A hilarious profile published Wednesday in London's Evening Standard raises a lot of questions about Tinder CEO Sean Rad's intelligence, and his fitness to be a CEO not to mention their PR person's fitness to effectively do her job. First off, Rad did not know what the word "sodomy" meant he does now! and yet he claims he had to turn down a supermodel, "someone really really famous" who was "begging" him for sex, because she wasn't intellectually challenging enough for him.
It was news to Pando Daily that 29-year-old Rad had been brought back as CEO of the West Hollywood-based company he actually returned in August, after previously being demoted amid a 2014 sexual harassment scandal, ahead of the IPO of parent company Match Group, which just happened this morning. And for some odd reason, Tinder's VP of communications and branding, Rosette Pambakian, thought it would be a great idea to let Rad speak off the cuff with a British journalist on the eve of that IPO.
In the course of the interview, Rad manages to say he has OCD, he lost his virginity at 17, he's slept with about 20 women, some of them "ugly," and he turned down that model because "attraction is nuanced." Also he doesn't "condone" penis pics, and he admits to having done "background research" on journalist Nancy Jo Sales who wrote an unflattering piece about Tinder in the September issue of Vanity Fair. He implies he'd like to smear her, à la that awful Uber exec, saying, "there’s some stuff about her as an individual that will make you think differently."
The best:
He continues: “Apparently there’s a term for someone who gets turned on by intellectual stuff. You know, just talking. What’s the word?” His face creases the effort of trying to remember. “I want to say ‘sodomy’?”Rosette shrieks: “That’s it! We’re going to be fired” and Rad looks confused. “What? Why?”
I tell him it means something else and he thumbs his phone for a definition. “What? No, not that. That’s definitely not me. Oh, my God.”
Rad's various gaffes, as MarketWatch notes, prompted Match Group to issue a statement distancing him from Match's leadership, saying, "Mr. Rad is not a director or executive officer of the company and was not authorized to make statement on behalf of the company for purposes of the article." Also, Match Group Chairman Gregory Blatt told CNBC today that the company may be trying to strongarm the Evening Standard into some "corrections." "It's a silly and unfortunate article," Blatt says. "I think there are a lot of inaccuracies there and a lot of things taken out of context, and I actually think there's some corrections being made."
How much do we want to bet that the Evening Standard doesn't give a shit about making corrections for the sake of Sean Rad and Match Group's publicity?
Regardless of Rad's interview, the details of which have been splashed all over social media, Match Group's first day stock price is doing just fine, and a lot better than Square's.
