Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman takes aim at ‘anti-capitalist’ DEI ‘ideology’ after Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation

According to the billionaire hedge fund manager, the anti-semitism that he had previously accused Harvard of “was not the core of the problem” but merely “a troubling warning sign” of the real issue—an obsession with DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, that has grown into something entirely different from the three concepts embedded within the acronym, he said on X on Tuesday. 

In the 4,000-word post, Ackman painted DEI as a “movement” that is antithetical to any merit-based program, including capitalism itself. Ackman’s missive appears to be the first mainstream criticism of DEI as “anti-capitalist,” and it widens the scope of a yearslong debate over DEI initiatives that has roiled the business community. Now, instead of DEI being part of a new way of looking at “stakeholder capitalism,” Ackman is accusing it of being an “ideology” harmful to the functioning of a capitalist economy. 

“Under DEI’s ideology,” he wrote, “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.” By this standard, he continued, “Capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist …” Zooming out in his analysis, he said the use of the lens of “oppression” means that any merit-based…