When a Company Fails, Blame the Board: Bill Ackman on Value, Harvard, and a Journalist With a Pen

Bill Ackman's first investing book was Benjamin Graham's *The Intelligent Investor*, written after the Great Depression for ordinary people who had lost faith in markets. The lesson that stuck is the gap between price and value: price is what you pay, value is what you get. Graham's image is a neighbor who comes by every day and offers to buy your house. A stupid bid you ignore; a great one you can take. The only job is to know what the house is worth.

In the short run, Ackman says, the stock market is a voting machine — speculation, supply and demand, mood. In the long run it is a weighing machine, and much more accurate. Speculation, in his telling, looks like short-term crypto trading: you do not know what the thing is worth, only that it is going up. Investing is homework. It is understanding a business, the competitive dynamics of an industry, what management will do, and what price you are paying.

He offers a stripped-down definition: the value of anything, "other than love," is the present value of the cash you can take out of it over its life. A U.S. Treasury bond paying a 5% coupon is easy. A stock is a claim on a business, and you have to forecast widgets sold, costs, and how much cash must be plowed back in. Pershing Square's job is to find the rare companies whose cash flows you can predict with high confidence for a very long time. Most investments, he says, are speculations, because the future is hard.

The test Ackman uses is whether you can close your eyes, shut the stock market for a decade, and still be confident the company is more valuable and more profitable when you wake up. Universal Music Group is his example. Music is a many-thousand-year piece of the human experience, and he expects it to still be one thousands of years from now. Universal owns about a third of global recorded music, turns 18-year-olds with a YouTube following into superstars, and sits on a library that includes the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and U2.

The industry almost died when Napster digitized music around the late 1990s peak. Universal, he says, led the rescue and made an early deal with Spotify that let streaming replace the old format-driven sales cycle of records, CDs, and eight-tracks. You can model smartphones, family plans at roughly $10 or $11 a month, and Universal's share. You never get a precise value — only an approximation — and Graham's margin of safety is the point: buy at a discount deep enough that if you are 30% wrong, you are still okay. A big part of investing is not losing money.

Fridman presses on AI-generated music. Ackman does not think a computer will be the primary creator, because no one falls in love with a generated track the way they fall in love with Taylor Swift's story, her presence, and the live show. AI looks to him more like a synthesizer: a tool that lets one person sound like an orchestra. Fridman then asks the harder version — what if the machine has human-like sentience? Ackman answers as an investor: that would be a copyrightable asset, another artist Universal could represent. He is not sure that is a world he wants. The business logic, he says, does not care.

The research process is unglamorous. For Chipotle, Pershing Square started with SEC filings — 10-Ks, 10-Qs, the proxy — then years of conference-call transcripts, which Ackman treats as a historical record of how truthful and competent management has been. They talk to people in industries they do not already know, read books, use expert networks, and watch podcasts and YouTube interviews to get a feel for the CEO. What attracted them to Chipotle was a roughly 50% stock drop after a food-safety scare. Almost every large quick-service chain has had one, he notes, and most have survived. The concept — athletes, fresh food made in front of you — was still great; the systems were not.

The businesses they want are the ones everyone wants: long growth runways, lots of cash, simple to understand, huge barriers to entry, no constant need to raise capital. The problem is that those companies usually have high prices baked in. Overpay for the best business in the world, he says, and you will not earn an attractive return. So they look for a great business that has made a big mistake, or lost its way in a recoverable way, and they buy from disappointed shareholders at a discount to what the company is worth if it is fixed.

The hardest analysis in investing, he argues, is how wide the moat is and how much disruption risk sits outside it. This is, in his view, the greatest period of disruptability in history. A couple of 19-year-olds can leave school or skip it, raise millions, get infinite bandwidth and storage, hire engineers in cheap markets, and attack businesses that looked established — while multi-trillion-dollar companies hunt for profits wherever they can. That is a dangerous world in which to be an investor.

Restaurants are the exception that has never lost them money. If Chipotle works at 100 stores, 200 and then 500 are imaginable; the hard part is brand, intelligent growth, and systems a stranger can run. Chipotle owns its stores rather than franchising, buys fresh sustainably sourced ingredients, and prepares food in the store — a dinner under $20 that is hard to copy, and harder still once you have to build farm relationships nationwide instead of signing one deal with a giant processor. Scale plus a working system, whether company-owned or franchised, is itself a moat.

