Back in February 2013, Thorsten Heins, then-CEO of what was once the iconic “smartphone” brand Blackberry, publicly lied that its Hail Mary iPhone competitor, the Z10, had “record” early sales. He told CNET, that “BlackBerry nearly tripled the sales of its best performance over the first week in the U.K., while it had its best first day ever in Canada. In fact, it was more than 50 percent better than any other launch day in our history in Canada.”
Less than one year later, and less than two years after he was hired, the ruse was up – Blackberry’s US market share has fallen from 50% to 3% in four years – and Thorsten was fired.
Fast forward to Monday morning, when the S&P500 had just hit its first limit down in history, stocks were crashing, countless ETFs were crashing more as ETF pricing models were corrupt and broken, the QQQs were plummeting, and none other than AAPL was set to open at a price of $92 wiping out tens of billions of market cap overnight.
It is then that AAPL CEO Tim Cook may have pulled a page straight out of Thorsten Heins’ playbook when did something nobody expected him to do – he panicked, and emailed CNBC anchor Jim Cramer to do what the AAPL CEO himself admitted the company does not do by providing mid-quarter updates, and assure the CNBC anchor that there is no need to sell AAPL stock.
Continue reading “Did Tim Cook Lie To Save Apple Stock: The “Channel Checks” Paint A Very Gloomy Picture”
