6 CEOs Who Showed Their Whole Ass on Social Media
You’d think that once you reach the top of the business world, you’d be perfectly happy to stay as ignorant as possible. However, like a despised king willingly descending his ivory tower to waltz through the town square, some CEOs insist on chopping it up on social media like they’re normal people. Usually, it’s just annoying, but in some glorious moments, something horrible slips out, and we all get to watch their public shaming.
Here are six times CEOs said a little too much on social media…
Bezos’ ‘Happy Earth Day’
For most of us, the statement “Happy Earth Day” is as unobjectionable as they come. Even among holiday greetings, it’s not the most controversial. That’s a privilege we enjoy because we aren’t personally responsible for a good piece of the destruction of said earth. So when Jeff Bezos, owner of a company that pumps out the carbon dioxide equivalent of 80 billion pounds of coal yearly, starts getting teary about the environment, it rings a little hollow. Did he think all those shoddy foreign cellphone chargers were changing the world for the better?
Tech CEO Goes Off on the Homeless
“Sympathy for the homeless” is hard to ascribe to people who own multiple houses, but they’re not supposed to say it out loud. Or on Facebook, like CEO Greg Gopman of AngelHack, who decided the homeless of San Francisco, or as he calls them, “the lower part of society” needed the straight dope about how they don’t add “the smallest iota of value" and how “there is nothing gained from having them so close to us.” Buddy, you’re welcome to set them up with a house in the ’burbs. He also said they “sell small trinkets” like he lived above some sort of fantastical bazaar.
Ice Cream CEO Makes An Ill-Advised Assumption
“Social media manager” is a go-to non-job to make fun of, but sometimes, a little personal touch on social media is enough to show exactly why you need someone with a normal brain to handle it. When a customer posted on Wilcoxson’s Ice Cream’s Facebook page, he was seeking simple information. He noticed that their cookies-and-cream flavor listed gelatin as an ingredient, and, being Muslim, wanted to know if that included pork. The acceptable answers here would be yes, no or “let me look into it.” Instead, the CEO fired off the reply, “We don’t deliver outside of Montana, certainly not Pakistan.” As you might guess from the fact we’re talking about it, the man in question wasn't from Pakistan, but Wyoming.
Makeup CEO Photobombed By An Unfortunate Cake
Even as a simple cog in our great machine, I generally try to make sure anything I post to social media doesn’t have any unpleasantry or private information hiding in the background. Nobody wants to realize a picture of their new TV has their reflection ass-naked floating in the middle of it. So, especially when a company’s stock price is tied to your behavior, you’d think to scan the margins, but the CEO of makeup brand Too Faced forgot to do this when posting a Instagram Story of him and his husband, with an unwelcome guest in the bottom left corner: a cake decorated with the phrase “Rich Lives Matter.” That’s a gaffe almost designed in a laboratory to piss off the most possible people in three words.
Ryanair CEO’ s Uncomfortably Horny Q&A
The CEO of budget airline Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, is known for being a bit of an, as they’d say, “arsehole.” So much so that it basically became part of the brand. Which is a good strategy, I suppose, if you’re stuck with an impulsive, banter-heavy guy as the face of your company. Even with everyone expecting the worst, he still occasionally managed to cross the line, like he did during a completely voluntary Twitter Q&A. He opened up a hashtag called #GrillMOL and invited people to ask questions, and when the FIRST QUESTION apparently came from someone whose profile picture he was a fan of, he replied, possibly not fully knowing replies on Twitter are public, “Nice Pic. Phwoaaarr!” “Phwoaaarr,” I assume, being some sort of sexual exhortation, even though it sounds like someone’s best attempt to spell a pterodactyl’s cry.
Elon Musk Summons The SEC
Pissing off your customers isn’t great, but by design, they have limited recourse, even less if you have a functional monopoly on whatever good you supply. One reader you very much do not want to get the attention of is the governmental body that regulates your business. Which is exactly what the razor-sharp business mind of 52-year-old memelord Elon Musk managed to do with an attempt at (what he denies was) a joke on Twitter.
This one, arguably untrue tweet about the financial status and plans of Tesla that sure seems like an attempt to wedge the funny number 420 into a joke that would bomb in Fortnite match chat, cost him literal tens of millions of dollars and sparked a SEC fraud investigation.
