[UPDATED/CORRECTED ITEM: An earlier version of this piece cited a New York Post story about Ackman that he and others present have explicitly denied happened. Ackman's description of what really happened is a doozy.]

Bill Ackman, whose outspoken criticism of Claudine Gay's inadequate response to antisemitism at Harvard and subsequent vow to expose plagiarism in academia and in the media, is a force to be reckoned with.

So when he declared in the wake of the Iowa Caucus that President Trump was going to blow Joe Biden out of the water come November, it drew headlines.

According to the New York Post:

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman reacted to former President Donald Trump’s landslide victory in Monday’s Iowa caucuses by warning Democrats that incumbent President Joe Biden is toast.

“If you haven’t figured it out already, it is now abundantly clear that @realDonaldTrump is going to crush @POTUS,” the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management wrote on his X social media account on Tuesday.

Ackman, who has become far more vocal in the public sphere since the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel and the subsequent eruption of antisemitism on college campuses, repeated his call for the 81-year-old Biden to “step aside” so that the Democratic Party can “quickly get behind a strong, credible contender” for the presidency.

 Ackman's a hedge fund guy and hedge fund guys are hard realists who are paid to know what is going to happen. Ackman's one of the best, given that he's a billionaire, so he often gets a lot of such predictions right. 

That's bad news for Joe Biden, of course, and it's what a lot of us think intuitively. It's doubly bad for him because Ackman's a Democrat, not a Republican, and he doesn't make money through wishful thinking.

All the same, there's such a thing among the Wall Street sharks known as 'talking one's position.' That's when a trading ace like Ackman might say what he hopes will happen when he's really hoping that others will make their trading decisions accordingly.

Based on the Post's reporting of the bad blood between Joe Biden and Bill Ackman, that appeared to be a possibility as to what was happening.

Ackman and Biden have history. In 2017, Biden referred to Ackman as an “a–hole,” according to an item recently unearthed by the news site Mediaite.

The two men were guests at a dinner hosted by former Trump press secretary and hedge funder Anthony Scaramucci, according to Fox Business.

During the get-together, Biden was asked by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush why he declined to run for president in 2016. He then told the assembled guests that he passed up the White House run because he was still in mourning over the death of his son Beau in 2015.

When the room grew quiet, Biden apologized, saying: “I’m sorry…I’ve said enough.”

Ackman is then reported to have chimed in: “Why? That’s never stopped you before.”

Biden then turned to someone near him and asked, in reference to Ackman: “Who is this a–hole?”

He then turned directly to Ackman and said: “Look, I don’t know who you are, wiseass, but never disrespect the memory of my dead son!”

The Post reports that Ackman then tried to apologize, even though he insulted Biden, not his dead son -- and Biden got more aggressive.

When Ackman reportedly tried to apologize, Biden would hear none of it, saying: “Just shut the hell up.” 

UPDATE/CORRECTION:

But we got an email note from the public relations agency of Pershing Capital Management stating that this report was inaccurate and didn't describe what happened.

They provided us with these two recent links.

Ackman's post is well worth reading, click on the part that isn't visible because that's where it gets good and the computerized embed is hiding it.:

This is absolutely and totally false. I never disrespected Biden’s dead son, nor was I ever disrespectful to Biden.

I also have never disrespected anyone’s son, let alone one that tragically died of cancer. Why would I possibly do this? Obviously it makes no sense.

We tried…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 16, 2024

Here it is again:

This is absolutely and totally false. I never disrespected Biden’s dead son, nor was I ever disrespectful to Biden. I also have never disrespected anyone’s son, let alone one that tragically died of cancer. Why would I possibly do this? Obviously it makes no sense. We tried to get the story corrected, but the Biden camp let it run because his team perhaps thought it looked good for him to play tough with a hedge fund manager. It was a very strange moment for everyone at the table. He either had a senior moment or he misheard me. At one point, he asked me if I wanted to go outside and fight. I thought he was joking. I had no idea what set him off, nor did anyone else at the table. I was nothing other than respectful and polite to Biden at that dinner. I did at one point ask him why he wasn’t running for president. He said that Beau wouldn’t have wanted him to run. I was surprised by his answer, but I of course accepted it as true. That was the only dialogue we had about his son and I have not interacted with him since. Don’t believe everything you read in the media.

There's no reason to doubt Ackman, because unlike Biden, there isn't any evidence out there that he lies or insults people.

Ackman in fact says that the calumnous story about him was the doing of Biden's people. In their claim that Ackman insulted Biden first, they sound like soccer players who justify their fouls by claiming their mother was insulted, or criminals arrested for hate crimes who tell cops the dead victim called them an expletive. It's rare for these stories to not be fake.

If anything, this explanation makes Joe Biden look even worse -- flying off the handle with that well-known temper of his against a blameless man for no reason whatsoever. Does it sound like something Biden or the dirty political tricksters in his orbit would do? I think we all know the answer to that one.

So now Ackman's bankrolling Biden's primary challenger, Democrat Dean Phillips, not because he wants revenge but because he's encountered up close someone with stability issues.

It won't be a smooth sail to the Democrat nomination for Old Joe, and this comes amid many calls among Democrats to get rid of him based on his dotage -- and here's a sleeper issue Ackman hasn't addressed yet but voters are onto -- Biden's corruption, as a new TIPP poll reports. Ackman is putting his money where his mouth is, giving Joe a well-financed political campaign machine to compete against him as just one more thing for him to worry about.

So in being an absolute dinner-party creep, Biden bought himself a primary challenger and a big hedge fund billionaire exuberantly announcing to the world, via Twitter, that he was going to lose big.

It's all in line with what is really happening... it's just that Ackman knows Biden better than most and is amplifying Biden's challenges and problems.

It's not for nothing that Joe Biden has been called stupid in many contexts.

His making a guy he didn't know look bad in front of others [Update: through spreading calumny about him] which pretty well all by itself tells us all we need to know about why Joe Biden is unfit as U.S. president. Imagine him trying to cut deals in Congress or negotiate with dictators. That complete absence of common sense is a disqualifier in itself. Now Ackman's after him, getting ready to put another antler-head on his wall, and Claudine Gay can tell Joe all about it.

Image: Insider Monkey, via Flickr // CC BY-ND 2.0 DEED