Mark Goulopoulos

The hyperscalers have bet big on reactors. Next they'll have to lock up the fuel, and the first one to move gets the last good price.

why not just raise income tax rates? because your real intent is not to just “provide healthcare”. you’re masking that you are proposing the creation of, for the first time in the 250 years of this American republic, an organized government seizure of private property from citizens. you’re calling it a “wealth tax” or a “billionaires tax” or “millionaires tax” or whatever nom du jour polls well. but at the end of the day, it’s the seizure of private property from citizens by the government. citizens that earned money, paid their fair taxes on those earnings (53% if they live in California) and are now being told they need to hand over after-tax assets because the government has failed to provide promised services with the revenue it’s collected, and are now re-casting their own failure to be a socio-economic inequity that must be justly resolved... a slippery slope that has never gone anywhere good (see economic effects in USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, France and Norway wealth tax etc.) the American founders fled tyranny in Europe and this amazing nation was populated by immigrants (myself and your parents) from around the world not just looking for a “better life” but for a place where they could have freedom from tyrannical governments that can take what they want from private citizens. a great nation borne of property rights, the rule of law, and endowed freedoms to believe, speak, or act. these principles led to the greatest run of innovations, successes, and widespread increase in prosperity, for all citizens, ever seen. the citizens, the individuals, not the institutions, delivered this progress. those who invented, who toiled, who bled, who sacrificed, who took risk and persevered, who led, and who changed the world, are not charlatans, kleptocrats, or oligarchs. they’re what made us all better off. prosperity is a measure of america’s success, not its failure. it is your principle that is so offensive, as evidenced by the broad disdain for your flippant flirtation with the darkest of human fantasy - socialism. you and other neo-socialists have led so many of us to reflect on America’s history and what it is becoming. that now leads so many to consider, so unnecessarily, leaving their homes for a place where everyone stands up to shout down the principle you suggest. because if your ideas are now considered moderate, it’s clear this titanic is sinking. that a “simple tax” of taking assets that have been earned, through toil and tribulation, rightly taxed, and preserved, should now be unjustly seized, is your solution to a problem of obvious government mismanagement and outright fraud, tells us that your true motivation lies not in giving people healthcare but in cutting down success and deleting the system of prosperity and opportunity for all. i don’t care, and neither should anyone else, what the sum total market value of a private citizens private assets might be. it is none of my business and should be none of yours. because, again, once you open that pandora’s box, we might as well study Lord of the Flies … there is literally nothing stopping 51% of citizens demanding that their government go out and seize 100% of the private property of the 49%. want to give healthcare to people in need? do your job and fix healthcare. make it affordable. want to be lazy about it? then do your job lazily and raise income taxes. want to take private property from private citizens who have paid their fair share of taxes and legally earned their property, then honestly declare that it is envy, not inequity, that you strive to resolve…

Share this message to the Prime Minister. @AlboMP If you won’t use the powers you already have — don’t ask for more. Australians have had enough.

We are demanding a full retraction and public apology from the ABC. Last night on 7.30, the ABC deliberately misrepresented our report that led to the National Party abandoning Net Zero in an attempt to discredit our thorough research into the Australian energy market, net zero policies, and their effects on households, businesses and our environment. Our paper, Delivering a High Energy Australia, is a meticulous, evidence-based discussion paper built on more than 160 detailed references. It lays out, in full, how Net Zero is driving up energy prices, crippling Australian industry - and what we can do about it. But instead of engaging with the facts, the ABC tried to smear our work by claiming that our modelling came from Coal Australia. This is blatantly false. Our energy numbers both in this report, and the report we released earlier in the year have come from analysis of a number of sources, including but not limited to; the CSIRO, CIS, AEMO, Australian Energy Regulator, Australian Bureau of Statistics, DCCEEW, Net Zero Australia, Arche Energy, Adept Economics, the World Bank and the International Energy Agency. It also contained our own internal calculations based on publicly available data, and this too was made clear in both the body of the report and in the footnotes. The modelling Coal Australia commissioned from Clean Energy advisory firm Arche Energy merely reinforced our earlier findings, which is why we cited the work as an additional, supplementary reference in the report. And the ABC knew this. Before going to air, they reached out to us for clarification, and we made this clear. Yet despite knowing the truth, they ran the false claim anyway, and in doing so they knowingly misleading their audience to cast doubt on legitimate research. The ABC needs to be held accountable. We’ve demanded a full retraction and apology. Australians deserve to hear the truth, not taxpayer-funded lies designed to undermine real, legitimate research.