Alphabet is a large position for Pershing Square, and Ackman says the firm admired it for about 15 years without getting a price it could own. The AI scare changed that. Microsoft's ChatGPT demo dazzled the market; Google, which had been working on AI earlier, put out a disastrous Bard demonstration; the world decided Google had fallen behind; the stock was crushed to around 15 times earnings. For a business of that quality, he calls that an extremely low price.

His case has several layers. When a business becomes a verb, that is usually a good sign about the moat: a very high percentage of the world still opens a computer and starts on a Google page. Search, YouTube, and ads are among the most dominant franchises on earth, and advertising keeps moving online because you can finally see which dollars work. AI is the real risk — if people start asking ChatGPT instead of the search bar — but work with industry experts left his team thinking Google's capabilities were at least a tie, and that regulators had forced a more cautious release than a startup like OpenAI could attempt. Google also has more training data than almost anyone, enormous cash, no debt, and a cloud business whose profits are being reinvested so they barely show up in earnings. A 15 multiple is about a 7.5% earnings yield, against roughly 4% for lending to the government.

Fridman asks whether AI makes all of this more treacherous. Ackman says yes: business investing is about finding companies that cannot be disrupted, and AI is the ultimate disruptive technology. Buffett's image is a castle with a wide moat and barbarians trying to steal the princess. Kodak was dominant until it disappeared; Polaroid too. That is why Pershing Square long stayed away from technology companies. Google, he adds, was pretty fat and happy until ChatGPT — and embarrassment plus pride, from Sergey Brin on down, are huge motivators. Demis Hassabis and DeepMind are now in the picture. Fridman says he loves watching everyone freak out.

Incentives, Ackman likes to say, drive all human behavior. He learns a management team by going back a decade through what they wrote and did, and by listening to how they answer questions: under-promise or over-promise, admit mistakes, build teams, retain talent, run the company for the business or for themselves. Senior leadership matters enormously. At Chipotle, founder Steve Ells could not run the company at scale; they helped recruit Brian Niccol, then seen as the best operator in quick service, and moving the company to California was one way to reboot the culture. An A+ leader recruits A people. A B leader will not.

Most of what he has learned as an investor, he says, he learned from Warren Buffett — Berkshire letters first, then the 1950s partnership letters. What is remarkable is duration (still at it at 93) and a very long-term view. The deeper gift is temperament: an extreme, dispassionate economic rationality that you do not learn in the jungle. When the lion shows up, everyone runs. In markets you generally have to do the opposite. When the lemmings run off the cliff, you face the other way and buy what just got cheap. People get excited when stocks go up and depressed when they go down. You have to reverse that.

How do you not let a roller coaster break you? First, enough money in the bank that you survive whatever the tape does — and do not borrow. Own stocks on margin, and a decline puts your livelihood at risk, which makes rationality almost impossible. Second, do the homework. Stocks can trade at any price in the short term; if you know what you own, a drawdown bothers you much less. Over time you grow calluses. He is an emotional person, he says, but not about investing. That immunity took time, and other people's history — Buffett's mistakes included — is how you learn it.

For everyday investors the rules are blunt: never invest money you cannot afford to lose; never borrow against securities; take a long-term view. A nuclear device, an unexpected war, or the killing of a leader can cut the greatest business from $100 to $50. Most mutual funds, he thinks, are too diversified and too short-term to earn their fees; an index fund is often better, though he names a handful of exceptions such as Will Danoff, Peter Lynch, and Ron Baron. Individual investors, he adds, analyzed Tesla better than most professionals. A dozen simple, lightly indebted businesses you actually understand beats twenty-five or fifty. Fridman admits volatility wrecks his life, which is why he stays in index funds. Ackman's reply: if owning the stock would ruin dinner at Chipotle, do not buy it.

Ackman had just read that more than 50% of stock-market capital is now passive index money: a machine buys a fixed set of securities, with no human judgment and no steps to improve a business. Pershing Square does the opposite — a handful of companies, as much as 20% of assets in one name, known extremely well. Once you are a large holder and you have ideas, you can do more than sit quietly. Early on, nobody knew who they were and they did not have much money, so they had to make more noise.

