Doesn’t anybody know how to shut up anymore?
In our say-anything age, even US president Barack Obama has a Twitter account. All of this year’s presidential candidates do, too; Donald Trump has taken to the medium like an agitated middle-school student.
The business world is social-media crazy, too: Tech titans like Marc Andreessen share their thoughts in florid tweet-storms. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk taunt each other at 140 characters per message over whose rockets do cooler things. The futurists promised us an always-on Internet, but they did not tell us that so many people would always be on stage.
Still, you know the old line: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
No, former US president Abraham Lincoln apparently did not say it, but it is good advice anyway. It is even better advice when you are going to trial. Yet some really smart people apparently do not feel confined by petty rules and well-intended advice.
A recent New York Times article by Matthew Goldstein and Alexandra Stevenson examined chief executives and other prominent figures who have gotten in trouble with the law and have used social media to make their case in the court of public opinion — even though actual courts take a dim view of such antics.
The article says that just two days after Martin Shkreli, a pharmaceutical executive, was arraigned on federal securities fraud charges, he wrote on Twitter: “I am confident I will prevail.”
He has also posted on Twitter: “I’m not a criminal.”
Shkreli, 32, made headlines by increasing the price of a decades-old drug by 5,000 percent; the charges focus on earlier financial dealings that were already the subject of a lawsuit.
Other business executives with legal problems, including private equity executive Lynn Tilton and Charlie Shrem, who led a money transfer service, have also been pretty loose-lipped.
To be fair, Shkreli, for one, has not been his usual brash — maybe even bratty — self online. Before the arrest, based on his tweets and live videos, he almost seemed to be playing the role of a movie bad guy. Now he is posting on Twitter less often and with a more restrained — for him — air.
However, he is still talking. I called him and asked about his current approach on social media.
He said: “I am not going to say something that jeopardizes my case,” adding that prosecutors had a lot of sway over public opinion through events like so-called perp walks.
“This sort of becomes a chess match now of public opinion — which is sad, because ultimately it should be about the facts,” he said.
“I feel like I am being prosecuted for being a jerk,” Shkreli added.
After hearing from him, I retained my reservations about his public relations strategy. I myself have a Twitter account and on a daily basis, I wonder if Twitter is not custom designed to trigger career suicide. My own online persona could well end up in a flameout so spectacular that colleagues would talk about it in the years afterward as “pulling a Schwartz.”
This has not happened yet, thank goodness, but give me time.
The thing is, though, that as close as I regularly skate toward disaster online, I am not a chief executive and I am not facing criminal or civil charges. What these brilliant captains of industry are doing takes boldness into a realm that even I, a great fan of boldness, find questionable.
I checked in with Gerald Shargel, a prominent criminal defense lawyer, for insight into this phenomenon and I am pretty sure I could hear him shaking his head over the telephone. Shargel, who has represented John Gotti, the Mafia don, among others, said that the problem came down to brains and self-confidence.
“It starts with the proposition that there are people who are very smart outside the four walls of the courtroom,” he said. “They think they are smarter than the lawyers they have engaged.”
These are high-powered people, who did not get to their positions by being conventional, he said.
Is it possible, I asked, that their rule-breaking, gut-trusting ways might be part of what got them plunked down in front of a judge in the first place?
He paused for a moment and replied: “Well said.”
The public pronouncements get the clients the attention that they seem to crave “and sometimes, it is funny — until the verdict,” he said.
To get further insight into the minds of these geniuses, I called Rory O’Connor, who provides media training and crisis consulting to executives through his San Francisco company, Morcopy Communications. He pronounced himself mystified by the likes of Shkreli.
“What is the first line of the Miranda warning? ‘You have the right to remain silent,’” he said.
O’Connor said that when police officers say: “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law,” they really mean it.
“Why would you want to go on social media, where they do not even need a subpoena, and say things that could be used against you?” he said.
It is great for clients’ lawyers and friends to say how wonderful they are, but as for the executives facing legal trouble themselves, “you want to keep your mouth shut,” he said.
There is nothing novel about this advice, he said, adding: “I have never been in a situation where a lawyer or PR counsel says: ‘Hey, get out there and open your yap.’”
What does this mean for the future? I wonder whether the quiet period before an initial public offering of stock — a blessedly silent interlude when executives are prohibited from speaking out and influencing public opinion — is doomed.
More generally, many corporate espionage strategies, and sophisticated market research programs, could become utterly pointless. Just check a chief executive’s Pinterest and Instagram accounts. Maybe Tinder, too. It is all out there, baby.
Vanity might finally lead to true corporate transparency. How wonderful if corporate America used Twitter even more.
All of it, eventually, would be a guide for investors. Give money to this company? To this entrepreneur or that one? Well, how do they sound online? I can only imagine what the real Steve Jobs would have done with a Twitter account by now. Or how Henry Ford would have fared if he had committed anti-Semitic gaffes in a social media world.
Yes, strip away the layer of handlers and let us see what these giants are really like and what people think of their judgement and boldness then. People will make decisions accordingly.
Of course, if Twitter leads chief executives to actually start losing money — well, that is when they will finally put a sock in it. Silence would once again be golden when not being silent means having less gold.
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