The anti-woke hero's journey

The conversion narratives of Bill Ackman and Elon Musk

I really enjoyed reading Reeves Weideman’s new profile of the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman in New York magazine this week. Ackman has recently inserted himself in the news for loudly advocating, in dramatic and multi-thousand word tweets, first for the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay over plagiarism charges, and subsequently for the retraction of plagiarism charges against his wife Neri Oxman, a former professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab, originally documented by Business Insider.

If you’re not familiar with the Ackman-Oxman saga, your soul is probably overall better off, but if you’d like to darken it a bit, Reeves’ piece will give you a nice précis. And even if you are already unfortunately intimate with the story, this is the kind of wonderful profile you get when an alert reporter meets an unrestrained subject, filled with great details like Ackman’s philosophical endorsement of nominative determinism:

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.”

I suppose that all I personally can say to this is: fair enough!

Another interesting detail from the piece is that Ackman quite explicitly sees his inveighing against Harvard as an extension of his activist investing:

Ackman’s campaign against Harvard was in many ways a return to his roots. “It’s the same thing,” he told me. “As an activist, we usually have only a small percentage of the stock — 5 percent or 10 percent — and we get a corporation to do something. How do you do that? You win by the power of the idea.” But others who worked with him saw something new — Activist Man unleashed. “This is different, and maybe even better, for Bill,” a longtime Ackman associate told me. In business, he often had to wait for an annual board meeting to exert real pressure, and any substantive comment he made about a company was vetted by lawyers. “With political speech, he has no filter,” the associate said. “You’re getting direct nectar from the source — you’re getting the royal jelly directly from the queen.”

This struck me as one of many noteworthy parallels between Ackman and Elon Musk. Both men’s careers have till recently depended in a large part on the interaction between financial markets and media coverage--Ackman in his capacity as an activist investor writing public letters or short-seller eager to make his case against Herbalife on CNBC, and Musk in his role as a living marketing campaign and mascot for his various businesses. (Musk has obviously been much more successful at using the media to increase his wealth). One consequence of these histories is that both men are extremely comfortable being the center of media attention and therefore happy to become the faces of political campaigns; another is that both are convinced that this attention is a source and symbol of genuine power.

A third consequence is that Ackman and Musk operate their anti-woke political campaigns (such as they are) according to the same logic as their investment strategies, as Ackman himself admits above. No wonder, then, that both men are so thoroughly addicted to Twitter, which can present itself as a kind of financial market for discourse, where arguments and political struggles are subject less to the strictures of material reality or the rigors of careful deliberation (even in a vague sense) than to the swings of (theoretically manipulable and always somewhat occluded) crowd sentiment--like, say, stock prices.

There are other parallels between Musk and Ackman, of course. Here, e.g., is Ackman telling Weideman “where the trouble started”:

His nephew enrolled at Harvard, as did his eldest daughter — which, Ackman told me recently, is where the trouble started.

“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.” … Ackman said it felt as though she “had been indoctrinated” into a cult.

And here is a Telegraph summary of Elon Musk’s tale of conversion:

Elon Musk was driven to take over Twitter after fearing his transgender daughter had been infected with a “woke mind virus” incubated on the social media platform.

Mr Musk had initially rushed to embrace the news when Jenna, formally known as Xavier, transitioned at age 16.

But when she later cut him out of her life entirely, he knew he had a fight on his hands, a battle which would eventually culminate in the world’s richest man buying Twitter for $44 billion.

The Tesla owner believed his child had been radically transformed by the $50,092 (£39,500) a year liberal school she attended in California.

“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Mr Musk said.

(It’s often repeated that Musk went anti-woke because his daughter transitioned, but based on this excerpt it sounds like her incipient, private school-indoctrinated communism and consequent alienation was the real problem.)