🧵 Just spent 10 days in South Africa—a brutal lesson in energy failure. Australia needs to wake up fast, or we're next. Here's why:

I thought to do one more post about the @NeriOxman Business Insider story in the hopes of its rapid resolution. In this post, I share the entire story including many new facts that we have learned in the last 24 hours, and hold nothing back from the public domain, including all intimate details. Even those who have followed the story closely will find this a fascinating read. Perspective In business and in life, I have always believed that the best way to understand someone’s perspective is to reverse places with them. Pretend that you are sitting in their seat, and they are in yours. The story I am about to tell begins on January 3rd, 2024 January 3rd, 2024 At 10:29pm on Wednesday January 3rd, Fran McGill, Pershing Square Capital Management’s head of communications, trieds to reach me to tell me that Business Insider (“BI”) had emailed him at 10:29pm that evening. I did not answer the phone as I was asleep. Fran had tried to previously reach me at 10:37pm and 10:38pm. He then tried my wife @NeriOxman at 10:39pm. Then he texted both of us at 10:40pm, and again at 1:03am, and also sent us emails, but we had already gone to sleep. We were on a family vacation in the Dominican Republic where the time is one hour later than NY. Fran tries us the following morning on Thursday, January 4th at 7:29am ET, and then finally reaches us at 9:05am DR time. When we finally hear the phone ring, Neri and I are in bed in our hotel enjoying our last morning before packing and heading back to New York City. We are still on vacation, and we are not expecting any calls, so I thought the incoming call was likely urgent. For context, my mom is 83; Neri’s dad is 90, and her mom has Alzheimer’s. I answer the call. Fran quickly explains that he had received an email from Katherine Long, a Business Insider reporter who claims to have identified a number of examples of what BI calls “plagiarism” in my wife’s MIT PhD dissertation from 2010, and she would shortly be publishing a story about these findings. The reporter wants to know if I have any comment. Fran forwarded the email from the reporter, which also copied Jake Swearingen, Deputy Editor, and Jack Newsham, Senior Reporter – Fast Investigations [What other news organization has a “Fast Investigation” division], all from BI. The subject line reads: “Journalist on Deadline | Plagiarism by Your Wife” In the email, the reporter claims that Neri had “plagiarized” five times in her dissertation, and explains that BI would be running a story to that effect. After providing the examples of alleged plagiarism, the reporter writes: “Do you expect your wife to remain at MIT in light of these instances of plagiarism?” This question is in a bold font. It is the only bold language in the three-page email. It is the only question in the email that I am asked to respond to. We are given a 12pmET/1pm DR deadline to respond. In response, Fran emails the reporter and explains that Neri is no longer at MIT, having given up her tenure when she moved to NY. Fran is asked again by the reporter, this time on the phone, about when Neri left MIT. Again, Fran confirms Neri is no longer at MIT. She left in 2020. BI then asks for a formal email confirmation that she is no longer a professor at MIT, which Fran then provides. In short, BI does not believe that Neri is no longer a professor at MIT. It immediately becomes clear to us that BI’s and the reporter’s goal for the story is to get Neri fired from MIT for plagiarism. In her email, the reporter says that I sought the firing of former President Gay from @Harvard due to her plagiarism, and suggests that Neri should be fired from MIT for the same reason. As a result, Katherine and the editorial team are very disappointed that Neri is no longer a professor as they won’t be able to get her fired. So they then set out to destroy Neri’s reputation and career, as the second-best outcome. The questions about plagiarism concern Neri’s 2010 MIT PhD dissertation entitled: Material-Based Design Computation. Unfortunately, our hotel has weak WiFi and the subject document in question is 330-pages long. We do not have a printed version, nor access to a printer. At 8:41am ET, Fran asks the reporter for more time to respond, and proposes a deadline of noon the following day on Friday, explaining that we are on vacation out of the country with our daughter, and will be shortly heading to the airport to return to New York. At 9:25am ET, Jake adds John Cook to the email chain. John is Executive Editor for News at BI. Together, they call Fran. On the call, John says that under no circumstances can we delay until tomorrow, and he offers a final deadline of 4pm ET. We postpone our flight and accept the 4pm ET deadline. After several hours of work, we determine that in four paragraphs of the 330-page document – in which Neri had correctly provided the proper citation for each author – she should have used quotation marks at the beginning and end of each paragraph. Now bear in mind, Neri’s thesis has 2,774 paragraphs, which implies an error rate of 0.1141%. In other words, for 99.8859% of the paragraphs Neri used proper citation. Not perfect, but pretty darn good. Also, for one sentence in her dissertation, Neri had properly paraphrased the author, but, by mistake, had omitted citing the author. In the dissertation, Neri expressed gratefulness for the author’s contribution to the field, and he is featured prominently in the document. In the other eight instances where Neri uses his work in the dissertation, she provided proper punctuation and attribution. Clearly, her intent was not to present his work as her own. Microsoft Word does not have a feature which counts sentences, but it looks like, on average, that there are about four sentences per paragraph in her dissertation. So using this assumption, Neri’s error rate for sentences was: 1/(2,774*4) or 1 out of 11,096 sentences. In other words, Neri accurately provided citations for 99.0988% of the sentences. Even better