Bill Ackman
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The Katie Miller Podcast · Bill Ackman: Harvard's Future, His Iconic X Posts & His Daughter's…
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Why Is Bill Ackman Not Worried About Harvard?
Bill Ackman says he is not worried about Harvard. He says Harvard is okay, and he has other philanthropic things he is focused on.
Katie Miller asked the longtime Harvard donor what he thinks of President Trump's effort to rid schools of wokeness, whether Harvard can eradicate some of the origination of that woke thought, and what the future of his Harvard giving is. Bill Ackman says it is actually working. A classmate who is a Harvard professor told him at a wedding that weekend that Harvard has changed dramatically in the last few years. The student body has changed significantly and gone back to being a meritocracy. People are encouraged to say what they think, and conservative students
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What Happened When Bill Ackman Tweeted About Chocolate?
Bill Ackman tweeted a picture of Amadea, the 100% dark chocolate he calls the best, and the bar sold out.
He could not get it anymore, so he wrote a tweet on Twitter complaining that he could not get his favorite chocolate. People started sending him boxes. He keeps a lot of the chocolate in his office and eats one whole bar when he gets hungry. Dark chocolate is his biggest guilty pleasure. He says most 100% chocolate is terrible, and Amadea is amazing.
Katie Miller tells him to mix the dark chocolate with frozen wild blueberries and calls the combination the complete level up. She says she will give him the name of the place off camera so it does not sell out.
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What Happened to Bill Ackman's Daughter?
Bill Ackman's daughter had a congenital arterial venous malformation and a large brain bleed. She lay on the ground for 15 or 16 hours, surgeons operated anyway, and cognitively she is the same person she was before.
She had no symptoms beforehand. Bill Ackman says an MRI is the only way they would have found it, and you would not take a child for an MRI without a reason. He wants to examine her Oura Ring data from earlier days for any hint of the malformation. An arterial venous malformation weakens veins in the brain. A person can have it for a whole life. It can lead to a small bleed or a burst.
When someone collapses and reaches a hospital right away, surgeons remove part of the skull
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How Did Bill Ackman Meet Neri Oxman?
Bill Ackman met Neri Oxman after a 78-year-old Harvard professor called to set him up, and he waited because she had a boyfriend. About six months later a friend described the same woman, and Bill Ackman recognized the match.
While Bill Ackman and his ex-wife were splitting, they sent a friend an email of the kind Gwyneth Paltrow invented, saying they were splitting. Bill Ackman thinks the call came later that day or the following day. The professor said he had the most amazing woman for him, named her Neri Oxman, and invited him to a dinner party in a couple of weeks, with the caveat that her boyfriend would be there. Bill Ackman said the professor was wonderful and gay, that he did not kn
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Why Is Bill Ackman Unafraid of Negative Feedback?
Bill Ackman says he is unafraid of negative feedback because he is not afraid of blowback or of losing his job. He believes the country does not move forward when people stay silent. Important things remain unsaid because of fear of blowback and fear that speaking could hurt someone's employment and get them fired. Because he does not share that fear, he says he is well positioned to take the risk of speaking the truth.
Katie Miller asked how long it took him to become unafraid, and how he reached a point where criticism does not land. She said she has met people with a similar net worth who still read their Google News and their news alerts and are afraid of any bit of negative criticism.
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Can Bankruptcy Wipe Out Student Loans?
Student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Bill Ackman says the rule exists so people do not go to college and then, at 23, file for bankruptcy and wipe the loans out.
Katie Miller asks how to fix a system in which half of college grads work jobs that do not require a degree while they drown in student debt. Bill Ackman says he does not think an 18-year-old, maybe even a 17-year-old, signing on for student debt got the same federal disclosure as a mortgage or a credit card, or really understood the obligation. He thinks most people do not even know the loans cannot be discharged. A borrower underwater on a car, a credit card, or a home can reset through personal bankruptcy. Filing i
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What Does Bill Ackman Say About Democrats?
Bill Ackman says the Democratic Party is in the worst place it has ever been in the 250-year history of the country. He calls it a crazy radicalized anti-American thing. He says some very high-quality Democrat senators and some congressmen remain, but the Democratic Party itself is in a very bad place.
He lives in New York and says he did not take politics seriously. He always held centrist views and did not align with a party. The only people who showed up in his office were Democrats, and he supported the ones he liked as people. He registered for an independent, then registered as a Democrat to vote in an important primary, and he had not checked his registration in years. When he was pu