Indeed, beyond the delightful reported color, one thing that struck me about the story of Ackman’s conversion from generic rich Democrat to anti-D.E.I. holy warrior is how structurally familiar it felt. Ackman and Musk are, obviously, not the first highly visible, shallowly liberal members of the business and finance elite to rapidly transform themselves into devoted anti-woke crusaders, and as these stories are told it gets easier to pick out certain correspondences: the complaints about private school syllabuses, the introduction to Chris Rufo or someone similar, the group chat among fellow elites.¹

These recurring tropes sometimes feel like a diagnostic checklist or bingo card, but reading through the New York article I was also reminded of the so-called “monomyth” or “hero’s journey,” the recurring template that Joseph Campbell claimed undergirded all myths and folktales. The basic structure of the hero’s journey features a hero (a titan of finance) entering a supernatural world (Twitter) to do battle with fantastical forces (journalists who QT them), emerging fundamentally changed (donating to RFK, Jr.) and with new powers (friendship with Elon Musk). Consider, in the case of Ackman:

1. Wikipedia summary of the Hero’s Journey: “The hero begins in a situation of normality from which some information is received that acts as a call to head off into the unknown.”
   Bill Ackman’s journey: “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[.]’”

2. Wikipedia summary of the Hero’s Journey: “Once the hero has committed to the quest, consciously or unconsciously, their guide and magical helper appears or becomes known. More often than not, this supernatural mentor will present the hero with one or more talismans or artifacts that will aid them later in their quest.”
   Bill Ackman’s journey: “Ackman joined Twitter in 2017, when Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker recommended the platform over dinner at Peretz’s house.”

3. Wikipedia summary of the Hero’s Journey: “The Crossing of the First Threshold: This is the point where the hero actually crosses into the field of adventure, leaving the known limits of their world and venturing into an unknown and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are unknown.”
   Bill Ackman’s journey: “On December 5, Ackman was sitting in his barber’s chair watching 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.’

4. Wikipedia summary of the Hero’s Journey: The road of trials is a series of tests that the hero must undergo to begin the transformation. Often the hero fails one or more of these tests, which often occur in threes. Eventually, the hero will overcome these trials and move on to the next step.

   Bill Ackman’s journey: “The shrapnel from Ackman’s attacks landed two days after Gay’s resignation, when Business Insider published a story alleging that Oxman, like Gay, had committed plagiarism in her dissertation: Multiple paragraphs from a paper by Oxman appeared verbatim in work by other authors… A day later, Business Insider followed up with another story highlighting sections of Oxman’s dissertation that were taken from Wikipedia without citation, as well as uncredited passages from two other papers Oxman had published. This time, Ackman tweeted that he would be investigating the work of every professor at MIT for plagiarism — and, for good measure, the work of Business Insider’s reporters.”

5. Wikipedia summary of the Hero’s Journey: “Campbell says in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that ‘The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world.’ The goal of the return is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest and to integrate it into society. For a human hero, it may mean achieving a balance between the material and spiritual. The person has become comfortable and competent in both the inner and outer worlds.”
   Bill Ackman’s journey: “‘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.”

If you are a “visual learner” perhaps you would prefer it as a diagram (courtesy Wikipedia, with notes by Read Max):

Not every anti-woke hero will follow this precise template (Musk’s, e.g., is slightly different), but for comparative message-board folklorists like myself it’s a very useful scholarly tool.

1. One small detail from the New York magazine story stuck out to me:

But last fall, Ackman said, he had several extensive conversations with two different Harvard faculty members — he declined to name them — who suggested that he look more closely at the university’s DEI programs.

A few years ago I tried to argue that “cancel culture” was probably best understood as a kind of arrangement of power within and outside institutions like Harvard or The New York Times by which internal factions (usually disaffected and frustrated groups of workers and managers) could leverage specific high-profile transgressions and the attendant social-media anger to effect change within those institutions. Hearing that Ackman had a couple Harvard professors whispering in his ear through this suggests that the anti-woke reaction has some of the same qualities, maybe with “high-dollar donors” substituting “the woke mob” as a particular point of leverage.