Kara Swisher Slams Billionaire Bill Ackman For ‘Doxxing’ College Kids But Remaining Totally Silent on Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitism

The co-hosts of the Pivot podcast, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, fumed over the weekend at the lack of condemnation pointed at Elon Musk over his boosting of an anti-Semitic trope last week. Swisher particularly took aim at billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman who urged the doxxing of Harvard students associated with a letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s devastating attack on Oct. 7th so that they would lose job opportunities.

The conversation began with Galloway arguing that he was “heartened by” the many companies that quickly paused ad spending on Twitter/X after Musk agreed with a post that accused Jews of fueling hate against White people. He then noted however that he was disappointed by how few individuals had spoken out against Musk.

Swisher quickly agreed and said, “Well, no well-known people have, no other billionaires.”

“Can I just make this point?” she asked, adding:

Because, I gave him a hard time, Bill Ackman, who is like beating up on college students who, let’s just say, probably don’t have good judgment. Not word one about this, not word one about Elon. Here he is like doxxing kids.

I’m sorry. These kids are stupid and there’s not that many of them that are that stupid. Some of them just are calling for a ceasefire and they can do that in America. Like we may agree or not agree with them, but this guy is trying to doxx them and he has not a word for this, which is such an obvious thing. Nobody does, none of them.

“The finance community has a lot of leadership that’s Jewish, whose parents are Holocaust survivors,” Galloway added.

Swisher agreed and Galloway continued, arguing , “And they don’t come out against Twitter because they or they want to be involved in SpaceX’s IPO.

“Right. Exactly. Hey, Bill Ackman. Come on, Bill,” Swisher added, taunting Ackman who on Monday wrote on X, “Elon Musk is not an antisemite.”

“And here’s the reality. 90 years ago we didn’t speak up enough,” Galloway jumped in, adding:

Yeah. And it’s happening again. So organizations, people, customers, financiers and just generally US citizens need to speak up and say, I’m selling my fucking Tesla.

After a conversation about why college students deserve a bit of a “hall pass” as they are still forming political opinions, Galloway then argued that business leaders should be held to a higher standard:

But when you’re the wealthiest man in the world and you’re responsible for employees and you have dramatic influence over the behavior, you set a role model for young men and you start talking about retooling things, about replacement theory. That’s totally fucking unacceptable. And what I find just so upsetting is not as many people as I would have thought or hoped have said, ‘I’m embarrassed I wrote a biography on this guy. We are canceling the movie we were going to do on him. I am selling my Tesla. I am selling my shares. We will not be involved in any financing, wealth management or debt offerings for any company that this individual was involved.’ If we don’t cauterize this shit right now, it gets out of control. And I’m just incredibly shocked and disappointed that more people aren’t pushing.

Listen to the full episode of Pivot here.