According to a press release issued by the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange on Wednesday, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and his spouse Neri Oxman are purchasing a nearly 5% stake in the company.
According to CNBC calculations, the announcement coincided with the Israeli exchange announcing the pricing of a secondary offering of 17,156,677 shares, or 18.5% of its market value, priced at 20.60 shekels ($5.50) per share. This means that Ackman and his wife’s purchase would have cost approximately $25 million.
Investors from Israel, the US, Europe, and Australia showed strong interest in the transaction, indicating their strong confidence in the Israeli economy overall and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in particular, the statement said.
Ackman and Neri Oxman, who agreed to buy about a 4.9% equity stake in the TASE, were two of the notable buyers. Furthermore, it stated that the exchange intended “to use the net proceeds from this offering for investment in its technology infrastructure.
Ackman is the CEO and founder of Pershing Square Capital Management in New York. Since the terror attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, which led to an Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Ackman has been a strong advocate for Israel. Architectural designer and professor Oxman is an American-Israeli woman.
According to Bloomberg reporting, this purchase represents Ackman’s first financial venture into Israel since the start of the conflict. Jewish businessman Ackman got into a dispute with his alma mater, Harvard University, after over thirty student organizations there signed a statement accusing Israel of being solely responsible for the Oct. 7 attack, which was spearheaded by Hamas and resulted in 1,200 deaths and 240 hostages.
Ackman demanded that Harvard release the students’ names so that Wall Street employers would not hire them on the social media platform X, which was formerly known as Twitter. His 3,138-word letter on X, which he had written to Harvard President Claudine Gay at the time, detailing actions to combat the growing antisemitism on campus, was later made public.
Afterwards, Ackman pushed for Gay’s resignation, claiming the academic dean was plagiarizing and that she wasn’t doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus. Gay eventually resigned in early January, but not before holding onto her position following her testimony at a contentious congressional hearing regarding hate speech and antisemitism on campuses.
The billionaire hedge fund manager identifies as pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, stating as much in a late October post on X. Given my recent support for Israel on @X, some people may be surprised by this, but you shouldn’t be. I’m not anti-Palestinian; I’m anti-terrorist. Being pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel is not contradictory.
He added, “My pro-Palestinian perspective began more than 30 years ago when I was introduced to the Palestinian community and their plight in the early 1990s,” saying he “invested millions in helping promote Palestinian economic development and peaceful coexistence.”
