Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Take That, Mark Cuban! Bengals Receiver Chad Ochocinco Pays $520 a Word for NFL Twitter Fine

When the NFL banned in-game Twittering by its players last year, I’m pretty sure they had Chad Ochocinco in mind. And while it took nearly a year, the Cincinnati Bengals receiver finally got the league to flex its anti-social-media muscles, via a $25,000 fine for two tweets sent out last Saturday.

Ochocinco (old-timers may remember when he went by the name Chad Johnson) sent this one out about an hour before a preseason game against the Philadelphia Eagles:

Followed by this one, tapped out during the game itself:

By my count (contractions are tricky), those two missives contain a total of 48 words, which puts Ochocinco’s tab at $520 a word. Which means he trumps Mark Cuban’s $510 per-word Twitter fine he got from the NBA a year ago.

And Ochocinco is sorry. Sort of. Because tweeting is great, but exotic luxury cars are expensive:

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik