Billionaire Jewish hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is responding, in part, to his daughter’s medical crisis with a massive investment in brain health and rehabilitation.
In early February, Ackman’s 26-year-old daughter, Lucy, suffered a massive brain bleed which has left her totally blind and unable to speak, he wrote on social media.
Lucy is slowly rehabilitating and has recovered the ability to walk short distances and to understand everything going on around her, Ackman wrote. He said that he has since purchased two large buildings and an adjacent vacant lot in midtown Manhattan with the goal of creating “the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization and longevity institute.”
The “patient-centric” organization is being called the Ackman Oxman Institute and is named both for his family and that of his wife, Israeli-American technology-based designer and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Neri Oxman.
Ackman is not working directly through universities on this project “due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning” and the “curse of antisemitism” on campus, he said.
The new institute in the West 60s will be on 3.4 acres and is being funded with an initial donation of 10 million shares of Pershing Square, stock worth an estimated $400 million, according to a public filing by Ackman. The dividends that produces over time will fund AOI’s work, wrote Ackman, who is estimated to currently be worth nearly $9 billion
He and his wife will be making another donation, not of Pershing stock, that may be even larger, Ackman wrote, to provide runway funding for innovations created at AOI to become commercially viable and to limit the need for the new institute’s staff to focus on fundraising.
AOI will be a nonprofit with ‘highly commercial instincts,” wrote Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital and co-creator of the Pershing Square Foundation, which is purchasing the New York City properties.
It will be “laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient,” he wrote.
The new nonprofit “will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist and spin out to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.”
Ackman, who is 60 and a long-time supporter of Jewish causes and the Democratic party, wrote that “we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition” and device development, among other disciplines.
“We will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy or any other constraint that is inconsistent with its mission,” he stated.
The night Lucy Ackman was discovered unconscious on the floor of her Brooklyn apartment by her sister, she underwent a hemicraniectomy to release pressure on her brain and remove blood left by the hemorrhage. She remained in a coma for several weeks, her father wrote, “and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.”
She has since recovered her cognition and is making progress “with the beginnings of speech but remains unable to see,” he wrote.
