F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly said to Ernest Hemingway, “You know, the rich are different from you and me.” To which Hemingway supposedly replied, “Yes. They’ve got more money.”
Never happened, but there’s a good yarn behind it, and some good writing about the characteristics of the very rich.
My problem with the very rich isn’t that they are different than you and me. It’s that they’re exactly the same.
You’ve been hearing about this guy Bill Ackman, all of a sudden. He’s a billionaire hedge-fund manager who got upset about his alma mater Harvard’s insufficiently vociferous response to the October 7 Hamas attacks, and suddenly found his voice—which turned out to be really loud, thanks to the sound system they have over there in the Hamptons. He helped get Harvard’s president sacked and now he’s on a glorious campaign against diversity, equity, inclusion and plagiarism (DEIP).
Ackman’s story was chronicled well last week in New York Magazine. How is he like you and me?
He has crackpot ideas, just like us! For instance, I secretly believe that when I eat any kind of hot pepper, it adds years back onto my life that had been subtracted by cigarettes and booze. I have a friend who believed for many years that all back pain was psychosomatic. I knew a guy who insisted that any tavern situated on the east side of a north-south Chicago street would fail—and if it hadn’t failed yet, it was doomed to fail someday.
Here comes Ackman, from the NYMag piece:
Ackman believes that our lives are often fated from birth. “I have a view that people become their names,” he told me. “Like, I’ve met people named Hamburger that own McDonald’s franchises.” We’d been talking for nearly an hour and a half when Ackman asked me what my name was, hoping to offer a diagnosis. After he seemed momentarily stumped by my surname, I offered him my first name, which he misheard as Reed. “Read … write,” he said, before turning back to himself. “So, my name is Ackman — it’s like Activist Man.”
When our young children misbehave, we ask them, “What got into you?” When they get a little older, we attribute their misbehavior to “getting mixed up with wrong people.” (Whose parents, of course, think our kid is the wrong people.) Ackman’s daughter followed his footsteps to Harvard; who could have guessed she’d fall in with the wrong crowd there?
“She became, like, an anti-capitalist. Like practically a Marxist,” Ackman said in January, leaning across a large conference-room table at the offices of his hedge fund, Pershing Square. “We’d talk about capitalism, and she would freak out at the table.” His daughter was in the social-studies department just like her father, and rowed crew, too, but she had chosen to write her thesis on “The Concept of Reification in Western Marxist Thought,” having come to very different conclusions than her father had about how the world should work. Ackman said it felt as though she “had been indoctrinated” into a cult. Father and daughter eventually made up — he bought her a copy of Das Kapital as a present for her graduation in 2020 — but in hindsight, Ackman saw it as an early warning. “That was an indicator, but I didn’t know if that was just my daughter or what,” he said.
My advertising exec father said that every human being had the same secret philosophy: “There will never be another me.” You’d best understand that when selling someone anything—even insurance. “Is there anyone else in the whole human race,” a 1973 Equitable commercial said, “with your kind of style and your kind of grace?”
Whether you’re a billionaire or a hobo, it’s a real psychological trick to live all day every day at what sure looks like the center of the universe to you, and not have it go to your head!
On December 5, Ackman was sitting in his barber’s chair watching [Harvard President Claudine] Gay and the presidents of MIT and Penn answer questions from Congress. When all three appeared unwilling to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, falling back on a defense of free speech, he called his director of communications and asked him to cut a clip of the exchange. “He emails it to me while I’m sitting there getting my haircut, and I write that tweet and send it out,” Ackman told me. “And it changed the course of history.”
Just like you and me, Ackman wants to know he matters! He’s a fifty-something, and time is running out! Did he just eat, shit, fight and fuck his way through this life like the rest of us, and is he just going to die like us, too? Or could he be involved in something bigger, something greater than himself, something exalted from the grime of commerce.
Would Ackman … ever consider running [for president] himself? Some of his friends think he might. “He’s going through a period of growth—a period of expansion—because it turns out this political activism is quite fun, and I believe the adulation he feels will push him to do a lot more of it,” the longtime Ackman associate told me. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see him running for office. And if you ask what office, you don’t know Bill Ackman.” Ackman himself said in December that “if the country wanted me at some point, I would be open to it.”
If you’ve seen The Sopranos, you’ve seen Succession. Every tough guy just wants to be loved. Within a finance world overflowing with arrogant pricks as sure as Best Buy’s employee suggestion box brims with urine, Ackman has stood out for years. Now, he’s being recognized on the street.
Ackman believes that his campaign is critical for the future of America and that the masses are with him. He said strangers have continually come up to praise him for his work: in the Dominican Republic; at an Orthodox wedding in New Rochelle; at hotels, where people leave thank-you notes with the concierge. “I can’t walk around New York City, or anywhere, without people coming up to me,” he said. “I was in a restaurant two weekends ago—the whole restaurant gave me a standing ovation.” I asked where the restaurant was. Ackman smiled. “This incredibly diverse community called the Hamptons,” he said.
See, billionaires aren’t so bad. They’re just insecure, self-involved, slightly scatterbrained hotheads like us. It’s just that when they get carried away, they can make bigger messes.
“The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon,” is what Hemingway actually said in literary response to what he saw as Fitzgerald’s misplaced fascination with the rich. “They were dull and repetitious.”
Just like us. Only louder.
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