Bill Ackman’s Crusade, A Rabbit Wins CES, Apple Boosts Meta  

0:00Bill Ackman's continuing to crusade, a rabbit has won CES, and Apple is boosting meta in tremendous number of ways. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed, and nuanced format. We have a big week of news for you as 2024 gets underway. We're joined, as always, by Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, welcome. Do we get to talk about Bill Ackman today, Alex? I think we finally get time to talk about Bill. I think it's going to be time. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Bill Ackman and what's been going on with him and the presidents of the Ivy League universities and then the controversy with his wife.

0:42Well, so Bill Ackman, everyone's favorite activist investor slash billionaire hedge fund manager, you know, has been a longtime and very public facing investor, especially his style of activism is being loud, being proud, making big proclamations about different companies. And he's been right sometimes in the past. he's been very wrong in the past. So isn't Herbalife like one of his major ones that he's tried to go after? There was a documentary about it. Yeah. And Herbalife was one where he was correct, but time-wise missed it. Like still lost money on the trade versus I believe his Valiant was one of his big trades.

1:22He also famously right at the beginning of COVID managed to time kind of shorting and then going long the economy as well. So overall again, good investor, famous investor, notable investor, but then had decided recently to take it upon himself to go after the president of Harvard. And all the after that disastrous congressional hearing that we did talk about here, where the presidents of UPenn, Harvard and MIT did not sound very convincing on how they wanted to combat hate speech. Bill Ackman decided he would go after Claudine Gay at the Harvard president, especially first over her answers, and then more plagiarism came to light that this was a problem for an academic, which we can definitely talk about.

2:13But then very recently— Why don't we pause and talk about that? Okay, let's talk about that. This is something that I've been watching with a lot of interest. So obviously this initial hearing happens. They ask whether calling for genocide of Jews would be against the speech rules on campus or the harassment or bullying rules on campus. And all three presidents basically said it depends on the context. So Ackman and a bunch of others try to go after their jobs. They get the president of Penn to resign. They do not get the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, to resign, though she does apologize.

2:50then they come after her with these plagiarism allegations which include numerous instances where she has effectively lifted passages or sentences from other papers and passed them off on her own now gay has claimed that those the ideas central in the papers were her own just the sentences might have been lifted but i don't really like yes there's a distinction of course like it's a degree of crime, but you're the president of Harvard. I don't understand there's a yes, but that's come up after this. Yes, but it's not the original ideas or everything. I'm like, wait a second, you're the president of Harvard.

3:32The very table stake requirement of you is not to lift other people's work. So I just, I sort of don't understand why there's been this huge move of defense here. Like, yes, that is something that you need to resign for. You won't let students do it. You should not let the president do it. I don't care about anything else that's, that happened, you know, basically like if you're going to have people come after you, you need to be able to withstand that pressure. Like you can't give them like, you know, clear instances of plagiarism and then call it a witch hunt. Like you, you plagiarized. Yeah.

4:04No, I think this is one time, one time where we will agree that it was pretty clear cut and And you can feel the momentum of where that whole decision would go. Clearly, once Bill Ackman became the very public face of it, it almost became an us versus them battle rather than plagiarism is the issue. And I think that probably almost probably bought her more time in support than otherwise she would have had. So, yeah, I think you plagiarize. There are going to be people that come after you if you're in that position, if you're in high level in society you cannot be in a position where you have enough skeletons in the closet where they can get you like yeah you can't go and say this is a persecution thing where in the end you did plagiarize and you did do the things that just were completely unacceptable for position for a person your position yep no that should have been vetted beforehand i mean i wrote did you ever write a thesis of any sort i did an undergrad thesis And it was like 90 pages.

5:10And I remember being terrified of like plagiarizing. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a book. I can tell you like there's no plagiarism there. Like it's not that it's one of those things where people are like, well, you know, there's reasons for it. It's like it's actually not that hard to write your own original sentences. I like I just said I wrote my college thesis and Alex got to flex. He wrote a book. So I don't know. Maybe more people read your thesis than read my book. But anyway, long story short, I can tell you it's hard to plagiarize. You literally have to copy and paste and reformat. Like, why would you even want to pass somebody else's work off as your own?

