Slashdot Mirror
CEO Questionably Used Pseudonym to Post Online
jpallas writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that court filings by the FTC about Whole Foods' plan to acquire Wild Oats reveal an unusual detail: The CEO of Whole Foods regularly posted to a Yahoo! stock bulletin board under a pseudonym. His alter ego was feisty, to say the least, and regularly disparaged the company that he later decided to acquire. A former SEC chairman called the behavior 'bizarre and ill-advised, even if it isn't illegal.' This certainly raises questions about online rights to free speech and anonymity, especially when the line between free speech and regulated speech depends on who is speaking as much as what they are saying."
Posting anonymously under a pseudonym, bah. Gill Bates.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why would you expect that anyone posting to a stock message board did NOT have some stake in the game? I don't see how or why you would differentiate the CEO from any other stakeholder who chooses to post for his own self interest. Does the public in general use their real names?
It certainly reflects poorly on the him, but only insofar as he's just another lame schmuck posting propaganda on the message boards. Maybe I'm missing something but I wouldn't expect to find unbiased opinions there.
Doesn't exist. Someone will hold it against you. This is why the more polite a society gets, the less it tolerates or even cares about truth, and the more its science gets politicized.
Free speech, like world peace, unconditional love, and true happiness in life are misnamed goals. They are symbols, not reality. Of course, some of this could be changed, but it would require getting over the aforementioned taboos.
technical writing / development
Don't we usually call this Astroturfing?
They should ban pseudonyms and anonymous posting to forums
It think that such behaviour is smarmy but not worth much attention.
The guy is essentially just another anonymous poster. Even if his intended goal was to somehow affect the price of the company he was buying, as an anonymous poster the impact of his statements should be close to nil. If they were not nil, then the problem is with society taking the word of anonymous posters seriously, and the cure is not some sort of extended regulation, but for society to learn to think more critically.
They say freedom isn't free. Well, this is a perfect example of a trivial cost that society should bear in order to assure freedom of speech for all of us.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Actually, the CEO Unquestionably Used Pseudonym to Post Online.
The questionable part was the propriety of him doing so.
Carry on.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Ummm, that'd be the point. He was (apparently) trying to drive down the cost of Wild Oats to make the acquisition cheaper.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So the guy posted to a forum. Big F'ing Deal.
If he didn't do anything illegal, why does anyone care? He wasn't manipulating prices or public perception... so what's bizarre about it? Perhaps his forum postings were is personal feelings about things, rather than his "official" feelings as the CEO of Whole Foods.
Last time I checked, that was the entire reason people use anonymous "tags" online, rather than their real names.
I have no idea why people have a problem with anonymity, but feel perfectly comfortable with the endless soup of shell companies created by corporate America (especially all those shell companies which, combined among 3-4 parent companies, own about 95% of all our nation's media outlets).
Why should he be fired?
Even I as a lowly employee know that under no circumstances should I be posting on any share trading site about my company, without having discussed the situation thoroughly with our legal department first. Under no circumstances should I do anything that could annoy the SEC; and in one employment contract I was told that I am not even allowed to do anything that might _appear_ to be illegal or that some people might believe to be illegal.
Now I am not employed to run my companies' business, and I still have to know these things. As the CEO of the company, posting on a share trading site marks him as an outstanding idiot, bringing his company in disrepute, and possibly opening it up to severe penalties. That is grounds for immediate termination of his contract.
The last place I'd ever take advice is from the Yahoo Stock message boards. Everyone is a zealot for one stock or another there. Who cares if people are dumb enough to take investment advice there. I suspect anyone who actually knows anything about the market and Yahoo stock message boards knows this. I suspect anything he wrote had little if any effect on the performance of the stock.
Unbelievable!
/.'ers fail to understand how much money he stood to make if the price of Wild Oats shares were lower by a dollar or two. Easily worth the effort. Easily.
A. The guy couldn't come up with another way to kill Wild Oats? He should hire some of the scumbags running HP. They've got plenty of dirty tricks and know how to give their CEO plausible deniability.
B. The SEC in general would frown on this kind of activity from a CEO. In theory, they are held to a higher standard. Since it's a public company the likes of Albertson's would love to see disappear, no doubt more non-stories like this will appear.