than her paragraph punctuation accuracy. In light of these errors, Neri and I prepare a response which she intends to post on X. When Neri finalizes the post, Fran emails the BI group at 12:48pm ET and tells BI that they should feel free to publish their story promptly. John calls Fran after receiving this email, and Fran again explains that BI should post the story, and further explains that Neri and/or I may want to comment once we see the story. At 1:10pm, Fran emails John, thanks him for the call, and says that Neri and I will be losing connectivity at 2:30pm, as there is no bandwidth on the 90-minute drive to the airport, and asks that BI publish the story before then. John responds that BI is not ready to publish the story, and asks us to hold off from posting until BI publishes its story. We give BI this courtesy, and we holdover in our hotel room while we wait for BI to finish and post its story. BI publishes a story at 2:28pm entitled: “Bill Ackman’s celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman’s dissertation is marred by plagiarism.” We quickly read the story. Neri then posts her response on @X, seven minutes later at 2:35pm ET. Neri’s post acknowledges the four missing quotations and the one missing attribution, apologizes for her mistakes, and graciously thanks MIT and the scientists who enabled her to build upon and create her own work: nitter.gq/NeriOxman/status/17429… Then we drive to the airport, fly home, and arrive about four hours later than planned. That same evening, at 5:54pm while we are enroute in the air, Business Insider publishes a story entitled: “Neri Oxman admits to plagiarizing in her doctoral dissertation after BI Report” We don’t see the story until the following day. The story is catastrophically damaging to Neri, and our nightmare begins. The “Neri admits to plagiarism” story is reposted and re-reported around the world in thousands of articles including on the front pages of the most important Israeli newspapers, Neri’s beloved homeland where she spent the first 25 years of her life, and where she has many family members and friends. It is also the number one trending post on X all day by a factor of 10X. Imagine the following headline: “Bill Ackman admits to insider trading” Would any publication write such a story unless I actually admitted to insider trading? In light of the catastrophically damaging nature of the headline to me and my family and business, don’t you think the publication would do serious analysis including consulting counsel to determine if I actually insider traded, and that I actually admitted to insider trading? BI’s headline about Neri, however, is much worse and more damaging. Plagiarism According to Plagiarism.org: to "plagiarize" means: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own to use (another's production) without crediting the source to commit literary theft to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward [My bold emphasis added]." Neri did not do any of the above offenses. Plagiarism is one of the most serious crimes you can accuse a professor of doing, as a finding of plagiarism is catastrophic to a professor's career. It is also catastrophically damaging to a former tenured member of the faculty, even if she has left the university, and she founds a company based on her academic research. For if Neri in fact committed fraud and stole other people's ideas, who would ever invest in or do business with her or her company? Because of the career-ending and reputationally damaging nature of a plagiarism finding, universities take allegations of plagiarism extremely seriously and adjudicate these cases with extraordinary care in academic tribunals. These proceedings typically take six or months before a finding is made, and can take years to be resolved if litigation ensues. The facts of each case are meticulously reviewed often with the benefit of separate counsel representing the faculty member and the university. Plagiarism is fraud. Fraud is a crime. Neri publicly admitted to making four clerical errors of punctuation and one missed footnote in her 330-page dissertation, and she apologized for doing so. To this day, she has never admitted to plagiarism despite BI’s incredibly damaging headline and story to the contrary. Neri has never committed fraud of any kind. January 5th, 2024 The following day, January 5th, Fran receives an email at 5:19pm from Katherine Long, copying John, Jake, and Jack, alleging other purported plagiarism. Note again that the email is sent to Fran at Pershing Square, and not to Neri Oxman or to her company. The email subject heading states: Journalist on deadline | Plagiarism by your wife and the email begins: "Dear Francis, My colleagues and I have identified numerous additional examples of Dr. Oxman’s plagiarism and we plan to publish a story about them this evening." The email continues for 11 more pages and 6,900 or so more words. The email is received at 5:19pm after sundown last Friday, after the beginning of Shabbat. Ninety-one minutes later, BI publishes a story entitled: “Academic celebrity Neri Oxman plagiarized from Wikipedia, scholars, a textbook, and other sources without attribution” The article makes novel and speculative assumptions about what is plagiarism including asserting that definitions of basic terms and words from Wikipedia, and quotations from software and hardware manuals that describe products used in Neri's research are plagiarism. Neri and I hire counsel on Monday. It is going to take many weeks to properly analyze all of the assertions as many of the sources are not readily available. We are working on cataloguing all of the factual misstatements and errors in the five BI stories, but even that takes time. The good news, however, is that in only 24 hours, Neri’s lawyers use the Wayback Machine to check MIT's plagiarism policy back when Neri wrote her thesis in 2009. It turns out that MIT's Academic Integrity Handbook did not require citations or even mention Wikipedia until 2013, four years after Neri wrote her dissertation and used Wikipedia for the definitions of 15 