5:45It's ridiculous. But that brings us to the latest part of the story where Business Insider published a piece, and actually two pieces then, covering Bill Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, and acts of plagiarism that she had committed, which included lifting entire passages from Wikipedia, 15 passages. And then this story got even more fun for bystanders like us, because Bill Ackman not only defended lifting, he essentially defended lifting passages from Wikipedia saying that in 2009, when these papers were written, that Wikipedia was the Wild West and it was just there was no standards on how to cite it.

6:26And so this was amazing because, again, it's one thing to plagiarize. It's another thing to plagiarize 2009 vintage Wikipedia. I mean, that's a whole other level of laziness that you didn't even go and read the academic papers. You just went to Wikipedia and lifted directly from there. I mean, Ackman's wife is not the president of Harvard, but I'm going to remain consistent here and be like, if you plagiarize, that's wrong. and you can't continue to work in academia if that's the case. You're going to fail your students if you saw them copying from Wikipedia. So like for Bill Ackman, also this like backward explanation of like, well, like that was like the Wild West.

7:08Like, come on, man. Like you just like held somebody else to a similar standard and got them fired. Like you can't now, you know, bend over backward. Like the intellectual dishonesty on that front is fairly remarkable. But then the most important tech angle for me, the main character is back. Like for longtime Twitter users, I feel it's been a while since we've had such a central quote unquote main character. And again, this idea that periodically on social media, especially Twitter, one person, one will bubble up to the top. There's been famous ones over the years. And Bill Ackman has given us to start 2024 one of the more incredible main characters that I remember.

7:52So does this mean Twitter itself is back in relevance more than we've been giving credit for? Because this is not taking place on threads. this is still a pure pure twitter thing well first of all i would say that like you don't have to look too much back into the recent past to find the main character before ackman and that's elon so like i don't think it's a new thing that there's a main character and second of all like yes is twitter declining and diminishing in relevance 100 is twitter less relevant than threads, not a chance. I mean, even the data that I cited and published, which continues to show up in my feed where people are like, see, Twitter's dying, shows that they only lost like 14 % of users last year.

8:39And so that is a significant chunk, but it does not take a platform that, you know, was the beating heart of the, I don't know, public conversation and say it's no longer relevant. It's a little less relevant, but it still packs a punch. Yep. No, I think I'm curious to see whether we can go back to the golden days of multiple main characters on a rolling basis. You're right. You're right. Elon dominated our minds, especially on Twitter. And maybe that was purposefully done via algorithmic changes for all in 2023. Oh, it was purposely done via algorithmic changes. We know that. Didn't he fire someone who said that his reach wasn't enough?

9:20Something like that. Yep. Yep. the good old days. But I thought you were actually going to bring up the finance angle of this. So the drama continues to unfold, which is that... So Business Insider published this story about Ackman's wife plagiarizing. Okay, so obviously he shouldn't plagiarize. I don't think there's any defending that. There's been a big question of whether his wife was a fair target, and they did reach out to him about his wife and not his wife about the story, as far as I can tell. what do you think about that is it is it fair for business insider be like the wife of this guy who okay the wife is well known but the wife of this guy who's on this crusade also plagiarized is that fair reporting process i the the actual reporting process i think it's worth like and then also they had given only i think it was at like 90 minutes or three hours or something to respond to many accusations but i still feel the what's interesting is i actually i'm not going to say prior to Bill Ackman, I definitely knew about him before, but I knew of her for a long time.

10:23She was very, the whole topic of like design as a central way of approaching technology. She at MIT media lab, she's done multiple Ted talks that I've watched that are good. She was a very, very public figure in the way I knew her name well before I did. I was surprised when I learned that she was actually Bill Ackman's wife. Cause I'd already watched her known her like from her writing. So yeah, I think she is a public figure, but I agree that why then go to Bill Ackman directly as opposed to her? Then you are saying this is, we're writing this because it's Bill Ackman's wife. So I think that's a fair criticism.

11:02There's some nuance that I think I should unpack for listeners. I'm not sure this is how it went, but this is kind of how it goes in reporting sometimes where Business Insider doesn't then say, oh, Bill Ackman is on this crusade, let's go dig through. They don't have the money to put reporters on an investigation to look through all of his wife's writing and all of his writing to find plagiarism. What probably happened was some group who was pissed that he got Claudine Gay fired started looking through the writing of all of his associates and found this plagiarism by his wife and then dropped it in the lap of Business Insider.

