Nilay Patel

There’s a decade-plus-old Cadillac CTS parked in an alley next to the studio. “I got it washed four days ago,” Mars says proudly. In a way, it’s become one of his closest musical confidants — he’s mixed every album he’s put out since 2010’s Doo-Wops & Hooligans by listening to it inside the Caddy, getting a sense for it in the sort of real-world scenario he deems optimal: A pimped-out American luxury sedan so old it has a CD player.

“No one trusts anyone within the company anymore,” he said. “How can you function? Employees don’t trust the new management. Management doesn’t trust the employees. How do you think you’re supposed to get anything done? That’s why there’s production freezes – you can’t merge code, you can’t turn things on without permission from VPs.”

Inside the real Eli Lilly, the fake sparked a panic, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded they kill the viral spoof, worried it could undermine their brand’s reputation or push false claims about people’s medicine. Twitter, its staffing cut in half, didn’t react for hours.

Fake Schefter accounts have existed for years, duping people not looking for the check mark or scrutinizing the news. The difference now is that the Tweet as pictured gives absolutely no indication outside of the username @AdamSchefterNOT that would lead people to know it’s not the actual ESPN NFL insider.

“His personal Twitter handle is introducing a level of reputational risk that in my experience, most Fortune 500 companies cannot accept,” says Lou Paskalis, an advertising executive who met with Musk and about 100 other industry officials via a Zoom call last week.