Barry Spitzer

District Manager @BrooklynCB12. Former Deputy Chief of Staff for @NYCGreenfield at @NYCCouncil. Posts are my views only.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

I don't want to ever hear another word about a Jewish wedding, funeral, open yeshiva, or open store - ever!

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

For those that would like to say some Tehillim, Liora bat Karen is Lucy's Hebrew name.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

This is so heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. Hashem works in mysterious ways but maybe in this case we can all catch a glimpse. We are all praying for Lucy to have a refuah shleimah but also for Bill to succeed in this huge endeavor.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her.

I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong.

After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses.

By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice.

The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful.

The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert).

I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.

When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone.

Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others.

Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.

Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.

Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back.

We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention.

Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery.

Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space.

If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.

With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later.

We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December.

We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson.

Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission.

The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.

While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.

On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission.

Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients.

Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort.

Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible.

The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.

Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute.

We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity.

Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.

We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself.

We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles.

If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments.

We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us.

We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.

For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see:

https://t.co/gZKafCw6Ia

[David G. Greenfield @NYCGreenfield]

For 14 blissful years, these stickers were illegal in NYC because I banned them when I served in @NYCCouncil.

Why? Many of drivers getting stickered were innocent and the glue wrecked their cars.

A ticket is a penalty. Gluing trash to someone’s windshield is vandalism.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

Hey Internet, make her famous.

[David G. Greenfield @NYCGreenfield]

This nice lady on the subway platform moved her seat just to tell my 16-year-old son, visibly Jewish in his yarmulke and tzitzis, “Hey, Jew, they’re coming to get you.”

Stunned, he said, “Excuse me?”

She doubled down:
“They’re coming to get you all.”

NYC. 2026.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

.@nickshirleyy called for the Jews to be "exposed" simply for living in America. He called their living here an invasion. Somebody like that should not be given a platform in the world's greatest deliberative body.

@SenateGOP, do better.

[Joni Ernst @SenJoniErnst]

👏@nickshirleyy looked and now we all see. He should be applauded, not criticized.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

But it definitely is racist (and anti-Semitic) when calling for Jewish Americans living in an American state to be "exposed" for their "invasion."

@SenateGOP, you could've done better than @nickshirleyy.
https://t.co/49EoTzJUZw

[RNC Research @RNCResearch]

.@nickshirleyy: Democrats won't investigate fraud for fear of being called racist

MORENO: "Is that somehow racist to say 'you should not steal money from the federal Government?'"

SHIRLEY: "Their priority is to make sure they're not labeled as racist...for exposing fraud."

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

The Nazi tattoo wasn't enough?

[Rashida Tlaib @RashidaTlaib]

I am withdrawing my endorsement of Graham Platner and calling on him to exit the race immediately so that he can be replaced by a progressive fighter who will deliver for the people and help win back the Senate. These allegations are devastating and must be taken seriously.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

@B840D0o I would prefer the government not damage private property without due process. Also, what's to stop the government from putting stickers on your house windows if the street outside is dirty?

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

This was one of your signature achievements that went a bit under the radar but affected countless average, hardworking New Yorkers. Sadly, making life easier for the people of this city is no longer a top priority for our elected officials.

[David G. Greenfield @NYCGreenfield]

Say it ain’t so!

I banned these 14 years ago because stickering someone’s car is a blatant violation of due process.

But everyone hates car owners, so behold, they’re back!

We had a good run, @bspitzer (my former district director, now CB 12 Director).

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

@B840D0o That's what the ticket's for.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

@NYCGreenfield Please don't give them any ideas. The Council of today is not the Council you served on.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

@jencloo @bethanyshondark Jen, the descendants of those liberated from Gunskirchen will never forget these warriors. Last year, 80 years after the liberation, NYS Assemblyman @AronWieder, whose grandmother was also there, honored one of them on Memorial Day. #TheGreatestGeneration
https://t.co/nxn5kpqVzj

[Aron Wieder @AronWieder]

This Memorial Day, I visited the resting place of Alan Moskin—a WWII veteran who helped liberate my grandmother from Gunskirchen concentration camp. Honoring his courage and the lives he helped save. Never forgotten.

[Bethany S. Mandel @bethanyshondark]

Twitter sometimes can suck. But sometimes it helps people realize things like their grandfather liberated a concentration camp and someone else pipes in that *their* grandfather was liberated from that very camp.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

@jencloo @bethanyshondark It was Gunskirchen, and my grandfather was liberated from that camp. Thank you to your grandfather and to the 71st. They are forever heroes.

https://t.co/BT9AzcMtgN

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

75 years ago today the @USArmy's 71st Infantry Division liberated my grandfather OMB from the Gunskirchen concentration camp. His children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren & great-great-grandchildren owe this country and its armed forces a debt of gratitude. God bless America!

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

Interesting caveat I heard from more than a few people this Passover season. They will absolutely not accept charity but feel comfortable taking from @MetCouncil. Great job, David. You made it possible for numerous families to have a "Freilichen" Pesach.

[David G. Greenfield @NYCGreenfield]

Thanks to the over 100 staffers, 800 volunteers, 1,000's of donors and 55 elected officials who helped make this happen, with an assist from AI.
Chag Sameach & Happy Passover!
https://t.co/r8IsRcOZT8

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

A spike of what, pray tell?

[Gothamist @Gothamist]

After 152% spike, NYPD changes how it reports hate crimes

https://t.co/Ubr0DEwi80

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

@camhigby Nick Shirley replied "expose it all" to a video that's titled I Exposed New Jersey's Jewish Invasion. There is no nuance here.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

@nickshirleyy @LauraLoomer No, Nick. When you reply to a post labeling Jewish Americans living in an American town an invasion with "expose it all," that is anti-Semitic.
https://t.co/w1MBnwFDlN

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

Absolutely not. When he sees Americans living in an American town being called invaders just because they're Jewish and his first instinct is to say expose them, he deserves all that's coming his way.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

Jews shouldn't have to apologize for living ANYWHERE in the United States and we don't have to 'explain' why it's ok to live wherever we do. That's why I haven't replied with how long my family has been here or how many generations my family has been American. IT DOESN'T MATTER.

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

Absolutely not. When he sees Americans living in an American town being called invaders just because they're Jewish and his first instinct is to say expose them, he deserves all that's coming his way.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

Stop calling Nick an antisemite for his comment. It’s just going to alienate him.

Instead, explain why this comment is dumb and why Tyler is wrong in his video.

What Tyler’s exposing is how we should abolish the welfare state, not fraud. And there are tons of studies showing data on where the most money is going (it’s not to Jewish communities). But explain that rather than calling them antisemites,

[Barry Spitzer @bspitzer]

@nickshirleyy @tyleraloevera Oh, it got to your head, didn't it? So Americans living in an American state need exposing? Is there something scandalous here? You don't know it yet, but believe me, your 15 minutes of fame are already over.