Trying to strike up a conversation with a woman in the real world? Bill Ackman has some advice for you.
The billionaire CEO of Pershing Square Holdings wrote on X that many young men “find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting.” Reflecting on his youth, Ackman offered what he said was his old go-to line.
“May I meet you?”
The line seemed to take social media by storm over the weekend. Ackman’s post has racked up roughly 4,200 comments, ranging from meme-ified mockery to sincere conversations and endorsements of his advice.
“This ain’t 1850s UK,” one user commented. “This is ‘peak rizz,'” wrote another.
Ackman responded to some of the comments. When one commenter wrote that he tried the line on a girl at a coffee shop and “she said no,” Ackman wrote, “Try again.”
“You need not fear being rejected,” Ackman wrote. “Wrong girl for you. Her loss, your gain.”
When another user suggested that Ackman had found success with it because he was wealthy, he responded, “I didn’t have two nickels then.”
Some online praised the post. “You have taken dating off the apps with a single X post,” wrote one. “Corny? Maybe. But authentic,” another wrote.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the post quickly turned into a big meme fest.
Nick O’Neill, a crypto enthusiast known for his joke persona, tried it out on the subway and in the park. (Both attempts appeared unsuccessful.)
“Attention, ladies of New York City, may I meet you?” he asked a crowded subway car. “Should there be a line that forms, please line up single file,” he added.
Another tried it as an opening line with all of their Hinge matches.
There were Selena Gomez memes and Shane Gillis memes, Joe Biden memes and JD Vance memes.
Some X posters suggested Ackman was out of touch with the younger generation of daters.
“May i meet you fellow kids,” one X poster wrote with an image of actor Steve Buscemi dressed as a teenager, a reference to the popular “How do you do, fellow kids” meme that mocks attempts by older people to fit in with today’s youth.
“You Boomers have zero clue what you have created,” another commenter wrote.
This is far from the first brush with internet virality for Ackman, a prolific X user known for writing long posts sometimes reaching thousands of words (he dressed up as one of his X posts for Halloween).
While much of the meme-ing centered on “May I meet you?” as a pickup line for women, Ackman wrote that it “should also work for women seeking men as well as same sex interactions.”
After the post went viral, Ackman posted that the line works best “when you are moving” and that he’d heard a Stanford undergrad had used it successfully.
“A world where human interaction is encouraged and rewarded is a better world,” he wrote.
