Michael Hiltzik: Will billionaire Bill Ackman ever learn to shut up?
There was a time, I must admit, when the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was one of my Wall Street heroes.
It started in December 2012. Ackman had decided to take a short position in the shares of the multilevel marketing firm Herbalife.
Ackman justified his bet with a heroic 334-deck Power Point presentation laying out all the features of the Los Angeles company that he said made it indistinguishable from a scam: It marketed its nutritional supplements as unique products when they were actually commodity supplements sold at premium prices, he said. It was a pyramid scheme in disguise, and more.
Some of Ackman's points dovetailed with reporting by me and my colleagues at The Times — that its widely touted "affiliation" with UCLA was a penny-pinching attempt to gain reflected scientific credibility from the university's reputation (to UCLA's discredit) and that it exploited Latinos in its marketing, for example.
In short, I saw Ackman's campaign as an effort to take down a company that needed taking down. That was