words and/or terms. Bear in mind that 2009 was still the early days for Wikipedia. Interestingly, Business Insider also used the Wayback Machine to research MIT's plagiarism policy, but only when it cited Wikipedia to manufacture plagiarism claims against Neri: "MIT’s academic integrity handbook notes that authors must either “use quotation marks around the words and cite the source,” or “paraphrase or summarize acceptably and cite the source.” Identical language appeared in MIT’s handbook at least as far back as 2007." [From Business Insider's initial email to Pershing Square of Jan. 3, 2014, 1030pm] As a side note, what are the chances that Business Insider examined the MIT handbook "as far back as 2007" and did not notice that there was no requirement to cite Wikipedia nor was it even mentioned until April 4, 2013 when the following language was added: "Wikipedia is Not a Reliable Academic Source Many of us use Wikipedia as a source of information when we want a quick explanation of something. However, Wikipedia or other wikis, collaborative information sites contributed to by a variety of people, are not considered reliable sources for academic citation, and you should not use them as sources in an academic paper. The bibliography published at the end of the Wikipedia entry may point you to potential sources. However do not assume that these sources are reliable – use the same criteria to judge them as you would any other source. Do not consider the Wikipedia bibliography as a replacement for your own research." To be clear, Neri did not use Wikipedia as a source, but only for the definitions of 15 words and/or terms for her dissertation. The words and terms are not ideas stolen from others. They are facts and descriptions like: “Weaving,” “Tensor,” “Functionally graded material,” “Finite element method,” “Manifolds,” “Heat flux,” “Constitutive equation,” “Pain,” “Computer-aided design,” “Computer graphics,” “Principle of minimum energy,” “Optimization,” entries related to “symmetry,” “Raster graphics,” and “sustainable design.” While there was no way for us to do any of the research required and respond to BI in the 91 minutes we were given before Business Insider published its story, our lawyers in a day were able to uncover the lack of Wikipedia guidance in the MIT handbook until April 13, 2013, four years after she wrote her dissertation. This finding wipes away 15, or more than half of the plagiarism claims made by Business Insider at 5:19pm last Friday night. It is clear from the order that the plagiarism claims are provided to us in the 12-page letter that BI put the “best ones” first, i.e., the ones we received on Friday, and the rest are just stuff they throw against the wall to see what sticks. Substantially all of the remaining 13 plagiarism claims consist of text excerpts from software and hardware manuals and websites for software and hardware used in Neri’s research and provided in the dissertation including a description of “poles.” It is also clear that the stories were staged. BI's goal was to get Neri to "admit plagiarism" based on the clerical errors of the first five examples. Then, once she is an admitted plagiarist, hit her with 7,000 words of accusations and publish 91 minutes later. Because by then, Neri is a self-admitted plagiarist so why even read anything but the headline. Impact on Neri Neri is one of the most acclaimed designers and scientists in the world. In order to understand what she does, I recommend you watch her podcast with Lex Fridman which can be found here: youtube.com/watch?v=XbPHojL_…. Alternatively, you can take a look at her 73-page CV which can be found here neri.oxman.com/cv. You will likely conclude from viewing the podcast and/or reading the CV that Neri is one of the most creative, brilliant and talented people in the world, and she has been recognized as such with the most important awards and honors in her field. Neri is also one of the kindest, most loving, and gentle human beings in the world. She has a remarkable combination of incredible attributes, and I am the luckiest man in the world to have met her when I did. But don’t take my word for it, ask around. Business Insider’s campaign to destroy Neri could have literally killed her, if she did not have profound love and support from me, love from our family and incredible friends, and confidence and respect from the most important scientists, architects, and designers around the world who have shown an incredible outpouring of support to her during this extraordinarily difficult time. But it still has been very, very challenging for her. She has suffered severe emotional harm, and as an introvert, it has been very, very difficult for her to make it through each day. Try to imagine how she feels. Seriously, try hard. Among other things, in one of the stories BI tried to create the impression in a materially false and misleading portion of one story that Neri had some kind of inappropriate relationship with Epstein, taking advantage of recent headlines concerning the release of the Epstein list. In short, Neri’s lab received a $150k donation from Epstein. She met Epstein once at the request of her boss the head of the MIT MediaLab in a meeting attended by one of the most important members of the MIT faculty, presented her work, and never saw Epstein again. Please see here for details: nitter.gq/BillAckman/statu… Being in the Spotlight Few people feel comfortable in the spotlight. Some love it, but most do not. Why? Because bright lights reveal things, and that makes people uncomfortable. And if you are in the spotlight and you make a mistake, other people find out. The number of people who find out depends on how bright the spotlight is. Some people try to get in the spotlight because it can be good for business, but it can be hard to get attention in a world with so much news and social media. One guaranteed way to be in the spotlight is to be a high-profile person and do something wrong or be accused of something wrong, the more wrong the brighter the spotlight. Another way to get in the spotlight is to be married to