(Bloomberg) — Bill Ackman and his wife Neri Oxman have bought a stake in the Tel Aviv bourse, marking one of the highest-profile investments in Israel since its war with Hamas erupted.
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Ackman, who has railed against a rise in antisemitism since the Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent retaliation, and Oxman are buying 5% of Tel Aviv Stock Exchange Ltd. The deal is part of a roughly 18.5% stake sale to foreign and local investors for 353 million shekels ($95 million), meaning the couple would have paid $25 million, according to calculations by Bloomberg.
Ackman and Oxman were the only investors named in a statement detailing the sale, which was priced at a 5% discount to the stock’s last close.
The deal is an early sign of foreign investors returning to Israel after having pulled money at the onset of the war. The share sale “received a lot of interest from international and local investors, including from large investors who have not yet invested in Israel,” said Ittai Ben Zeev, chief executive officer of the stock exchange.
Shares in the bourse jumped as much as 9.4%, putting it on track to erase all war-linked losses. The stock had fallen 3% since the start of the war through Tuesday’s close, under-performing global peers. Saudi Tadawul Group Holding, Deutsche Boerse AG and London Stock Exchange Group Plc all had double-digit gains in the same period.
Ackman, a Harvard University graduate, is the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management and has a personal net worth of $2.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
His investment comes on the heels of a campaign directed at Harvard’s leadership for failing to root out antisemitism on campus. Claudine Gay, the university’s first Black president, eventually stepped down amid Ackman’s attacks and allegations of plagiarism.
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Oxman was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. A first lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force, she is a graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
According to a recent report in Business Insider, she plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation. Oxman responded to the outlet’s accusations saying she had “omitted quotation marks for certain work” in her 330-page thesis, but had cited other authors appropriately.
Ackman has accused the site of holding a “campaign to destroy” his wife, while Business Insider’s chief executive officer said the organization stands by its report.
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The offering is expected to close on or about Jan. 25. Jefferies Financial Group Inc. served as sole global placement coordinator with Leader Capital Markets acting as local placement coordinator for Israel.
–With assistance from Dana Khraiche and Farah Elbahrawy.
(Updates with comment from stock exchange and shares in 4th and 5th paragraphs. A previous version of this story was corrected to fix the value of shares sold.)
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