May I Explain the “May I Meet You?” Meme?
Bill Ackman thinks the cure to male loneliness is asking women these four magic words. Allow me to explain.
The way the fabled investor Bill Ackman sees it, he was born to move markets. It’s right there in the name: BILL-ionaire ACK-tivist MAN, as the 59-year-old always loves pointing out, whether in a New York magazine profile (in which Ackman also asserted that “I’ve met people named Hamburger that own McDonald’s franchises”) or on the social media platform X (where Ackman has racked up 1.8 million followers since he joined in 2017 with a Chipotle tweet). As a billionaire, an activist, and a man, Ackman built his fortune and his reputation by offering decades’ worth of unsolicited and even unwanted advice. Most of it has been directed toward the various big stagnant corporations he always sought to improve or the stubborn nations he still hopes to influence. But recently, Ackman has attempted to proffer his offbeat wisdom to us smol bean, stick-in-the-mud civilians, too.
And more frequently, that wisdom has extended far beyond the field of finance.
“Just two cents from an older happily married guy concerned about our next generation’s happiness and population replacement rates,” Ackman posted this past weekend, using the same confident, conversational tone you might find in one of his hedge fund investor letters. “The online culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers. As such, I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I found compelling.”
Ackman’s suggested few words?
“I would ask: ‘May I meet you?’” he wrote, adding that his suggested inquiry’s stilted, never-felt-the-touch-of-a-woman aura—I’m paraphrasing a little bit here—was precisely what gave the phrase its most vital charm. “I almost never got a No,” he insisted.
Past performance is never indicative of future results, but it’s hard to ignore observed results like that.
It took almost no time at all, even during a weekend, for Ackman’s so-old-it’s-new, so-earnest-it’s-ironic May I meet you? to start taking over social media timelines every which way: mocked, debated, saluted, and processed into mindless grindset gristle in immediate and near-equal measure. “Just asked a cat ‘may I meet you?’” quipped the Menswear Guy. Overworked Sydney Sweeney crossover images flourished. The trad girlies, the Fox News crew, the finance meme bro ecosystem, the lords of LinkedIn (imagine me reading all those descriptors in the voice of the school secretary from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)—they all loved May I meet you? They see it as righteous content, dude!
To butcher that old line about that first Velvet Underground album: May I meet you? may not have reached everyone—but everyone it did reach immediately went out and created a May I meet you? meme of their very own. (Guilty as charged, and sorry to summon you to this weird human realm, Casper!) Not since Succession’s Tom Wambsgans coined the tagline We Hear for You have four silly little words from a rich-as-balls striver made such a deep splash in a small but influential corner of American culture.
Here at The Ringer, our enthusiasms drive our expertise, which is why my colleagues include a noted Simpsons historian, a respected interpreter of all things Taylor Swift, and multiple people with uncanny recall of any and every scene ever shot by Paul Thomas Anderson. There are elite George R.R. Martin (and Lucas!) completists in our midst, the leading scholar in the arts and sciences of Lane Kiffin, and also professionals who have logged, like, 700 episodes of Survivor or studied tens of thousands of Kevin Durant’s minutes.
And then there’s me, the real sicko: the accredited Billionaire Activist Man knower; the hedge fund edgelord enthusiast; the person who was tracking Ackman years before he finally logged on and became, depending on the day, one of the worst or all-time best posters ever. Today is a good day: This doesn’t happen often, but it’s my time to give back to a confused community by answering any frequent (and/or fervent) questions about Bill Ackman’s sudden playbook for getting one’s freak on.
Hello, first caller: g’head.
Kindly remind me, what’s Bill Ackman’s deal?
People sometimes refer to an “invisible hand” behind (or maybe somewhere up above?) the financial markets—some ineffable, inconspicuous force that drives all those outcomes and shifts that we didn’t see coming, like a profit-driven Ouija board. Many of the best-known big-name investors—your Warren Buffetts, your Seth Klarmans, low-drama figures who like to let their trades do most of the talking—tend to possess a similar aura: Their impact is, ideally, felt, rather than constantly seen or heard. But the best way I can think of to describe Bill Ackman is that he’s … the total opposite of all that.
This man is hella effable, if you will? Conspicuous as fuck? The kind of guy who hopes you heard him yapping about his plans and ideas from miles away? Ackman is someone who thrives on conflict and chaos and seems unafraid to publicly fail at his objective about as often as he succeeds—a personality structure that I both envy and fear. In short: Ackman has the human shell of a normie Harvard Business School–educated Gen X hedge fund guy, the mind of a boomer who is both terminally online and absolutely stymied by what is and isn’t artificial intelligence, and the soul of an absolute poster. (He also has a big chip on his shoulder in the shape of his daughter’s Marxist studies, also at Harvard.)
I’m not sure whether any of that even answers the question, which suggests that I’m approaching the most accurate answer there is.
What are some of his more recent wins and losses?
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Ackman turned $27 million worth of credit default swaps into a tidy $2.6 billion position. Bully for him! On the other hand, while “more recent” precludes me from answering this question with Ackman’s billion-dollar Herbalife bust from a decade ago, there was last year’s aborted retail IPO and, more importantly, the time just this summer when Ackman weaseled his way into a professional tennis match and failed extremely miserably and extremely memorably.
OMG, wait, this is that tennis guy??