a high-profile person, and then be accused of serious wrongdoing like fraud, (let’s not forget that plagiarism is fraud). And if you happen to be a gorgeous, incredibly talented and charismatic person that is highly recognized in your field, the spotlight will be even brighter. And if they can somehow connect you to Jeffrey Epstein the spotlight will really, really glare, until it is so blinding that you can no longer see. And if the story says that you admitted to fraud and the online publication and its large German parent company both put out statements which say: “the facts in the story are undisputed,” that is the most spotlight you can possibly create. The story will become the biggest story in the world, and it will stay there until it is resolved. Every newspaper, magazine, blog post, and social media site in the world will write that story, and write many more follow ups. My Opening Words Now here is where my opening words become relevant again. The only way to begin to feel how Neri feels right now is to have the spotlight of the entire world bearing down on you. But you can only begin to feel what she is feeling if the spotlight is on you, and you have done something wrong or are responsible for wrongdoing. So I am now going to turn the spotlight around to the people responsible for this unbelievably disastrous mess. I have reached this point in the journey only after taking every step I could possibly take to try to end this madness that is severely harming the woman I love. And time is not her friend, every day of this incredibly damaging media mess is grinding down on her. Naming Names Below I am going to tell the behind-the-scenes story beginning Saturday, January 6th, and name names. So here goes: When the “Neri Oxman admits to plagiarism story” broke, I reached out to a board member I knew at BI, and to its controlling shareholders, the co-ceos of KKR, and to Mathias Döpfner, the Chairman and CEO of Axel Springer. I assumed that with a call or two, I would be able to convince BI or AS to suspend the stories so we could address the materially misleading and false statements that were damaging to Neri while the stories were in suspension. This seemed like an easy request to me. If we weren’t able to rebut the allegations, then BI was free to republish the stories. They would be even bigger stories in that case, but after 110 hours or so of trying, I haven’t been able to achieve this objective. Alternatively, I proposed that AS announce that an investigation was pending about both the alleged facts in the story – including the most important false statement, i.e., that Neri had admitted to plagiarism – in addition to the already launched investigation of journalistic practices and ethics that was underway and already announced. By putting the stories in suspense or at least announcing that the facts were under investigation, that would enable Neri to defend herself against the plagiarism accusations. The stories could then be corrected, or I thought, more likely, depublished, and new stories could be written that would help restore Neri’s reputation. Whom did I contact and why? I reached out to a board member of Business Insider because the board of BI oversees the hiring and firing of BI management including its Editor-in-Chief, Nicholas Carlson, Executive Editor John Cook, the reporter, Katherine Long, and Deputy Editor Jake Swearingen. I reached out to Joe Bae because he is Co-CEO of KKR, the effective controlling shareholder of Axel Springer, which according to public information, holds 48.5% of the company along with CPPIB, the Canadian pension fund. I didn’t call CPPIB because I didn’t know until today that it was an owner of the company. And I reached out to Henry Kravis because he is KKR’s representative on the board of Axel Springer, and he and George Roberts are the founders and largest individual shareholders of KKR. AS is only one of two boards that Henry sits on. The Business Insider Board Member I called a board member of BI that I knew, but not well, on Saturday. He responded by text and we ultimately scheduled a call on Sunday morning at 10am. On 830am, on Sunday morning, he sent me a text in which, after pleasantries, he said: “After spending a lot of time over the past few weeks looking at and thinking about the definition of “plagiarism” (and some cited examples), I agree with you about it. Academia needs to narrow the definition. There’s a big difference between clerical oversights and intentional theft and misrepresentation. And there should be a clear delineation between the two. I’m actually planning to write about that myself this week. If you’re still free today, happy to call you whenever convenient between 10-2. Look forward to talking.” I was obviously encouraged by his text as Neri was certainly not a plagiarist under this definition. We spoke Sunday at 10:01am. It was a condition of him speaking to me that I not disclose his name publicly, which is why I am not doing so here. In summary, he said that he would resolve the issue with a four-part plan including an investigation of what went down, an opinion piece he was writing for BI on plagiarism referenced above, and two other steps which I don’t remember. I was encouraged by his words, but ultimately, he misled me. I shared with him many concerns I had about the reporting, its factual inaccuracy, and the materially false and misleading stories that had been published. I made one request. I asked him to publicly disclose that Axel Springer had launched an investigation of the story, and he said he would have to get back to me on that request. Hours later, at 3:41pm, (I had previously told him that Neri and I were going to a wedding at 4pm) he told me that AS would be releasing a statement about the investigation. Unfortunately, that statement and the contemporaneous ones made by BI and its Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson in an email to staff, all made the same false and damaging statement that: “the facts of the reports have not been disputed…” This of course was a catastrophically damaging statement for Neri.

