From the words of Magic Johnson straight to the internet’s heart.
According to actor Rob Lowe, a close friend of Johnson, the tweets that have made the Lakers great a viral sensation for stating the obvious are done by an assistant who turns what Johnson says out loud into a tweet.
“Last night, I found out Magic Johnson does not physically do any of the tweets, which may explain some of it,” Lowe said on the Pardon My Take podcast on Friday. “So it’s articulated clearly across the room while he’s doing 17 other things — a titan of the industry — and then there is a woman whose job it is to figure out what he’s talking about and make it into a tweet.”
If we can take Lowe’s word for it here, this of course sounds brilliant. The 62-year-old Johnson, who has 5.1 million Twitter followers, wouldn’t be the first celebrity to have a social media manager, but to do it in quite that style seems to explain a lot.
“I think he doesn’t say ‘Send tweet’ so she never knows when it’s ending so you get what you get,” Lowe said. “I can promise here’s what it’s not, ‘Hey, hello. I have an idea for a tweet. Are you ready? Lakers look very stiff tonight, period. Perhaps they need a change in the lineup, period. Send that.’ I don’t think that’s happening.”
We got a hint of this over the summer, when ESPN’s Christine Williamson said on SportsNation that she knew the person who wrote Johnson’s tweets. Williamson said on the show that the person kept things basic because she was afraid of accidentally making him look bad. Though, according to Lowe, Johnson doesn’t know his own account’s notoriety.
“I’m not sure he’s aware of what a viral sensation he is,” Lowe said.
Maybe that’s for the best. No reason to change what’s working.