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Tinder CEO Sean Rad at the Web Summit last month Web Summit
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A supermodel has been 'begging' me for sex: Tinder's CEO
Sean Rad’s bosses have already disowned his comments.
TINDER CEO SEAN Rad revealed a supermodel has been “begging” him for sex – but he’s a bit confused by the meaning of the word ‘sodomy’.
In a car-crash interview with the London Evening Standard, the co-founder of the hook-up app said despite being “addicted” to the service he was an old-fashioned romantic who had been turning down a sex with a “really famous” model.
“She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen but it doesn’t mean that I want to rip her clothes off and have sex with her,” he said.
Rad continued by saying there was a term for people like himself who were “turned on by intellectual stuff” – before he took a wrong turn on an apparent hunt for the word ‘sapiosexual’.
“What’s the word? … I want to say ‘sodomy’?,” he said, before looking up the definition on his phone and realising his error.
What? No, not that. That’s definitely not me. Oh, my God.”
Bad timing
The interview came at a particularly sensitive time for Tinder’s parent company, Match Group, which is going public in a float that will value the online dating group at about $2.9 billion (€2.7 billion).
Under strict US financial rules, companies have to observe ‘quiet periods’ in the lead-up to a launch on the stock market.
The Rad interview included figures attributed to “analysts” that gave the app 80 million users worldwide.
The CEO also revealed he had done his own “background research” into the journalist behind an unfavourable Vanity Fair article, titled Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’, and discovered “some stuff about her as an individual”.
In a statement to US regulators late yesterday, Match was quick to distance itself from the Tinder CEO’s comments, adding that some of the numbers provided – although not attributed to Rad – were wrong.
“The article was not approved or condoned by, and the content of the article was not reviewed by, the company or any of its affiliates,” it said.
(Rad) is not a director or executive officer of the company and was not authorised to make statements on behalf of the company for purposes of the article.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the Tinder CEO also said he was thrilled his audience at the Web Summit was “bigger than Instagram’s” with the crowd full of “screaming fans”.
It was like a concert … tech, I guess, is more important than it was. It’s like the new rock.”
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