Bill Ackman Sent a Text to the CEO of Mastercard. What Happened Next Is a Parable for ESG.
Michelle Celarier, 16 June 2021
On a Saturday morning last December, Bill Ackman was scrolling through Twitter when an article in The New York Times caught his eye. “The Children of Pornhub,” by Nicholas Kristof, told how unauthorized sex — and rape and torture — videos were being spread across the internet on a website called Pornhub, one of the most popular in the world.
Ackman, who has four daughters, was outraged when he read how one teenager ended up a Pornhub victim after sending a naked video of herself to a boy she had a crush on. Harassed and humiliated, the young girl attempted suicide.
“In your mind replace the victims with your daughter or son,” the hedge fund manager and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management wrote when he retweeted the article. “We could fix this problem.”
Then he swung into action. Ackman’s first step was to call Bradley Myles, the former CEO of anti–human trafficking nonprofit Polaris, whom Ackman had met through his charity, the Pershing Square Foundation.
“He was reaching out to me and asking what’s a metastrategy for addressing this whole area of nonconsensual intimate images. He was thinking at a strategic level,” recalls Myles, who is now a senior adviser at Panorama Global, a not-for-profit social impact platform.
Kristof’s piece wasn’t about the money behind Pornhub, which is owned by a secretive, private Canadian corporation called MindGeek, or the many corporations that profit from its existence. It focused on the writer’s moral outrage about the victims and their tragic stories of rape and abuse.
