Dick Costolo Just Called This Critic Of His All-Male, All-White Board 'The Carrot Top Of Academic Sources'

Don't criticize Twitter CEO Dick Costolo for not having any women on his board of directors. He'll compare you to Carrot Top, the ginger-haired comedian who headlines a long-running (but somewhat uncool) show in Las Vegas.

The New York Times quoted Vivek Wadhwa, an academic who writes for Techcrunch, in a story that noted Twitter filed its IPO after searching for, and failing to find, a single woman to sit on its board.

Here's how the story frames that quote:

The board? All white men. The investors? All men. The executive officers? All men but for the general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, who has had the job for five weeks.

"This is the elite arrogance of the Silicon Valley mafia, the Twitter mafia," said Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford's Rock Center for Corporate Governance who is writing a book on women in tech. "It's the same male chauvinistic thinking. The fact that they went to the I.P.O. without a single woman on the board, how dare they?"

Costolo wasn't quoted in the story and Twitter declined comment when reached by the Times. But after it was published, Rich Robbins, founder of a marketing consultancy, tweeted at Costolo to suggest he put Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department official and Princeton professor, on the board.

Here's Costolo's response:

Note that Costolo used a "subtweet" - a tweet that talks about Wadwha without using the @ symbol that would have alerted Wadhwa directly. The pair had a slightly more enlightening exchange on the topic here.