Ellen Degeneres Oscars Selfie: Samsung Donates $3 Million to Ellen's Charities After Twitter Record
By now everyone has probably seen the Oscar selfie that host Ellen DeGeneres took with a number of a-list celebrities including Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita Nyong'o, Cate Blanchett, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and much more.
The record-breaking celebrity selfie, as seen below, has broken the record for most retweets, 3 million and counting, causing a brief issue with twitter, reports Deadline Hollywood. During the telecast, Ellen announced: "We just broke Twitter."
"The envelope please ... to @TheEllenShow - this is now the most retweeted tweet with over 1 million RTs. Congrats!" said Twitter when DeGeneres' photo reached the retweeting threshold.
According to Techcrunch, questions have risen over whether Ellen was paid to promote the phone during hosting but Samsung has responded with the following statement:
While we were a sponsor of the Oscars and had an integration with ABC, we were delighted to see Ellen organically incorporate the device into the selfie moment that had everyone talking. A great surprise for everyone, she captured something that nobody expected. In honor of this epic moment and of course, the incredible response of nearly 3 million re tweets, we wanted to make a donation to Ellen's charities of choice: St Jude's and the Humane Society. Samsung will donate 1.5 million dollars to each charity.
It's a win-win for every because with as much publicity as Samsung has gotten and the great charity donation, surprisingly, rival Apple has also found its way into the story.
Daily Mail reports that while Ellen has been publicly holding the Samsung Note, backstage, Ellen has been reverting to using her Apple iPhone to tweet pictures. In at least two photos tweeted, the source was revealed to be from her iPhone.
Check out the photo from Rumorfix showing DeGeneres used her iPhone.
To top it off, everyone in Ellen's live audience got to take home their own Samsung Galaxy Note 3.