11:43And then if you're Business Insider, I think it's like, okay, well, Oh, yeah. No, no, no, of course. Of course. But which also brings that last part of the story is that Business Insider famously got bought. Henry Blodgett, very good at market timing relative to other media startups, sold to actual Springer, the German media conglomerate for I think it was like 300 million, 350. And they are the owner and then KKR. This is what I was waiting for you to comment on. Yeah. So KKR, private equity giant investor in Axel Springer itself. So Bill Ackman had made a huge push. You know, I'm talking to Axel Springer, people on the board.

12:28I'm talking to KKR. We're going to go after Business Insider, basically trying to what Peter Thiel did to Gawker. Well, no, he's doing it more publicly versus completely secretly try to end this organization, Business Insider. That, to me, was shocking to make public declarations around because, again, what's the point? If you're really going to do this, go straight Peter Thiel and just do it in the background quietly. To me, there's no advantage. Business Insider, it almost, Axel Springer is still a journalistic organization. majority of people involved still are going to know that okay if the facts are correct you know we're not going to pressure our journalists and then the fact that they said they were looking into it and launching some kind of investigation still I think was a very bad move on their part because you lose the trust of every writer after that but right and that's by the way that's probably what Ackman is trying to do is just pressure them into taking the story down and pressure Axel Springer into making a move like this.

13:34Like it is pretty incredible that Axel Springer was like, we are reviewing like the decision to publish. But there's no taking the story down at this point. No. I mean, it's out there. It's out there. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But Twitter's back. Yeah. Main characters are back. That's the thing. Thank you for not having Elon as our main character for a week. You know, I'm trying to take out, look at the big takeaway here. Like what this says about our society, what it says about Ackman or journalism, I think the main thing is just like, don't plagiarize. Like it's very easy to not get into a plagiarism war by just not plagiarizing.

14:10Just do not hit control V after you hit control C. It's really the main lesson. Put that on a t-shirt. That's a good lesson. Let's talk about some other interesting sort of questionable behavior in the tech world. And that's with Carta. So Carta, if anyone has invested in a startup, knows it's like a place where you, or works at a startup, they know it's a place where you keep your tabs on your shares. And this is like the sort of, it's the manager for a stock before it hits the public market. And it puts Carta in an interesting position because they know how much, you know, shares of stock are floating up around there and maybe can help facilitate the sale of some of it.

14:52But the company got into some hot water this week as they were accused of using some proprietary information to try to sell secondary shares in a startup and then promise basically to not do this anymore. Rajan, what's your perspective here on what Carta did? Yeah, this was a really interesting story to me because, again, that idea of trust from a company. So Carta, as you said, you upload all of your private share data to there and they'll manage your cap table for you. So, you know, what's the current valuations of shares? Who has what? How much do they have? Getting notifications around it, taking care of any kind of like securities law concerns around it.

15:38So then they have all that information. And then a founder, startup CEO, Kari Saarinen, received someone he knew received an email about his company basically offering to sell shares. like so you can realize like are you interested in buying these shares on the secondary market which has kind of been a dream for the private investing over the last decade no one has really cracked it like a highly liquid secondary share market for private startups and clearly they're going after that and and if you think about it paying them a subscription fee i believe it's pretty expensive again it's i mean it's like 50k or it's like it's an expensive piece of sass but it's you can make a lot more money being a middleman for any kind of share transfer and being some kind of brokerage so obviously it's a buzzy startup raised a bunch of money they're going to start leaning into potentially higher margin more lucrative businesses but then all that data is completely confidential as far as founders are concerned and companies are concerned maybe the terms and services allowed terms and conditions allowed for this and it seems that they did because people never talked about that side of it it was more just a general trust issue which i think they broke but again reminder they need to shoot big and this is a bigger opportunity than what they are currently doing so were they doing the right thing i don't know i spoke with so albert wenger was on the show on wednesday from union square ventures and they are an investor in carta and I tried to get him to comment on it.

17:16He ended up basically saying nothing. So I cut it out of the episode. But it is kind of, I mean, if you're going and trying to sell shares in companies that don't want their shares to be sold, that is kind of a scandal. Although on the other hand, like it seems like everybody should want this, right? Like Carta should want this and startups should want this. And maybe it's just like a UI thing, right? Maybe it's just like you need a toggle inside this software to be like list my shares or don't. But yeah, that's too simple of a solution. The concern was like, there's a lot of people, especially at the private level, don't want to be known as investors.