My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source. Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story this evening. As a result, we don't have time to research their claims prior to publication. It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family. This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews. We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism. We will be using MIT's own plagiarism standards which can be found here: integrity.mit.edu/handbook/w… We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency.

You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and partner in life, @NeriOxman. I am one of the most fortunate people in the universe in large part because of Neri. Please see her post below about today’s Business Insider piece about her dissertation. Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate. Neri, a former tenured professor at @MIT, is the author of 74 peer-reviewed papers, eight peer-reviewed book chapters, and numerous other journal papers and proceedings. She has been awarded 15 patents for various innovations, and her work has been featured in 116 exhibitions around the world including two recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and SF MoMA. If you would like to learn more about Neri, I encourage you to watch her podcast with Lex Fridman: youtu.be/XbPHojL_61U?si=1DIs…

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about. I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts. How could this be? I wondered. When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students. A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge. I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment. Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant. I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more. What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology. Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.” Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology. In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one. After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear. The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk. The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled. These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society. The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country. You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe. To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors. Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed. And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed. I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all. America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times. Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists. An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups. The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment. I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring. When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community. I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more. I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities. In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock. Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action. While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks. I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am. All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role. This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty. The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay. The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay? One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent. Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management. The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president. Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets. The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school. The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices? In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above. The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department. The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students. And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues. It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility. The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter. According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies. Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board. In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them. So what should happen? The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats. The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board. The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure. The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy. Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible? Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences. Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus. Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy. These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done. A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president. A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect. Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves. We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

They already have voices 3,278 Aboriginal corporations 243 Native title bodies 48 Land councils 35 Regional councils 122+ Aboriginal agencies 3 Advisory bodies 145 Health Organizations 11 Indigenous Federal MPs 12 Culturally important Indigenous days Taxpayers give $33 BILLION annually for 984,000 people (3.8% of the population) Let’s not forget the “voice” they already have at the highest level of government the Minister for Indigenous Affairs who seems to be joined to the hip with our current PM. You want equality then how about we drop all the handouts, grants and government assistance that they get over every other Australian citizen and put us all on the same non racist play field. Source: Professor Matthew Bennett, spokesman for the Sovereign Court of International Justice (SCIJ) and International Barrister with a 25+ year legal career and an expert on international law. #votenotothevoice

1) This year has been difficult for many investors, whether you are a novice or an experienced risk taker. It would be useful to revisit today's money masters and see how they dealt with gut-wrenching loss. It always helps renew my ambition. 🧵

Sad, sobering, but inspiring. deseret.com/2022/8/22/233092…

The second half of 2022 was historic for the US housing market 🏠 Transaction volumes froze 🧊 Prices started to decline 📉 Here's an unbiased and data-backed update on the US housing market heading into 2023 👇 1/

LOL wut? Civic duty (or responsibility, no difference), isn’t “backed by law”. The ENTIRE POINT is that this is something you should do voluntarily as a good citizen, not that the “law” requires you to do it. FFS.

@Geo_papic on spaces with @profplum99 calls German industrials the “best opportunity” for investors looking forward. Calls the “crippling German energy crisis” way overstated! “German industrial strength isn’t rested on some €200B Russian energy, but German labor productivity!”

1/ In August, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz led a delegation of senior political and business leaders on a trip to Canada to beg Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to consider fast-tracking the approval of new LNG export facilities along Canada’s Atlantic Coast.

We have spent about $4.6 trillion on various forms of alternative #energy and we’ve reduced the market share of #oilandgas from 82% to 81%. In the meantime we created tremendous dislocations in energy distribution and pricing.

1/ "Australia's A$200 billion ($134.28 billion) sovereign wealth fund is increasing exposure to gold, commodities, private equity and infrastructure as it warns the future will echo the low-growth, high-inflation era of the 1970s."

Bloomberg: "India Plans to Add 21 Nuclear Reactors by 2031: Minister Singh" Additional locations / plant details below... #nuclear #uranium