I recently explained the dangers of writing things online under pseuodnyms, which can be summed up as “you’ll get caught.” Whole Foods CEO John Mackey just learned that the hard way. For eight years, Mackey was a regular poster to Yahoo’s finance forums under the screen name of “rahodeb,” spending a good bit of time bashing a company that he was in the process of acquiring, presumably in an effort to suppress the stock value to make the purchase cheaper. His defense? “The views articulated by rahodeb sometimes represent what I actually believed and sometimes they didn’t.” Translation: I lie…sometimes.
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Yes, I heard this story on NPR he other day. Amazing.
And then there’s the case of Spokane mayor Jim West:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hiddenlife/view/
Not to be confused with Quahog mayor Adam West.