17:53So the idea of disclosing that information for the purpose of selling shares definitely is problematic. But yeah, all right. You just solved it. Toggle. Allow my cap table to be shown. Allow you to pitch things. I agree. People have been trying to do this at every level, and it only, especially now when fundraising has become incredibly far more difficult, some kind of liquidity in the private market seems to be a good thing. Exactly. Yeah, I think we know that toggles are the number one solution for most tech problems. Show paper with plagiarism, show paper without plagiarism. Sell my shares, don't sell my shares.

18:35These type of things can make a difference. Cardiff, you're listening. Definitely put that into place. So speaking of things that need a toggle, it was definitely the SEC's two-factor authentication on Twitter. They apparently did not have two-factor authentication. And right before they approved this spot Bitcoin ETF, their account was hacked. And then someone tweeted that they approved. So I'm curious what your perspective here is on the SEC's account getting hacked. Actually, it turns out that almost all of the run up of this ETF being approved was priced into Bitcoin. Because when that tweet went out, I took a look at the pricing and Bitcoin went up from like$45 ,000 to$46 ,000 per coin.

19:21And now it's like even falling. It's at$43 ,000 time of recording. So maybe it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but definitely an embarrassing start for the SEC as this thing got underway. yeah this this killed me this killed me i just can we get just like a straight i mean this was supposed to be the cleanest most corporate thing that has happened in cryptocurrency out of all kinds of ridiculous joke-like things that have happened over the last three years and of course the most corporate thing that was supposed to happen to bitcoin ended up just a joke. And so again, SEC finding out that they do not properly lock down their Twitter accounts, making it not using two factor authentication to make sure to lessen the chances that it gets hacked.

20:16And then just look at coming out of this looking bad at a point that they were finally ready to play nice with the crypto community after Gary Gensler, the chair, has been pretty aggressive against it for a long time. So I'm disappointed overall, I have to say. But I still think to me, and we talked about this last week, I just do not understand the point of a Bitcoin ETF. Can you explain to me why this is interesting? Because it's pretty easy to buy Bitcoin. I think it's probably for the institutional buyers, right? Like Coinbase is nice if you're an individual, but you need it as an ETF to be offered through financial systems and be made available to, let's say, institutional investors who want to add a little risk to their portfolio.

21:03Yeah, but what does that say about Bitcoin? Well, that's another question. That's a different question. And it says that the promise of Bitcoin is a lie. Okay, as long as we're on the same page there. For sure. I mean, not fully a lie. Like their functionality is still, you know, it could still work. It's just this idea of separating from the modern financial system after the 2001 crisis, which was Satoshi Nakamoto's main idea. Just kind of, that was a blind spot for Satoshi. It was just never going to end that way. And certainly this is a inevitable conclusion. Yeah, I think this is going to be a very, I'm excited to watch this play out.

21:47because you remember like once all these etfs that have reasonably high fees on a relative basis if the price goes down i mean what does that do to this whole thing like finally you've gotten the etfs more and more people can now have access to being put at risk on the price of bitcoin and it's a lot easier so yeah i guess you don't have to open a coinbase account anymore you can do it directly in your schwab or fidelity account so oh this is going to be an interesting year for crypto yeah i did we didn't talk about it that much the last half of last year no we've already oh we did we talked about sbf a lot but oh yeah talk about less scam more potential but who knows it was can you really de-link the two i don't know uh the the the thing is yeah you're right that it's now going down and i was like sitting in the kitchen monday morning and be like hey should we buy some more bitcoin you know i was just like really glad we didn't do that so i was like oh man if i buy the peak again i'm gonna be so pissed you see kathy wood is saying it's gonna go to like 1.5 million per coin kathy wood is back 2024 she's not her the arc innovation fund is still down by like 50 from the peak i know but And as long as I can hear the name Cathie Wood just a few times a week, I'll be happy.

