Word: rahodeb
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...shocked was an understatement. Last week John Mackey, CEO of organic grocer Whole Foods, admitted that from 1999 to 2006, he had been anonymously posting messages to Yahoo's message board under the pseudonym "Rahodeb," praising his company's performance while knocking his competition and acquisition target Wild Oats. Shocking.... people are still using message boards...
...exchange, but also of the persistence of pre-Web 1.0 technology in an over-hyped Web 2.0 world. The Securities and Exchange Commission has now commenced an informal investigation into Mackey's message posting activity, possibly endangering Whole Food's potential acquisition of competitor Wild Oats. I wonder what "Rahodeb" would have posted about that...
Over the course of eight or nine years, until last August, someone with the handle "rahodeb" posted regularly about the company Whole Foods on Yahoo!'s finance bulletin boards. Rahodeb liked Whole Foods. He didn't care for its competitor Wild Oats. Rahodeb particularly liked Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. "While I'm not a 'Mackey groupie,'" rahodeb wrote, "I do admire what the man has accomplished." This was true, as far as it went. Rahodeb was not a Mackey groupie. Rahodeb was Mackey...
...venial sin that would never have come to light except that in February Whole Foods made a $565 million play to buy Wild Oats--the very company rahodeb so soundly dissed online--and while reviewing the bid, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) turned up what would, if this were a spy thriller, be known as the Rahodeb Identity. The FTC is seeking to halt the deal on basic antitrust grounds--it claims that a union of the two companies would produce an organic-foods quasi-monopoly. The government may also be examining whether Mackey, in his double life, revealed information...
...electronic masked ball, a place where people can play with new identities and get off on the frisson of being somebody else. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has argued that this kind of identity-play even has therapeutic value. You certainly can't ascribe a plausible financial motive to Mackey--rahodeb's postings weren't moving stock prices around. This was about just being naughty: picture Mackey chortling as he played the regular rube, like Marie Antoinette dressing up as a peasant and milking cows on the fake farm she built near Versailles. (Mackey was even in drag, sort of--rahodeb...
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