The first Pershing Square activist investment was Wendy's. The CEO would not return his call. Wendy's owned Tim Hortons, which Ackman thought was worth more than Wendy's entire $5 billion market value — so you could separate the coffee chain and get Wendy's for negative value. They hired Blackstone for a fairness opinion, mailed a letter arguing the company would be worth 80% more if it followed their advice, and six weeks later the company did. Shame, embarrassment, and opportunity, amplified by the press, became the toolkit. The extreme form is replacing the whole board; more often you take a couple of seats and try to build a board of diverse views, which is how you get to the truth.

Over time the work shifted from "investment-banking activism" — recommend a split, make money, move on — to sitting in the boardroom, picking managers, and guiding them. In the seven years before this conversation, he says, they have not had to bang on the door; credibility means the door opens. That is closer to how investing worked in the Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan era, when a 20% owner of U.S. Steel would replace the board when things went wrong. Mutual funds and index funds later scattered that control. Activism, in his account, restored a balance of power between owners and managers, and that has been good for the U.S. market.

Activists rarely own more than 5 or 10%, so influence still means persuading a majority of other shareholders — thought leadership as a day job, because a retail holder of a thousand shares has a day job of a different kind. A respected owner on the board can buy a new CEO time to make a three- or five-year investment that hurts near-term earnings. Could a short-term activist wreck a visionary? Theoretically, he says, but the biggest holders now are forever indexers — BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street — who should be skeptical of a six-month pop that impairs the company's ability to compete. He does not really know any short-term activists with credibility.

In November 2008, General Growth Properties, the country's second-largest mall owner after Simon, saw its stock fall from $63 to 34 cents. The CFO had borrowed aggressively in short-term Wall Street mortgages, and when the CMBS market shut, billions of maturities could not be refinanced. The market assumed lenders would foreclose and wipe out equity. Occupancy and net operating income, Ackman notes, were both up year on year from 2007 to 2008. The malls were fine. The company just could not roll its debt.

He read the bankruptcy code. It apportions value based on value: if you can prove to a judge that assets exceed liabilities, shareholders keep their investment. Every recent precedent had wiped out equity, so the tape priced the stock for zero. Pershing Square bought 25% in the open market, paying about $60 million for a slice of a company whose whole equity they valued around $240 million by the time they were done. Goldman Sachs, advising the board, warned against letting "the fox in the hen house." Ackman called Maddie Bucksbaum of the founding family; hours later he was on the board. He told the directors they represented the current equity, not the "old equity" about to be zeroed, and that the company should be restructured for shareholders.

The restructuring took about eight months. The company emerged from Chapter 11; creditors got par plus accrued interest; employees kept their jobs; the malls stayed open. The stock went from 34 cents to $31. Years later a New York taxi driver with a thick Jamaican accent left a voicemail. He had seen Ackman on CNBC at about 60 cents, put in something like $50,000 — all his money — held, made about 50 times his money, and retired. Those, Ackman says, are the moments that make you feel good about the job.

Investors pushed back: Pershing Square had never done a bankrupt company, and distressed investing is its own guild. Ackman's answer was that he can read. Sometimes, he says, not being a practitioner is an advantage, because experts get used to conventional wisdom. He read a book on distressed investing, hired Joe Schenker of Sullivan & Cromwell — the lawyer who had outsmarted him years earlier on Rockefeller Center Properties — and treated the setup as facts rather than folklore. "Most of the world's knowledge is already been written somewhere. You just gotta read the right books."

Getting on a board without an invitation means a proxy contest: propose a slate, spend mailing and legal money, fly around meeting large holders, and win a majority. Twenty years ago, Ackman says, a board seat was a cushy job — golf with the CEO, a few hundred thousand a year, four meetings, a rubber stamp. Once shareholders could throw directors off, incentives changed. The most dramatic battle of his career was Canadian Pacific, the railroad that had united the provinces and then, for decades, been horribly mismanaged. By the time Pershing Square arrived it had the lowest margins and growth in North America; management blamed the weather, even though Canadian National ran tracks across the same country and did far better.

They bought 12% at a low price and brought Hunter Harrison, who had already turned around Canadian National, to the first meeting. The board would not even see him. High-profile Canadians all agreed the railroad was a wreck and all declined to join the slate, because they saw the chairman at the club. A former director pointed Ackman to Rebecca McDonald, the first woman to take a company public in Canada as CEO, anti-establishment and unafraid. He flew to the Dominican Republic; she said she was all in, and others followed. They rented the largest hall in Canada, compared what each railroad had said and done, and put Harrison on stage — a Tennessean with a lion's voice, "like getting Michael Jordan to come out of retirement." They won 99% of the vote. Management begged to resign that night so they would not have to face the meeting.

