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Whole Foods' CEO Mackey: Poster Child for Sock Puppeting's Pitfalls

By Samuel Fineman
July 30, 2007

Creativity is king, and on the Internet you can be anything imaginable: a man posing as a woman, an undercover agent impersonating a curious boy, or the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company pretending to be an adoring fan of ' himself?

So goes the strange tale of John Mackey, the chief executive officer of Whole Foods Market, who used a pseudonymous identity on the Yahoo! message boards for nearly eight years to lambaste competition and promote his supermarket chain's stock, according to documents released by the Federal Trade Commission ('FTC') last month.

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