The American billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, whose real name is William Albert Ackman, is always making headlines, whether it's due to bold investments, public campaigns, or allegations.
His net worth recently doubled from $4.3 billion (in 2024) to $9.2 billion in 2025, which has made people wonder, “How is Bill Ackman so rich?”
But while much has been written about Ackman and his fortune, his wife, Neri Oxman, is a formidable figure in her own right.
While her name recently made headlines for challenging reasons, she has been grabbing people’s interest in her personal life ever since she married the investor, Bill Ackman.
What Happened To Bill Ackman’s Wife?
In early 2024, Neri Oxman's name became a topic of intense discussion after Business Insider reported her plagiarism in her MIT’s 2010 doctoral dissertation.
This news came shortly after Ackman was involved in Harvard’s president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism accusations, calling it serious grounds to fire her.
According to the reports, Oxman copied at least one passage directly from other writers without citation.
Oxman then took X to acknowledge that she had "omitted quotation marks for certain work," but had correctly cited her sources in her 330-page dissertation.
She expressed regret and apologized for the errors, which she attributed to citation mistakes rather than intentional wrongdoing.
Similarly, the Boston Globe reported on emails in 2019 showing that Ackman had pushed MIT not to involve Oxman in a scandal linked to a sculpture she presented to Jeffrey Epstein, for which he even donated $125,000 to her lab.
Neri Oxman was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but left her job in 2020 after she got married.
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Neri Oxman’s Job
Neri Oxman is an American-Israeli designer known as the wife of billionaire Bill Ackman. She is also known as the former professor at the MIT Media Lab.
She is known for her projects like “Silk Pavilion,” where 6,500 silkworms wove a dome over a nylon structure. It demonstrated how digital fabrication and biological processes merge to create sustainable and biodegradable structures.
Another project is “Aguahoja,” where biopolymers such as cellulose and chitosan were used to create 3D-printed structures that naturally degrade. It closes the sustainability loop without leaving toxic residues.
Although Neri pursued a career that merged science, design, and technology, she served in the Israeli Air Force in the early years of her career. Neri worked in the military from 1996 to 1999 and reached the rank of first lieutenant.
Neri Oxman is the founder of the company “OXMAN,” which fuses design, technology, and biology to invent multi-scale products and environments.
Neri Oxman Education
Neri attended Hebrew Reali School for her early education, and after graduating in 1993, she joined the Israeli Air Force.
After leaving her job in the army, Neri joined the Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical School. However, Neri switched to architectural studies at Technion Israel Institute of Technology
She then moved to London and attended the Architectural Association School of Architecture to pursue her architectural studies.
Neri earned her Ph.D. in Design Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after relocating to the United States. She completed her dissertation in 2010, but 14 years later, she was found lifting passages from other scholars, a dozen Wikipedia articles, and textbooks without any attribution.
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How Did Bill Ackman Meet Neri Oxman?
Bill Ackman and Neri Oxman have both experienced a failed marriage in the past. Ackman was married to Karen Ann Herskovitz, while Oxman was married to Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov.
Back in 2017, Ackman was introduced to Oxman’s name twice within a span of a few months.
Marty Peretz, a former Harvard professor, was the first to describe Oxman to Ackman as “the most gorgeous, brilliant, artistic, loving, and talented person he had ever met.” And then his close friend, who attended the same event as Oxman, said the same word.
Intrigued by the coincidence, Ackman decided to reach out to Oxman, and the rest is history.
Ackman and Oxman were already dating by September of 2017, and on January 19, 2019, they got married at the Central Synagogue in New York.
Ackman and Oxman’s wedding drew attention because of the groom’s billionaire status and the bride’s popularity as a scholar.
Bill Ackman’s Children
Neri Oxman was pregnant with the couple’s child shortly after the wedding. She gave birth to their daughter in late 2019.
Ackman also has three other kids with his former wife, Karen Ann Herskovitz. One of his daughters with his ex-wife also attended Harvard like him.
Talking about his daughter in an interview, Ackman said that she became like an anti-capitalist, practically like a Marxist.
His daughter would freak out at the table if they talked about capitalism. Ackman’s daughter was in the social studies department like her dad, but she followed a different path than him.
His daughter wrote her thesis on “The Concept of Reification in Western Marxist Thought.”
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FAQs
Does Bill Ackman Believe In God?
Bill Ackman has openly said that he is not a particularly religious person. However, he has also admitted that he believes “it makes sense to hedge.
Who Is Bill Ackman’s New Wife?
Bill Ackman’s new wife is Neri Oxman, an American-Israeli designer and former professor.
How Many Wives Has Bill Ackman Had?
Bill Ackman has been married twice. His first wife is landscape architect Karen Ann Herskovitz, and his second wife is designer and former professor, Neri Oxman.
Is Bill Ackman’s Wife a Professor?
Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, is a former professor at the MIT Media Lab.
