Kara Swisher Mercilessly Mocks Bill Ackman and the ‘Disease of Rich People’ Who Don’t Know What They’re Talking About

Jamie FreveleMar 1st, 2024, 8:23 am
 

Journalist Kara Swisher is promoting her newest book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story which delves into her career following the outgrown personalities of tech titans. And in a video promoting it for The Washington Post, Swisher took several swipes at one of them in particular: Bill Ackman.

To promote the essay, Swisher appeared in a video on Twitter/X on Thursday in which she targeted Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who led the charge in the firing of former Harvard president Claudine Gay and is not going after Business Insider for reporting on his wife’s plagiarism:

Listen we’re having to endure Bill Ackman right now. Like, he’s a hedge fund guy, right? What does he know about DEI. But he sure does talk about it! And everybody pays attention because he’s a rich guy who happened to give money to Harvard. You know like, okay, so that gives you the right to be a persistent irritant? You know, and like, if I what if I started tweeting about hedge fund investing? “Oh, let me tell you what I think without any knowledge of the situation! Let me take out my personal foibles on everybody else and pretend it’s something about something serious.”

So this is what rich people do once that now they’ve gotten a little power and they got their own little networks, right? Let us tell you, because we’re rich, what we think about Ukraine. Like, the fact that VCs, some of them are smart, I guess? You know, are like pontificating about what we should do in the South China Sea. I’d rather they just sit down. So I think it’s a function, it’s a disease of rich people who have people licking them up and down all day that they must be right. And that’s why many of them don’t talk to me anymore. Because often I’d be like, “What are you talking about, sir?”

Ackman has threatened legal action against Business Insider, which published articles about his wife’s plagiarism after Ackman pushed for Gay to be ousted from Harvard for her own plagiarism.

Part of the book was adapted into an essay that was published on the Post‘s site on February 15 that recounted a massive 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between tech CEOs and then President-Elect Donald Trump. That meeting, according to Swisher, was when “it all went off the rails for the tech industry.”

Correction: A previous version of this story identified Bill Ackman as the owner of Business Insider. Suffice to say that he is not.

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