Thirty years ago it was tough to get Bill Gross, the “Bond King,” on the phone.

These days, he tweets about everything from inflation-indexed bonds to meme stocks while posting photos of himself in Gucci sneakers at the ballet at La Scala with his wife Amy.

In a lot of ways financial media hasn’t changed much over the years. Reporters still bang out breaking news in real time and tap sources for trend stories.

But Gross illustrates one big way it has.

Information about executives is now way more abundant and available. And often the information is being provided via social media by the sources themselves.

Gross co-founded Pimco and ran the firm’s $270 billion portfolio. He was on top of the fixed-income world in the early 1990s when Bloomberg News was just getting going.

I was a junior reporter at the time and remember the intensity of the conversations in the newsroom about how to get an interview. A colleague dubbed him the “White Whale” because of how hard he was to land.

Gross, like most top business executives back then, heeded the advice of PR teams to restrict access to interviews to a handful of publications like the Wall Street Journal or BusinessWeek.

It was a big deal to get an interview with a CEO or executive and when it happened they were often accompanied by PR people who interrupted like lawyers at a deposition.

It would have been inconceivable to imagine a world in which Gross self-published photos of himself in a Gucci tracksuit in Milan or casually tossed off advice about the spread between one and three-year Treasuries or trolled Cathie Wood for being “trounced” by QQQ.

There are other executives active on social media. Daniel Loeb of Third Point likes to post on Twitter and Rich Handler, the CEO of Jefferies Group will sometimes comment.

Handler tends to prefer Instagram, which he uses to announce all manner of things which in the past would have been internal memos such advice to the interns or invitations to employees to join him for dinner.

Gross, Loeb and Handler are still outliers for their generation. In general, few Boomer or Gen X executives even have social media profiles.

But they do represent the future.

It’s one in which executives still avoid journalists, but now they go directly to their audience.