Twitter parody account imitating new Microsoft CEO causes confusion

Microsoft named Satya Nadella its new CEO on Tuesday, causing numerous Twitter parody accounts to immediately spring up. But one account is fooling users into believing it could be the official Nadella account.

Nadella is stepping up from his role as the president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group to become the third CEO of the tech giant. On Twitter, Nadella can be found on @satyanadella, but he hasn’t tweeted since the summer of 2010.

His impostor, however, has been quite busy Tuesday morning tweeting from @satyanadeiia, which is stylized with two capital letter “I’s” to look like the “l’s” in Nadella’s last name. On Twitter, the two handles look identical, and that’s causing confusion for some on the social network.

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“@SatyaNadeIIa or @satyanadella. Which CEO is the real one?” one user tweeted.

It’s particularly confusing because the real @satyanadella has sent out only 25 tweets ever. His account has not been verified by Twitter, and up until a week ago, his profile picture was nothing more than the standard egg users have before uploading an image of their own.

The official account will surely be verified soon, but until then, users can simply look at the content of @satyanadeiia’s tweets to know it is a parody.

The account has been used to link to some of outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer’s more embarrassing moments, including this image and this video of him going crazy during one of his keynotes.

“@bing it on guys!” says one of the tweets from the fake account, which is a fan of puns as well as Microsoft’s search service.

In defense of the parody account, it’s actually doing a great job imitating the real Nadella.

“Bing IT On!” the real Nadella tweeted five years ago.

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