unless it called for the ousting of its President Claudine Gay. Gay finally resigned in January after criticism for her answers at a congressional hearing regarding anti-Semitism on the Ivy League campus and also following charges that her academic writing contained examples of plagiarism. Per the Post, Ackman had played an important role in pushing Gay to step down, and once she had, he got backlash when the Business Insider published two articles that accused Ackman’s own wife, Neru Oxman, of improperly crediting work in her 2010 doctoral dissertation.
The articles hinted at hypocrisy saying they “found a similar pattern of plagiarism” by Oxman. Oxman, 48, is a prominent Israeli-American designer, architect and former MIT professor. She has had exhibitions at MoMA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and designed a series of 3D-printed masks for Björk. Ackman had taken to social media last month saying, “You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife.” He defended his wife adding that, “Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.” He later added on X (formerly Twitter) saying, “It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.”
He didn’t stop there though. He had threatened to sue Business Insider and its parent company, saying they “have tripled down on their false claims and defamation” against his wife. “By complaint I mean lawsuit, to be clear,” Ackman had said on X. Ackman also said that Business Insider “is toast” in a post that included a clip of the scene from the movie ‘Gladiator’ with the quote “At My Signal, Unleash Hell”.
Axel Springer is the German media company, founded in 1946, that also owns Business Insider, Politico, Bild, and other publishing brands, boasting 18,000 employees as of 2023. In mid- January, following complaints from Ackman, Business Insider’s top executive had commented saying they were satisfied with the fairness and accuracy of stories about Oxman. Business Insider’s CEO Barbara Peng issued a statement at the time, saying “there was no unfair bias or personal, political and/or religious motivation in pursuit of the story.”
Ackman had also posted on X, “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”.
