Bill Ackman on X, Elon Musk, and free speech | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

My kids' school, the epithet for the school or the saying is 'Go forth unafraid.' I think it's a good way to live. And again, words can't harm me. You know, the power of X, and we do owe Elon enormous thanks for this. So for example, The Washington Post wrote a story about me a couple days ago. I didn't think the story was a fair story. So within a few hours of the story being written, I'm able to put out a response to the story and send it to 1.2 million people, and it gets read and reread. I haven't checked, but probably five million people saw my response. Now those are the people on X, it's not everyone in the world. There's still a disconnection between the X world and the offline world. But reputation in my business is basically all you have. And as they say, you can take a lifetime to build reputation and take five minutes to have it disappear. The media plays a very important role and they can destroy people. At least we now have some ability to fight back. We have a platform we can surface our views. In the typical old days, they write an incredibly damning article and you point out factual errors, and then like two months later they bury a little correction on page whatever. By then the person was fired or their life is destroyed or the reputation's damaged. I was with Warren Buffett talking about media, it's something he really loves. He says, 'You know what, Bill, a thief with a dagger, the only person who can cause you more harm than a thief with a dagger is a journalist with a pen.' Those were very powerful words.

100%. And I think it's a really important one. It's really eye-opening for me to see how stories get covered in mainstream media. What I do on X is I follow people on multiple sides of an issue, and I post on a topic and I get to hear the other side. I read the replies. The truth is something that people have had a lot of question about, particularly in the last five years, beginning with Trump talking about fake news. A lot of what Trump said about fake news is true. A big part of the world hated Trump and did everything they could to discredit him, destroy him. He did a lot of things perhaps deserving of being discredited. He's a very imperfect, in some cases harmful, leader. But everything from pre-election, the Hunter Biden laptop story in the New York Post that Twitter made difficult for people to share and to read. You know, the Jay Bhatt of the world questioning the government's response, questioning long-term lockdowns, questioning keeping kids out of school, questions about masks, about vaccines which are still not definitively answered. No counterbalance to the power of the government when the government can shut down avenues for free speech, and where the mainstream media tows the line in many extents to the government's action. So having an independently owned powerful platform is very important for truth, for free speech, for hearing the other side of the story, for counterbalancing the power of the government. Elon is getting a lot of pushback. The SpaceXs and Teslas of the world are experiencing a lot of government questions and investigations. Even the president of the United States came out and said he needs to be investigated. I'm getting my own version of that in terms of some negative media articles. I don't know what's next. But if you stick your neck out in today's world and you go against the establishment, or at least the existing administration, you can find yourself in a very challenged place. That discourages people from sharing stuff, and that's why anonymous speech is important.