I've worked at 1k employee-sized companies. The CEOs definitely know what's happening, who shits on who, who's hired/fired, what each project is going through at a glance, etc. So I would attribute this 100% to either lying, incompetence and/or "faking" by trying to emulate a Steve Jobs/CEO persona.
The founder left the company and brought in a new CEO from amazon. He was still on the board. Then he saw they were hiring and complained on twitter, presumably fired the new ceo and came back to rescind the offers. I think it's believable that he was chilling on the beach or something until he saw the hiring news.