C. The job should be left to underlings. Contracted underlings like they do in *every* other industry.
D. Most
E. The simple fact he couldn't pay off enough people in D.C. to force this one through is also quite enlightening. The telcos have enough budget for bribes. I guess Whole Foods doesn't.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
This really is quite silly. If you're listening to stock message boards for your advice on what to buy, then you really need to find yourself a living, breathing broker. With all the spam I get on nickel stocks, schemes to make thousands of dollars a day, etc a message board is just more crap to filter through. Why would I want to read one? More so, why would I want to post to one?
-50 DKP for lame post!
Someone going the the pen name eht asks:
If you're not willing to take a stand for what you say, why are you even bothering to say it?
Because the truth is more important than taking credit for it. Often, the credit is punishment and the anonymous accuser always runs this risk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I mean... that's pretty cool. He didn't hire PIs to stalk his foes, "pretext" their private records, bribe our elected leaders, or even bully his interns into doing it and cutting them and their "independent actions" loose when the investigation came. No. That man sat himself down, got on the internet, and told some lies.
Hands-on kind of approach. I like it. I don't think even the SEC can really complain about people believing anonymous internet posts.
(I also propose Slashdot rename "Anonymous Coward" to "John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc." for the week, but that's because I don't believe in letting him off scot-free either.)
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
What I want to know is how did the FTC find out it was him? People are saying he is lame and has to much time on his hands, but look at the FTC. I mean trying to stop this merger is silly as its a small niche market in a large industry where they barely own a piece of it. Doesn't the FTC have better things to do with their time than release information trying to make Whole Foods and Mackey look bad? And more importantly how did they prove this was Mackey posting this stuff? Disclaimer - I am a shareholder who is angry at the FTC, but I'm not John Mackey ;).
I've seen him on TV from time to time. He comes across as an ideal CEO, refusing a salary and expecting his execs to live on less than usual. He seems really enthused about his products, his employees and the mark he is making on the economy of food.
Could he have totally fooled me and others? If so, he should run for president.
...omphaloskepsis often...
And as a friend of mine who had dealings with them points out: the SEC make the CIA look like nice, friendly people.
Mackey's not a loser. He has a cute haircut and I hear that he's very popular with the ladies. Also, anything you've heard about him having erectile dysfunction is just a rumor being spread by jilted ex-girlfriends and those jealous of his mojo.
He hid his credibility along with his identity. It is a self-correcting situation. A major CEO disparaging another company might actually attract an audience, this is a public figure with some sort of reputation.
His alter ego is basically the equivelent of an AC and his statements must stand on their own. The only way the comments would make a difference is if they ring true with others reading the posts. If that is the case then it really doesn't matter who is saying it.
It has ZERO to do with the acquisition of another company and the FTC knows it.This is typical Bush Administration crap to justify an ad hoc regulatory decision after the fact, a decision that appears to be based on the lefty politics of the two companies involved. These guys always have the same M.O. They relentlessly take politics into consideration whenever they have to decide in an official government capacity who to help or hurt. Help goes right and hurt goes left. My guess is, this was basically all the dirt that opposition research could find on Whole Foods. A bunch of stupid posts from a CEO at home.
How were these posts even found? If a CEO posts as an AC, what databases (secret or otherwise) would contain this information? How would the FTC even know to look for something like this? Did they find his home IP and do a wide search for it in hopes of fishing something up? (I imagine the information path was NSA-DHS-FTC-WSJ.) Are they looking for posts from CEOs of other companies that merge, or just this one?
There is simply no basis to the argument that Whole Foods' acquisition of Wild Oats should be called into question because of stupid online posts from a CEO. If SBC and AT&T want to merge, that's OK. If the nation's largest hog producer buys the second largest, that's OK too. But a less than 1 billion dollar merger between Whole Foods and Wild Oats, well we can't have that because then yuppies will have no place to go to get their overpriced fruits and vegetables!
A CEO is differentiated by registering as an insider with the SEC.
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/85/3871.html
Ask the old widow "Silence Dogood" aka Benjamin Franklin.
Google it, you're obviously ignorant of the history.
Anonymity is critical to democracy.
That sure sounds impressive. How much did he cut it, and how prescisely did the employess benefit thereby?
Article states he cut his salary to $1. Since CEOs make the majority of their money from other sources (especially those who found the company and have an enormous share of the stock), I'm guessing he cut his pay by 2 or 3 percent. Might be as much as 20 or 30 percent if the company had a bad year, though bad years rarely affect the execs compensation.
I'm sure his total compensation is in a report somewhere.