Bill Ackman and Neri Oxman explainer: How his anti-plagiarism crusade backfired, thanks to Wikipedia.

If you thought you’d heard the last of Bill Ackman, following his self-appointed stint as the internet’s Main Character in the right-wing crusade to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay, well, I regret to inform you the man is at it again—this time, to whine loudly about how he’s found himself at the receiving end of the very battle he kicked off. He tweeted that Oxman was the subject of a follow-up investigation: She’d been “contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.” This request for comment fueled a vengeful diatribe: “This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” Ackman wrote. “We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism.” He then asked that companies willing to “help” his effort reach out to a senior analyst at Pershing Square, declared he would expand his plagiarism “investigation” to Business Insider journalists, started harassing individual reporters there, defended Oxman’s connections with Epstein, and claimed that she couldn’t have plagiarized if she copied passages from Wikipedia because the online encyclopedia is in the creative commons. In a separate tweet, Ackman called out Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, noting that it is controlled by private equity giant KKR, “a firm that I have had enormous respect for over the years.” After more public whining from Ackman, Axel Springer announced Sunday evening that while it did not “dispute” the “facts” of the Business Insider pieces about Oxman’s scholarship, it wished to address the concern that “questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting.” CNN’s Oliver Darcy then reached out to the company to ask whether Ackman’s singling out of KKR had anything to do with this, which a spokesperson denied; Darcy did hear, however, from multiple Business Insider reporters who were “alarmed” by this development. On Tuesday, Ackman leaked an email that Business Insider’s editor in chief sent to staff Sunday afternoon, noting that “the facts of the stories have not been disputed by Oxman or her husband Bill Ackman.