“He is getting educated as we speak,” Ackman said on Twitter on the evening of January 14, in response to a query about Phillips endorsing DEI in his platform. “Let’s listen to what he has to say after he gets educated.” As of 12:42 a.m. Monday, the DEI language was still there, but by January 16, Politico’s Elena Schneider and Sam Stein reported, the DEI language had disappeared. That was the same day Ackman had previously announced on Twitter/X that he would wire $1 million to his asymmetric investment.
The pitiless precision with which the Wayback Machine captures this timeline is no small embarrassment to Phillips. “Nobody buys me,” Phillips said on CNN after the Politico piece was posted. “If a donor came to me and told me to do something, I will tell the donor to go pound sand.” Ackman, Phillips said, “has not asked me, told me, informed me to do anything at all.” Ackman quickly clarified on Twitter/X that when he said Phillips “is getting educated” he meant that he, Ackman, had furnished Phillips with “a handful of articles and posts” on DEI. “I didn’t suggest that Dean should eliminate the DEI title from a section of his website,” Ackman wrote. “He did that on his own initiative and without any push from me.”
In these defensive replies, Phillips and Ackman both demonstrated the layperson’s unfamiliarity with how algorithms work. An algorithm doesn’t tell a bot to do this or that, because algorithms don’t talk; they’re mathematical equations that make things happen automatically. In similar fashion, Ackman didn’t have to tell Phillips to eliminate from his website a reference to DEI. He merely had to express confidence to his 1.1 million followers on Twitter/X, as he was preparing to send Phillips $1 million, that Phillips would change his tune on DEI.