23:10Look, when Bitcoin goes to 1.5 million a coin, I will apologize to her. Oh, but Bitcoin's down 6 % today. It's well below. It's at 43 ,400. It's well below where it started when all this news was breaking. You know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do think it's kind of funny that this entire debacle with the Twitter account happened on a platform run by a guy or owned by a guy who said the SEC stands for blank Elon's blank. Yeah. I'm not saying that he passed along the credentials, which I don't think he did, but it is just... I enjoy any story that starts with, I'm not a conspiracy dearest, but...

23:53I guess Elon's always said the funniest outcome is the one that's most likely. And so here, Elon, you've had it. We're here on Big Technology Podcast. When we come back from the break, we're going to talk about this rabbit gadget that won the CES conference. It's an AI-powered handheld thingy that Ron John's going to talk a little bit more about. I watched the presentation. It seemed pretty interesting. And then we'll follow up by discussing whether Tim Cook is actually helping Meta succeed. Because I think he and Apple, they really are. So, all right, why don't we take a break and we'll come back right after this.

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25:45And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the Global Editorial Director of Wired. And I'm hosting our new podcast series, The Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that. That eats the internet. That turns it all off. Unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online, to the best of my ability. Every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context.

26:23True or false, you, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to The Big Interview right now in the same place you find Wired's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast, Friday edition, ready to do our big CES roundup that we do every year. Just kidding, I don't think we were covered last year, but let's just do a quick segment on who won CES. Clearly it was this Rabbit device. It was this, it's an, let me just read the headline.

27:05So this is from The Verge. The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you. rather than a chap gpt like large language model rabbit says rabbit os is based on a large action model and the best way i can describe it is sort of as a universal controller of apps first of all great branding large action model okay they say it's an idea similar to alexa or google assistant rabbit os can control your music order you a car buy your groceries send your messages and more all through a single interface no balancing apps and logins just ask for what you want and let the device deliver, the R1's on-screen interface will be a series of category-based cards for music or transportation or video chats, and the screen mostly exists so that you can verify the model's output on your own.

27:53This just seems to be like this new category of devices that are starting to become much more prevalent in the age of AI. Ranjan, you are clearly a huge fan of the Rabbit, So make the bull case for the rabbit. I am excited because even from like a product design perspective, it's fun. It's kind of cute, which I guess with the name rabbit, that's kind of what they're going with. It's again, it's this little box. There's a screen on it. You talk to it. And I thought I agree with you. I thought the branding of instead of large language model, large action model is brilliant because it's the idea that rethinking the way we interact with mobile phones.

28:35and I recommend people go and watch the presentation. We have used this interface of apps over the last, what is it, 14 years now, or 17 years. It hasn't changed that much. Certain things, like widgets on your phone, try to make certain actions that you take simpler. Shortcuts from Siri is kind of a disaster, at least from when I've used it. trying to kind of code your own Google Assistant or Alexa pathways of actions and trying to do different things. I'm a smart home nerd and I've spent hours and hours and you both first using Alexa and now using the Apple home ecosystem to try to get everything working together.

29:19Like there's so many actions we take every day on our phone, being able to make them smoother and just simpler and voice activated, I think has always been interesting. And to do it in kind of a new interface, a new little gadget, I'm excited about. I think we should all be supporting going back to a time when it felt like we can have an entire new class of gadgets, that we don't have to all just, everything's going to be on your phone or a helmet that you wear on your face yeah it's incredible how dominant this thing was uh at ces at the end and there was basically you would have thought that ces was just one big launch event for the rabbit i couldn't hear about any other products there like the second product that i heard about at ces was uh you know let me finish this sentence will make sense that the vision pro and they weren't even there so like it was just the rabbit show um so the they they already said that their initial 10 000 unit run of these devices has sold out um i guess like is do you think that it makes sense to have this rabbit in your hand and then a phone in your pocket like isn't it well no i too many devices and how long is it if this thing is really successful isn't apple just going to say okay, like we're going to build this right into the phone.

30:44Well, yeah, I, if Siri was not hot garbage, maybe they could finally do the things that Rabbit is saying that it can do. So I agree that as I'm watching it, I'm on one hand, I agree thinking that if Siri just worked, if Google Assistant was very good, maybe you just use it existing with your phone anyways, or whatever device you have on you. But this is where I feel like, and even so that I got, I recently started subscribing last year to the phone and data service on my Apple Watch. I'd gotten the Ultra and I'd started leaving the house with no phone and just the watch and taking calls or receiving texts and even dictating back texts and stuff like that.