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Sit down and pay attention, because this column might change your life. I bring you tidings from the Nazi-filled wilderness that is now X, where Maga-adjacent billionaire Bill Ackman has generously decided to dispense romantic advice to the masses. Online culture, Ackman notes, has “destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers”. The antidote to this, he suggests, are four simple words.
“May I meet you?”
That’s it. That’s the strategy. Ackman used this pickup line throughout his youth and, he says, it served him well. He didn’t even have to put “I’m a billionaire,” in front of the sentence – it was the syntax that women found sexy.
“I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness,” Ackman mused. “You might give it a try.” And by “you”, he explains, he means everyone, not just young heterosexual men. “I think it should also work for women seeking men as well as same sex interactions,” Ackman proclaimed.
A real man of the people, Ackman took time out of his busy billionaire schedule to add a little more context to his advice, which he explains is motivated by concern about the “next generation’s happiness and population replacement rates”. Per Ackman, you should try to be in motion while chatting someone up. This strategy “works much more effectively when you are moving”, he noted. “So on subways, elevators, escalators, airplanes, buses, and even walking down the street, it is most effective.”
I have debased myself for numerous columns (just Google “Arwa Mahdawi accidental laxatives” or “Arwa banana”) but I do have my limits. Walking around the streets of Philadelphia asking women who set off my gaydar “may I meet you?” being one of them.
But while I haven’t tried the Ackman approach myself, the advice has gone viral and various other people are giving it a whirl. It’s too early to do a quantitative assessment of its effectiveness but I hope that some enterprising social scientists are applying for funding for a future study. It’s perfect material for a future Ig Nobel prize.
While we wait for a peer-reviewed analysis to come out, I must confess that I have my doubts that imposing yourself on strangers in the subway is going to do much to help “population replacement rates”. This may be a wild take but it’s possible that not supporting genocidal wars (Ackman has been a big cheerleader of Israel’s actions in Gaza) that have made prenatal care virtually nonexistent and killed an average of a child an hour, might be more effective when it comes to population replacement. That’s assuming we think all populations are equal, of course.
Doing something about the exorbitant price of childcare, and the dire state of public schools in affordable areas of the US might also encourage more people to have kids. Since I’m churning out the hot takes over here, it’s also possible that young people might go out on the town more if the cost of living hadn’t become so expensive, and they had more disposable income. In short: solving underlying social issues that wealth-hoarding billionaires have exacerbated might prove more effective than a grammatically interesting pickup line.
But what do I know, eh? I’m not a billionaire. Far better if plebs like me keep quiet and listen to our social and economic betters. So, in that spirit, and in the hopes of solving the population crisis, I have put together a few bits of relationship advice from the rich and infamous:
1 Putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing: avoid at all costs
Once you have found your future spouse through the May-I-Meet™ method, you should try to hold on to them. According to our great leader Donald Trump that means avoiding a working relationship. “If you’re in business for yourself, I really think it’s a bad idea to put your wife working for you. I think it’s a really bad idea. I think that was the single greatest cause of what happened to my marriage with [first wife] Ivana,” Trump told ABC news in 1994. RIP Ivana, who is now dead and buried under the first hole of Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
2 Sabotage your co-worker’s car
Fox News host Jesse Watters is not a billionaire like Ackman or Trump, but he lives in a mansion so is still worth listening to. During a 2022 episode of the panel series The Five, Watters boasted that he “let the air out of“ now wife Emma DiGiovine’s tires when he “was trying to get [her] to date” him. “She couldn’t go anywhere. She needed a lift, I said, ‘Hey, you need a lift?’ She hopped right in the car,” Watters recalled. The Fox news host was 43 at the time, by the way, and DiGiovine, who is his second wife, was 29 and an associate producer on his show at Fox News. After some backlash about “Deflategate” he claimed this tactic, which he said “works like a charm”, was a joke.
3 Cozy up to a sex offender (DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT)
The latest batch of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents to be released reveal that Harvard professor and economist Larry Summers spent years discussing relationship advice with the convicted pedophile. In one 2018 email, Summers forwarded Epstein an email from a woman and asked for advice on when to write back. “Think no response for a while probably appropriate,” Summers said. Epstein agreed: “she’s already beginning to sound needy :) nice.” In another email Summers complained that attitudes to dating had become too woke. The “American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” he wrote to Epstein. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”
4 Offer your sperm to strangers over supper
If one is simply concerned with increasing the population rather than meeting a life partner you can always go the Elon Musk route and donate your sperm willy-nilly. According to a 2024 New York Times report, Musk has “offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances”. The same piece notes: “At a dinner party held at the home of a well-known Silicon Valley executive [in 2023] Mr. Musk offered to provide his sperm to a married couple he had met socially only a handful of times.” (Musk has denied this.) Or, if that sounds too exhausting, you can be like Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov and fund free IVF treatments for women who use your sperm. Durov now has more than 100 biological children in 12 countries via sperm donation. Perhaps, in the future, one of Durov’s children will bump into one of Musk’s many children and ask: “May I meet you?”
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