The stock later rose about ten times. The regret is that a later stretch of bad investments forced them to sell Canadian Pacific to fund redemptions; holding the original stake, he says, would have been epic. They have since bought back in, and Keith Creel, Harrison's protégé, now runs it. Asked about a "scorched earth" reputation, Ackman says the batting average is extremely high, the record is public, and the press prefers the failures. On a tangent, Fridman asks about the OpenAI board crisis. Ackman calls the nonprofit-plus-capped-profit structure a setup for a problem: investors with capped upside and no board representation, a reminder that governance really matters, and that venture boards often optimize for looking founder-friendly so they do not miss the next Google.

The biggest loss of his career was Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a name the transcript hears as "Vion." It violated core principles: pharma is volatile, built on drug discovery and patent cliffs. Another activist was already on the board overseeing day-to-day decisions, so Pershing Square made a rare passive investment. The company then made a series of disastrous choices. Ackman joined the board for the first time, found the mess larger than it had looked from outside, and was stuck. Valeant grew by acquiring drugs, often paying in stock, a confidence-sensitive machine. Once the market lost faith, the stock collapsed and the acquisition engine died. They lost $4 billion.

That loss catalyzed mark-to-market damage across a concentrated book. The press was disastrous; people decided Ackman was going out of business and bet against everything he owned — easy, because the firm holds about ten names, and they were also short Herbalife. Others squeezed Herbalife and shorted the longs. The Valeant loss was real and crystallized; most of the rest was temporary. Many firms die in that gap, he notes, if investors redeem or if they are levered. Wall Street assumed forced liquidation and piled on.

Personally it was worse. The mistake landed while he was contemplating his marriage. At scale, a hedge-fund CEO becomes chief marketing officer, flying to see hundreds of large investors, off the investment process, delegating more — a contributor to Valeant. Divorce lawyers estimated his net worth at three times reality and asked for a third. Elliott Associates, run by Paul Singer, bought a large stake in Pershing Square's permanent-capital public vehicle, shorted the underlying stocks, and tried to force a liquidation. Ackman pictured bankruptcy, a hostile activist, and jail, just as he had fallen in love with Neri Oxman. He did something he tells others never to do: he borrowed $300 million from JPMorgan, bought enough stock to keep control, settled the divorce and the litigation, and took a call from Gordon Singer after a large block print. "Bill, was that you buying that block?" Yes. "Fuck." That was the bottom.

They had never written the core principles down. He told a colleague to find a big piece of granite and a chisel, Moses-style, hang it on the wall, put a copy on every desk, and "hit me with a baseball bat" if they veered again. Since then, he says, the firm has had its best six years. Love helped. The first date with Oxman was September 7, 2017, near the low; then Brad Pitt spent a day at the MIT Media Lab with her while Ackman's WhatsApp messages went unread until 10:30 p.m. The cartoon in his head was a judge taking the assets and Pitt taking the girlfriend. He moved into an apartment he disliked in his children's building, got a black Labradoodle named Babar, started Transcendental Meditation, lifted, and played tennis. The method, learned after a 2002 scare, is a little progress every day — litigation, portfolio, life — because progress compounds like money. You cannot look up at the old mountaintop or you quit. On a long chart, the disaster that felt like the end of the world is a bump.

Pershing Square almost never shorts, because the downside is unbounded. Buy a stock at $100 and the worst case is losing $100. Short it, and if it goes to $1,000 you can lose many times your stake — Tesla's rise bankrupted people who were sure electric cars would fail. A reporter who had covered Ackman's earlier MBIA short, a success they had structured with credit-default swaps so the bet was asymmetric, brought him Herbalife: sold as weight-loss shakes, in his view a fake business plan pitched to poor people and undocumented immigrants. Multi-level marketing in name, a pyramid in fact. He gave what he calls an epic presentation, the stock was crushed, and the government opened investigations. Then Carl Icahn showed up.

