How much is a bad tweet worth? If you’re Mike Leach and Washington State, it’s about $1.6 million.
In June, the Cougars’ football coach shared a doctored video of a Barack Obama speech from 2014. The tweet was met with plenty of unease and deleted shortly thereafter.
University president Kirk Schulz estimated that the blowback from the incident lost the school around $1 million in donations, though Marketing and Communications Vice President Phil Weiler later told the Seattle Times via email the number was even higher.
“We did have five donors let us know that they had altered plans for their future giving,” Weiler wrote. “These were primarily estate gifts that would have been paid out upon the donor’s death. These planned estate gifts totaled $1.6 million.”
According to Schulz, the early-summer tweet led to the school’s coaches and cabinet being put through social media training and seems to think that not all of that money is lost for good.
“What happens sometimes is people watch for six months, see how things are and then say ‘maybe on second thought, we’ll do this,’” he said. “So, I think it’s a little bit early to tell.”


