Welcome to The WC — your weekly shot of awesome.
Today, we’ve got:
- Being Bill Ackman
- An MRI revolution
- Auction Action
- What’s the ROI of the War on Woke?
- And now for something completely different
Table of Contents
Being Bill Ackman
Over the last couple of months, Bill Ackman has gone from a hedge fund billionaire no one outside the industry had ever heard of to a slightly more well-known hedge fund billionaire most people still haven’t heard of.
You can catch up here if you’re unfamiliar with his recent rise in notoriety.
And like so many other billionaires recently who thrust themselves into the spotlight, it’s not necessarily been a good thing.
I used a new tool from DeepSearchLabs (it’s awesome but expensive, lmk if you want an intro) to track how the journey’s been for Bill.
This is a map of media, social, and journal mentions and sentiment toward Bill Ackman over a three-month period from November 2022 to February 2023.
Pretty good for a hedge fund billionaire. Loads of green in there, which indicates positive sentiment. People generally liked the guy.
And this is how it looks today.
Way more mentions, which is great, I guess. But way more red as well. People know who he is now, and they don’t like him.
Posts like this, citing a recent interview Ackman did with NY Magazine, are typical.
Twitter is the worst thing to have happened to perception of billionaires. It has normalized the richest people in the world saying the most ridiculous things you have ever heard. pic.twitter.com/a7N1dKJqPs
— Dare Obasanjo🐀 (@Carnage4Life) February 12, 2024
It gets more interesting. Let’s compare sentiment toward Ackman and two other players in this game:
- Claudine Gay: The target
- Neri Oxman: His wife/collateral damage
It’s not great.
While both Gay and Oxman came out of this better than Ackman did, his campaign dragged both of them down.
Removing Claudine Gay from her post at Harvard was clearly part of the plan, but it’s less clear how well he with the mark with his wife. From the same interview with NY Magazine:
Oxman, for her part, wasn’t sure what to make of her husband’s chivalrous tweeting, which had drawn even more attention to the allegations. (Through Ackman’s spokesperson, she declined to comment for this story.) Ackman wrote on X that the pressure from the Business Insider stories “could have literally killed her” and that he had seen others commit suicide in similar circumstances. “She was in a pretty dark place,” Ackman told me, adding that he tried to nudge her toward finding a silver lining: “I’m like, ‘Look, you didn’t do anything wrong; we’ll get this fixed,’ and ‘Actually, the more negative press, the -better. Once we turn this around, it’ll be good for your company.’” He wasn’t sure the pitch had landed — “There were times when she said, ‘Please don’t tweet anymore’” — but he defended himself by pointing to memes online suggesting he had become a hero to wives everywhere. “There’s a meme going around that apparently I’m causing a lot of marriages to have trouble,” Ackman said. “Like this one where a husband emails his wife, ‘Honey, I did the dishes.’ And she’s like, ‘Big fucking deal. Did you see what Ackman’s doing for his wife?’”
It all feels very sad to me and makes me think a psychotherapist could pay for a great many years of private school for her kids delving into his psyche.
Anyway, it looks like this is very nearly done.
Bill’s 15 minutes may be up. I wonder if it was worth it.
An MRI revolution
Remember LK-99? You’d be forgiven if not — it was the material Korean scientists announced last year that could have changed the world. A room temperature superconductor that would have, among a great many other things, enabled cheap mobile MRI machines.
Cheap MRIs are important because the machines can detect hundreds of diseases, including cancer.
“Early detection of cancer significantly improves the survival rate (80%), streamlines treatment options, and ultimately reduces the cost of care. However, most early detection efforts are centered around patients who are already presenting with probable cancer symptoms.”
Current solutions cost upward of $5,000 per scan, which means MRIs aren’t currently feasible as a preventative measure even in the rich world.
And while room-temperature superconductors aren’t here yet, Ezra is using AI (of course) to bring the price of MRIs down from $5k to–eventually–$500.
Ezra is on the right track, but this needs to get so much cheaper.
I’m still optimistic about the room-temperature semiconductor.
A recent study involving researchers from several institutions in China focused on a material known as copper-substituted lead apatite (CSLA), which showed some indications of room-temperature superconductivity. The signals indicating superconductivity were extremely weak, and the absence of a complete Meissner effect and direct DC hysteresis observations means they’re not quite there yet, but I’m hopeful.
Auction Action
Let’s do something a bit cheerier now.
In support of Baseball’s spring training kicking off next weekend, here are a few of my favorite items up for auction right now. These are all from the invaluable site, which is great for off-the-wall auction items.
1948 Swell Thrill Cards
This is a little-known set from 1948 that features a number of iconic baseball moments. Recent eBay sales suggest the set of seven cards could be worth between $1k and $2k.
The current bid is $150.
Original International Photograph of the House of David Baseball Club
![[BASEBALL]. Original International Photograph of the House ...](https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/Potter_Potter/68/764768/H4052-L362716610_original.jpg)
The House of David baseball clubs have a fascinating back story, which you should definitely read, but this one is worth it for the facial hair alone.
It’s a PSA-certified Type 1 photograph of the 1920 iteration of the club, which means it is “‘a 1st generation photograph, developed from the original negative, during the period (within approximately two years of when the picture was taken)’. Type I photographs are the originals and the most valuable.”
I haven’t got a clue what this is “worth,” but it seems like a steal at $200.
Chrome-Plated 125 Louisville Slugger Prototype Bat
Made in 1980, this is a silver-plated prototype of the Silver Slugger award bat given to baseball’s best hitters every year.
The final version looks like this:
The bat doesn’t have any bids yet (WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR) but is estimated to go for around $2,000.
What’s the ROI of the War on Woke?
For the last few years, Republican legislators and governors have waged a sort of war against Woke Investments to ensure state funds don’t go toward companies or funds they disagree with ideologically.
It may score political points, but is it a good investment strategy?
