Inside the secret, often bizarre world that decides what porn you see
The adult industry’s de facto regulator isn’t government, international convention or business itself. It’s Mastercard and Visa
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Bill Ackman was at home in the Hamptons, killing time on a Saturday morning in December 2020, when a New York Times article caught his eye. He read it on his phone, got angry, re-read it and logged on to Twitter to express his outrage. Then, the 56-year-old billionaire started plotting the downfall of America’s best-known porn site.
Moments like this often trigger Ackman’s sibling, Jeanne, to send an email of sisterly guidance: Bill, what on earth are you doing? Why are you weighing in on this topic? You’re a hedge fund manager. What makes you an expert? And Ackman usually ploughs ahead anyway. His métier is meddling in other people’s business, ideally without an invitation.
Ackman is the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, an activist fund that uses its billions to buy stakes in publicly traded companies and goad them into changing their business practices or, at the very least, increasing their stock price.
Before the pandemic, Ackman was best known for a quixotic and bitter campaign against Herbalife, a purveyor of health supplements he accused of being a covert pyramid scheme. (It wasn’t entirely successful, and Pershing lost nearly half a billion dollars.) In 2020, he became the talk of Wall Street again with a trade that turned a $27mn hedge on Covid-19 uncertainty into a $2.6bn windfall, all within a month. “I’ve been called the most persistent person in America,” he says. “And I take that as a compliment.”
Now Ackman had found a new target in the pages of the Times: Pornhub, the most-visited website of the world’s biggest porn company, MindGeek. Nicholas Kristof’s column that week included testimony from victims of abusive videos, spy-cams and revenge porn and argued the site was “infested with rape videos”, from which it was profiting. (Pornhub denied the allegations, insisting it had better moderation than most social media platforms.)