The backstory was Hallwood Realty. Winding down Gotham Partners, Ackman sold Icahn a stake at $80, above the $66 market but below roughly $150 of value, with "schmuck insurance": if Icahn sold or otherwise transferred within three years at a higher price, half the profit came back. The eight-page contract even included a math formula. Icahn bid for the company, lost, and his shares went out at about $145 in a cash merger. He told Ackman he had not sold — the company had taken the shares. Ackman sued. Icahn appealed to the eve of every deadline, all the way to a Supreme Court that would not hear it. At 9% interest Ackman treated it as a high-yield Icahn money-market account. He recovered about $9 million for investors. Icahn, then worth something like $20 billion, called to make peace. Ackman said, "Carl, fuck you."

He does not regret it. If you are happy with who you are, every decision, good or bad, got you here. Icahn waited in the weeds. After Valeant he bought Herbalife, called it a great company, and set out to run Ackman off the road. CNBC still tells him the on-air confrontation — Icahn phoning into an interview and calling him names — is the most watched segment in business-television history. Icahn had not even disclosed a stake yet. Fridman asks if it was personal rather than fundamental. "100%." Icahn joined the board, used the company's resources plus his own to squeeze the short, made a billion, and Ackman lost a billion. The FTC later settled for $220 million in fines. A Berkeley professor hired as the government's expert told Ackman he could prove a pyramid with the data; the government settled because it feared losing in court.

Had they stayed short, he says, they would have made money: the market cap went from about $6 billion to perhaps $1 billion or $1.5 billion. They covered when they sold Valeant — the reset. "You don't need to make it back the way you lost it." Losses also shelter other gains on a tax return. He later made peace: a hug on CNBC, Icahn at his house for a Finance Cup tennis tournament. Chipotle, by contrast, was one of the best investments they ever made — four of eight board seats, Brian Niccol, the stock up almost ten times — and almost no one wrote about it, because there was no battle. The granite commandments date from this bottom. The last seven years, he says, have been quite peaceful.

Fridman turns from markets to October 7. Ackman calls it a reminder that barbaric terrorism still exists. He describes himself as pro-Palestinian in the sense of early philanthropy through the Jerusalem Foundation — homes in Arab communities, peaceful coexistence — and as someone who never takes the side of terrorists. Palestinian lives equal Jewish lives, he says; people want a home, a job, and peace. Hamas has controlled Gaza's education for almost twenty years. He recalls an hour with Henry Kissinger months before Kissinger died: Gaza as a test of a two-state solution that was "not looking good." Next time, Ackman argues, Gulf states should oversee governance so $40 billion does not become tunnels and rockets. Dubai, he notes, was nomads in a desert.

The campus story, for him, begins on October 8, when 34 Harvard student organizations said Israel was solely responsible for Hamas's violence — before Israel had even mounted a defense. Dartmouth's president, in the job for the same number of months as Harvard's, immediately convened leading Arab and Jewish Middle East faculty for an open student Q&A. Harvard's Claudine Gay, in his account, produced weak letters, seemed unable to grasp the terrorist act, and then watched protests grow from benign to rule-breaking bullying while the university did nothing. He met hundreds of students who asked why the president was inert. Penny Pritzker, the board chair, struck him as a deer in headlights. His first public letter ended with a "dare to be great" speech. No one acknowledged it.

Before the congressional hearing, he and Rabbi Hirschy of Harvard Chabad offered to screen Hamas GoPro footage; Gay was out of town, then declined a flight he offered. He watched about 80% of the three presidents' testimony and calls it an embarrassment: evasive, rude, smirking. Elise Stefanik asked whether calling for genocide of Jews violated bullying and harassment rules. All three said it depends on the context, and that the university could not intervene until genocide was actually executed. FIRE had ranked Harvard last out of some 250 schools on campus free speech before October 7. Gay invoked free expression to allow genocidal chants on a campus that, he says, polices conservative speech and microaggressions. He posted a three-minute clip that did about 110 million views. After the hearing the Harvard board said it was 100% behind her. What removed her, he says, was other activists documenting plagiarism — some 76 examples across eight of eleven articles — and the loss of faculty confidence. He wanted a firing for failed leadership, not a technical rap.

