The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Year

Whole Foods' Mr. Lonelyhearts

It must be suffocating to be a CEO in the modern world, where every word is controlled and contorted by lawyers and public relations officials. Some must feel like a baited bull, and that probably explains why Whole Foods' John Mackey saw red this year.

To be fair, Mackey's qualifying event wasn't just this year. Indeed, it was just discovered this year that, in one of the most deliciously stupid developments, for most of the past decade Mackey masqueraded online under aliases like "Rahodeb," trashing the competition and blowing wet verbal kisses to none other than Whole Foods.

That, of course, is dumb. But we all have dumb impulses when it comes to our creations. (Wanna see my kids' art wall?) What merits Mr. Mackey's inclusion on this list has to do with vanity getting harnessed to the stupidity of doing something he had to know he was eventually going to get caught for. When one message board brayer made a disparaging remark about his hairdo, Mackey, writing as the masked "Rahodeb" struck back: "I like Mackey's haircut," he wrote, about himself: "I think he looks cute."

Dumb-o-Meter Score: 93. At least he named his tricky anonymous screen self after his wife. And he is kind of cute. And now we can all rest easy, since Whole Foods established a new policy about executives posting on message boards.