Bill Ackman Proudly Sticks To His Pickup Line As The Internet Memes Him Into Oblivion

Gentlemen, Bill Ackman is doubling down.

The billionaire hedge fund manager whose "May I meet you?" pickup line set the internet on fire this week is back — appearing on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo to explain why he's standing by his surefire strategy for approaching women.

I mean, you have to respect a man who gets roasted by the entire world and still shows up on national TV with confidence.

In case you missed it, Ackman jumped on X over the weekend to offer young men some old-school dating advice. Instead of hiding behind screens and dating apps, he suggested, walk up to a woman and politely say, "May I meet you?"

The internet did what the internet does and instantly turned it into a meme. I shredded poor Bill in my Womansplaining column. Some guy even tried the line on actual women in the wild — very unsuccessfully, mind you — and documented the whole thing.

Bill Ackman has gone viral for his dating advice.

(Photo by Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

But Bill Ackman remained unshaken. In fact, he's embracing his viral fame.

During the interview, Bartiromo noted that the "May I meet you?" line had sparked "its own meme universe" and was "fueling a lot of debate online."

"Well, look, I'm very happy about it," Ackman responded. "And I'm happy about it because, you know, we have a generation of people that are sitting at home on Twitter or, more likely, on maybe Instagram or whatever, looking at people living sort of fake lives. And the reality is, human interaction is just critically important."

He might be out-of-touch, but he's not wrong. As he continued, Ackman made a genuinely solid point about the real-world consequences of everyone being chronically online. He said younger people "are not having enough relationships, they're not having enough sex, they're not getting married… and that's the death knell for the globe, and also just happiness."

Funny enough, that's exactly what I said in my column yesterday. (Did Bill Ackman read Womansplaining? Unconfirmed. But we'll go with yes.)

"It just shows the virality of this, may I meet you," he said, "and by the way, it really did work."

Maria pressed him: Did he actually walk up to women and say that?

"I did," he said. And then he brought back the most bizarre detail from his original posts: "I actually had a better track record as long as I was on something moving. So there's an airplane, an elevator, an escalator, a subway, something about that increased the probability of it being effective."

I'd love to see the scientific data on that.

To his credit, Ackman has been a good sport about all the teasing. He's reposted several of the memes, and he's laughing along with us. But he is failing to address one very big difference between him and the average dater.

Ackman met his wife eight years ago… when his net worth was about $1.4 billion (it's up to about $9.3 billion now).

And money is certainly not everything. I'm just saying it's one thing to approach a woman when you live in a luxury penthouse and fly in a private jet. It's another thing to approach women when you're, well, just a normal dude.

You after you drop her a smooth, "May I meet you?"

(Getty Images)

Still, give the man this: he started a movement. "May I meet you?" is now officially part of the lexicon. It's been memed into immortality. And now that the whole internet is in on the joke, this pickup line might actually work.

So — both for the sake of your dating life and for my own entertainment — I'm asking my single readers to take The Bill Ackman Challenge.

Go out this weekend. Walk up to someone new. Make eye contact. Smile. And then confidently ask, "May I meet you?" Bonus points if you're "on something moving" as Bill suggests, but it's not required.

Maybe you'll get a weird look. But maybe you'll get a laugh and a dinner date? Either way, I want to hear about it. Email your findings to Amber.Harding@outkick.com. If some of you actually do it, I'll share the replies in next week's Womansplaining.

Go forth, be brave, and may the escalators be ever in your favor.