Harvard's deeper problem is a self-perpetuating Corporation of about twelve fellows plus the president, with no shareholder vote, and an Overseers board whose petition threshold was raised from 600 signatures to 3,200 after a fossil-fuel slate won seats, with dissident caps added on top. A young-alumni slate he backed collected about 12,000 signatures and missed by roughly 10% while Harvard made voter registration harder. Businesses fail because of governance failures, he says; universities do too. Faculty told him the operating ideology is an oppressor-oppressed frame in which any act by the oppressed is permissible. Christopher Rufo's *America's Cultural Revolution* became, for him, one of the more important and disturbing books he has read: a path from a failed 1960s Black Power movement into universities, then government and corporations. An anonymous faculty survey put conservatives at 2%. A search-committee member told him presidential candidates were restricted to those who met DEI-office criteria. Diversity, equity, and inclusion as ordinary words he supports; the ideology he now calls a form of racism. When a company fails, most people blame the CEO. He blames the board.

Ackman did not originate the Gay plagiarism claims, but he amplified them after the board stood unanimously behind her. He expected a hunt through his own undergraduate thesis; reporters lined up at the New York Public Library to OCR it. It was clean. He did not think about Oxman, who has about 130 academic works. At the end of a Christmas vacation, communications chief Fran McGill called: Business Insider had found four paragraphs in her 330-page dissertation that cited authors but needed quotation marks, plus one paraphrase without a footnote. They were publishing by noon. She admitted the mistakes, noted she had cited the neglected author many other times, and apologized. The next day's headline was that "celebrity academic" Neri Oxman — celebrity, he says, because it loosens what legitimate media may say — had admitted plagiarism, meaning academic fraud. The story went viral.

The following afternoon at 5:19 p.m., a 6,900-word email alleged two dozen more instances, fifteen of them Wikipedia definitions, the rest mostly hardware and software manuals in footnotes describing things like a Stratasys 3D-printer nozzle. They published 92 minutes later. MIT's own handbook, which the reporters cited, distinguishes academic fraud from honest error and exempts common knowledge. Ackman argues none of this was theft of ideas. Fridman, dropping the legalisms, applies a "bullshit test": plagiarism is becoming another attack-ism, and nothing Oxman did matches the word's bad meaning. World-class scientists and Nobel winners, he says, love and respect her. Ackman has never before threatened to sue the press in 35 years. He escalated to Henry Blodget, Axel Springer's CEO, and Henry Kravis of KKR. The outlet doubled down, claiming the facts were undisputed. He says that is false: he had disputed them privately, on X, and in a WhatsApp thread with the CEO.

The reporter's subject line, he says, was not a request for comment to Oxman. It was, in substance, that his wife committed plagiarism and should be fired from MIT the way he had caused Gay to be fired from Harvard. When they learned she had already left the faculty, they were enraged and demanded proof, because they wanted her fired. Malice, he notes, is an element of defamation. The story led Twitter for two days, made Israeli front pages and the *Financial Times*, and hit while she is building a company — fatal if the CEO of a science firm is branded with academic fraud. He tried to reframe it: now the world knows her name, and a future launch will have iPhone-scale attention. She hired some 30 scientists into a 36,000-square-foot lab in New York still under construction. He also saw her darkest period. You can kill someone, he says, by destroying a reputation.

U.S. defamation law, in his view, is wildly tilted toward publishers, and digital ads pay for clicks. A sensational attack on a billionaire's wife, with three hours to respond and then 92 minutes, is the business model. That is why he is grateful to Elon Musk's X: a *Washington Post* piece he found unfair could be answered within hours to 1.2 million followers, perhaps five million views. Buffett once told him the only person who can cause you more harm than a thief with a dagger is a journalist with a pen. An independently owned platform, he argues, is a counterweight after the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID dissent from people like Jay Bhattacharya, and government pressure on speech. On politics he still thinks of America as a great over-levered business — $32 trillion of debt, bloat, hostile regulation — that a CEO-president might fix. Trump, he says, delivered growth, record-low Black unemployment, and a NATO wake-up, and also wrecked civility, churned staff, and stepped in too late on January 6. He is backing Dean Phillips, a 55-year-old centrist from Minnesota, as an alternative, and calls Biden's refusal to step aside a failure of succession. The United States still has oceans, peaceful neighbors, and working capitalism. AI, on the optimistic side of the terminator stories, should raise productivity and discovery. Crises are a terrible thing to waste, including October 7 on campus. He has hope even for Harvard. It is hard, he says, to break a 400-year-old thing.