Bill Wexler: One Year
Later
Q. Has Bill Wexler answered the questions you posed to him?
A. No. Wexler has contacted us several times, but not with answers to the five questions we asked him.
Q. Do you know why Yahoo has removed Wexler's posts from its message boards?
A. According to Wexler, he asked Yahoo to remove the posts because of "a campaign of personal attacks based on some sort of ultra-bizarre conspiracy where anyone with a negative opinion was branded with my name!!"
We have
our doubts that such
a campaign ever existed. But if it did, it's difficult to see how removing
Wexler's posts would
have had any effect on it--especially since he continued to post as billwexler99
after his billwexler ID was terminated. We also wonder why Wexler didn't
direct Yahoo to delete all of his messages, not simply those posted after
the summer of 2000.
There is another explanation for this state of affairs. It is that Yahoo decided to remove about three years
of Wexler's posts because it found too many of them to be out of bounds.
Q. Do you know if Wexler uses other aliases?
A. We're familiar with allegations that Wexler impersonates others by
changing a letter in their screen names to a numeral. Aside from those
aliases, and
several variations on his Wexler name, we're not aware of him using other
IDs.
Q. Is Bill Wexler his real name or not?
A. He has long claimed that it is. But
we recently used several "people finder" services to search for a Bill or
William Wexler in the Bay Area. We also looked in Boca Raton, where he
says he has a second home. We couldn't find him.
These results probably explain why Wexler has refused reader requests for a piece of information about himself that can be confirmed--such as where he went to school and
when he graduated. Or the slip of the fingers that caused him to post a message
last year complaining about the importance
that readers were placing on "knowing my real
name."
Of course, the ultimate proof that Bill Wexler is
a pseudonym is the following message. No one posts this kind of talk to
the entire world under his real name.
Pantherschmuck
by: billwexler
10/05/01 04:36 pm
Msg: 7132Since you seem to be a Yiddish expert, I assume you know what "schmuck" means.
I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hang out here until this stock hits 5 a share, because you'll need money and I'll be willing to toss you $20 to [expletive deleted] your mother.
Q. Has anyone proposed that someone other than Mike Wilkins or another member of
the West Highland
Capital staff is the real Bill Wexler?
A. Not to us.
Q. Is the Mike Wilkins who works at West Highland Capital the same Mike Wilkins who is co-author of the books Roadside America and Sex, Zen, and a Bullet in the Head?
A. Yes. Wilkins is also co-author of two movie scripts.
Q. If Bill Wexler is someone at West Highland Capital, what are the chances
that he is not Mike Wilkins but someone else on the staff?
A. The West Highland staff is quite small. Based on information that has come to our attention since our first report, the chances that Bill Wexler is someone at the fund but not Mike Wilkins appear to be slim to none. Meanwhile, the fit with Mike Wilkins has done nothing but improve since we first reported on the Wexler-West Highland connection. Consider this 1999 exchange between Wexler and one of his readers:
Reader: Are you anybody important?
Wexler: Are you taking reservations for some pretentious Hollywood restaurant? What the hell kind of question is that?
Reader: Are you just an internet person?
Wexler: Is this some new form of hominid (Homo Nerdus?)
The message was written a few years after Mike
Wilkins published his book about science fiction films. At the
time, he was also alternating between the hedge fund and Hollywood, where he was filming a movie.
Coincidence?
Q. Wexler has strongly denied that he is Mike
Wilkins. Didn't that give you pause?
A. It certainly did. But not long after
informing us that
"I am not Mike Wilkins or
anybody else," Wexler falsely
announced that a
director of a publicly traded company is the author of this site.
That gave us pause, too--about his honesty. Next, when we requested a
retraction of this absurd claim, he sent us a thinly veiled threat (not of violence) designed to
intimidate us from continuing to publish "bullsh_ about Wilkins and Asensio." Which
struck us as rather odd since Wexler has claimed that he doesn't know Mike Wilkins.
His on-going efforts to discredit the site have
also given us pause. Because it's
obvious that Bill Wexler is a pseudonym for someone who does not want
his identity known. If, as he insists, rumors that he is Mike Wilkins are false, the website has done him a favor by
focusing attention on the wrong guy and the wrong hedge fund. You'd think he'd
be happy that the site has helped him keep his cover, and as a result, not be on
a campaign to discredit it.
But Wexler is anything but happy about this site.
It's a reaction that speaks volumes to us.
Page Created 1/11/04