Hedge Fund Billionaire Bill Ackman Buys 5 Percent Stake in Israeli Bourse

Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital, speaks at the Wall Street Journal Digital Conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., on Oct. 17, 2017. Mike Blake /Reuters

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and his wife Neri Oxman have bought a significant stake in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), with the investment representing a vote of confidence in the Israeli economy as the country continues its grinding war against the Hamas terror group.

The Israeli bourse said on Wednesday that Mr. Ackman and his wife would be buying a 4.9 percent equity stake in TASE, as part of the exchange’s secondary offering of roughly 17 million ordinary shares, priced at roughly $5.50 per share.

TASE will receive roughly $65 million in net proceeds from the offering, which it said it plans to invest in its technology infrastructure.

The bourse said in a Jan. 24 statement that the offering drew “robust interest” from investors in Israel, the United States, Europe, and Australia, “reflecting a strong vote of confidence in both the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the Israeli economy at large.”

“Among the prominent buyers were Neri Oxman and Bill Ackman who have agreed to purchase approximately a 4.9% equity stake in the TASE,” it added.

The couple have yet to publicly comment on their purchase.

Ackman Activism

Mr. Ackman, who runs Pershing Square Capital, has been a vocal supporter of Israel in its military campaign in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.

He has also been a critic of the way former Harvard President Claudine Gay handled what he said in a Nov. 4 letter was a “growing number of anti-Semitic incidents on campus, as we wait for you and the University to act.”

On Oct. 8, the day after Hamas gunmen killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, dozens of student groups at Harvard co-signed a controversial letter that accused the Israeli government of being responsible for “all unfolding violence.”

Mr. Ackman, a Harvard graduate, reacted to the letter by calling for the release of a list of members of each of the organizations that supported the letter so as to ensure that he and some of his fellow CEOs who found the student groups’ stance objectionable would not “inadvertently hire any of their members.”

He has also criticized the leadership of the Ivy League university more generally, including for its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, and he’s backing a bid by four dissident alumni to join its board of overseers.

Criticism of Harvard, DEI

Mr. Ackman said Harvard’s diversity policies have contributed to the problem of a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the wake of the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

“For the past four weeks since the horrors of October 7th, I have been in dialogue with members of the corporation board, other alumni, as well as students and faculty sharing and comparing our concerns about the growing number of anti-Semitic incidents on campus,” Mr. Ackman wrote in the Nov. 4 letter to Ms. Gay.

“Four weeks after the barbaric terrorist acts of October 7th, I have lost confidence that you and the University will do what is required,” he said.

“Jewish students are being bullied, physically intimidated, spat on, and in several widely-disseminated videos of one such incident, physically assaulted,” he added.

Mr. Ackman said that several members of Harvard told him the university’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (OEDIB) was “an important contributing factor to the problem.”

“I was surprised to learn from students and faculty that the OEDIB does not support Jewish, Asian, and non-LGBTQIA White students,” he wrote. Harvard’s statement on diversity “makes it clear” that the university does not consider Jews as part of such efforts, he argued.

Later, after Ms. Gay resigned amid a plagiarism scandal, Mr. Ackman called on members of the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing Board, to step down.

In a Jan. 4 post on X, where he has 1.1 million followers, Mr. Ackman said he had concluded that anti-Semitism was not the core of the problem but the “canary in the coal mine” at Harvard and other academic institutions, where there have been reports of a rise in anti-Jewish sentiment in recent months.

“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,” he said, adding that he had been “ignorant” about the true nature of DEI, “a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large.”

He said he had come to understand through research that DEI “was not what I had naively thought these words meant.”

“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,” he wrote.

He then called on members of Harvard’s governing board to step down, saying the it “should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI.”

“The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated,” he added.

Harvard did not respond to an earlier request for comment on Mr. Ackman’s remarks.

Aaron Pan and Naveen Athrapully contributed to this report.