Is it ever! One thing that most fascinates me about Ackman is that he has the supreme confidence of a guy who has never once gotten humbled, despite the fact that he has definitely been humbled in pretty major ways a good number of times. There was the time when he bonked on a bike ride so badly that an acquaintance of his described him as unleashing “primal screams of pain.” (Now that’s a four-word phrase about a billionaire I can get behind!) And before this round of May I meet you? semi-infamy, Ackman’s biggest mainstream pop was when he wormed his way into an actual pro tennis tournament—held on the showcase grass court at the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, no less—and looked, well, so bad that the match was picked up by the national media for the lulz. Game, set, match.
Anyway: The first time I learned about Ackman, the rest of my origin story goes, it was pretty much because of this same intrinsic self-assurance of his. At the time, I was but a lowly financial analyst in the mid-aughts at a big Wall Street bank that always had CNBC playing. Ackman, meanwhile, was smack-dab in the midst of trying to reimagine the retailer Target, one of the many visionary boondoggles mixed into his triumphs over the years. I marveled at and was hooked by the wild juxtaposition of the guy’s suave countenance and a more fundamental messiness that he didn’t seem to care to mask.
OK, so how did this guy break the contain from CNBC?
For decades, Ackman’s best ideas and strongest convictions—investment theses, personal grudges, idle thoughts on topics like nominative determinism—were found mostly in the investor letters from his hedge funds or in his occasional appearances for wider audiences on television. But when the capital markets maven joined Twitter in 2017, the marketplace of ideas was forever changed, too. Once upon a time, Ackman was almost solely the property of finance nerds. But once he was on Twitter, his total addressable market broadened.
May I meet you? ultimately spread wide and rapidly enough that even the good people who understandably no longer patronize Elon Musk’s social network and don’t follow Ackman may have encountered the concept in some other establishment. If you’re on Tinder, there’s a decent chance you’ve received the four words in your inbox as a “clever” litmus test–slash–opening line, for example. If you live in New York City, you might have even borne witness IRL to some of the in-person subway and sidewalk shenanigans/studies resulting from Ackman’s call to arms. And if you’re over on Bluesky, maybe you noticed Kara Swisher huffing that Ackman was being a “Cheap ass @profgalloway.com copycat.”
I’m sorry—there’s a turf war over who’s allowed to tell men how to do man things?
You jest, and yet. Scott Galloway was on Bill Maher’s show just this past weekend to promote his new book, Notes on Being a Man, and spread his own gospel about how men have been wronged by today’s society (even though, as The New Yorker’s brilliant Jessica Winter repeatedly pointed out in her recent column, most of his gripes about men’s material situation are things that affect women, too).
More broadly, I do think that one of the reasons that Ackman’s May I meet you? tweet popped off like it did is that it played off a current climate already extremely primed by a lot of recent discussion—from Galloway and beyond—about male loneliness, Gen Z mating habits, and people’s general meeting-new-people snafus and aversions. It was only recently that people were debating whether it was now considered embarrassing to [checks notes] have a boyfriend. And the other week, Twitter was alive with conversation about that one tech dude who wrote a whole “date me doc” that involved the minor sidenote that he was ideally looking for someone “monogamish.”
OK, it doesn’t feel like we have the time to get into all of that. Does the Billionaire Activist Man even have a successful track record of offering romantic advice?
He kinda does! Ackman joked to The New York Times in 2024 that he had a “patented method” for matchmaking that he used to employ back when he was married to his first wife: “He asked guests to bring their best single friend. Attendees were handed a card from a card deck and asked to find the person with the same card.” One hedge funder, Whitney Tilson, wrote that he was part of one of at least four couples whom Ackman successfully paired up. By all accounts—or two full accounts, at least—this man is Patti Stanger, only he’s a billionaire making matches, rather than a person matchmaking millionaires.
It’s also worth noting that (a) Ackman’s own current relationship, with his second wife, Neri Oxman, began prettaaaayy differently and (b) he’s now an all-timer wife guy in ways I didn’t realize were even possible. (Find you a man who will write multiple multi-thousand-word tweets defending you from clear and present plagiarism, I guess?)
Then let’s get down to brass tacks: Should I try Ackman’s trick? Should I be May I meet you? maxxing?
Honestly, what’s most funny about this whole brouhaha is that, contra all the grumps and skeptics out there, Ackman did give some pretty decent and actionable advice on how to move with confidence through this world. The May I meet you? method is a little cringe in that classic tips-fedora-milady way, but it’s also markedly respectful—especially for anyone who survived, like, that full decade when the preeminent advice to single young men, given by a man in a gigantic furry hat, was to get mad girls by being like: “Hey, nice unibrow! U wanna tequila shot or wut?” The biggest risk to May I meet you? is probably that you’ll find yourself on the bottom panel of that “Hello, human resources?!” meme. In other words, that you won’t ask the question billionairely enough.
If I successfully find love via the May I meet you? method, do you think Ackman will come to my wedding?
Honestly? I do, yes! (At the very least, I bet he’d make it rain on your registry if you sent him the invite.) Just look at his Twitter over the past couple of days: It’s almost entirely him retweeting randos who gave May I meet you? a shot, to such an extent that some enterprising folks are now seeing it as a viable growth-hacking strategy as opposed to just another pickup line.
In one case, Ackman mentioned some student at Stanford who had, according to him, secured a date this upcoming weekend with those four magic words. Which made me realize that while Ackman may be a lifelong New Yorker, May I meet you?’s best shot at any staying power will almost certainly be out on the more socially maladjusted (sorry, but true!) West Coast. Already, there are tweets with bullet points like “inside joke creates shared connection” that seek to optimize and scale May I meet you? like it’s just another go-to-market strategy built from first principles.
In the end, maybe that’s exactly what true love is.
