The CEO of Tinder Has No Idea What Sodomy Is. Now He’s in Trouble With the SEC
Sean Rad is having a terrible day.
Sean Rad is the CEO and co-founder of Tinder. He is also a 29-year old man who has no idea what sodomy is.
In a very special interview with the Evening Standard, Rad calls himself as a Tinder ‘addict,’ bragging about all the hotties he’s done sex with in order to remind readers how Very Cool and Very Successful he is, something interviewer Charlotte Edwardes sees through in an instant. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, some butt stuff (emphasis ours):
[Rad’s] desperate to impress on me how gallant he is, citing the fact that a “supermodel, someone really, really famous” has been “begging” him for sex “and I’ve been like, no”. She’s “taunted” him, he says, and “called me a prude”.
“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. Attraction is nuanced. I’ve been attracted to women who are …” he pauses “… well, who my friends might think are ugly. I don’t care if someone is a model. Really. It sounds clichéd and almost totally unbelievable for a guy to say this, but it’s true. I need an intellectual challenge.”
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’?”
Sean, you fool! Rad probably meant ‘sapiosexual,’ the ultra-trendy and aggressively pretentious hipster sexual identity where intelligence is the most sexually attractive feature of a person. But more importantly: What grown-ass man doesn’t know what sodomy means, even in the (actually) Biblical sense?
This is embarrassing, sure, but shit got way worse for Rad a few hours later, when Tinder parent company Match Group filed a prospectus with the SEC asserting that the Standard article “was not approved or condoned by, and the content of the article was not reviewed by, the Company or any of its affiliates.” Match Group also wrote that “Mr. Rad is not a director or executive officer of the Company and was not authorized to make statements on behalf of the Company for purposes of the article.”
What does that mean? Match Group is desperately trying to ensure that the Rad interview, which included information about the app’s audience, caused them any problems on the eve of the company’s initial public offering. According to Quartz, the company likely fears Rad violated the SEC’s “quiet period” rules that forbid executives at U.S. companies from making public statements ahead of an IPO. Quartz also notes that Match Group was scheduled to set a price for its IPO on Wednesday, November 18, the day Rad’s comments were published, and begin trading on Thursday. Rad, like an idiot, basically threw a potential grenade into parent company’s business plans.
It’s unclear what the fallout from this embarrassing incident might be (except that ‘sodomy’ is now in the SEC archives for the rest of human history). Given that Rad was previously removed as CEO following sexual assault allegations, we wouldn’t be shocked to hear that he’s out of a job in the coming weeks. Perhaps he can use some of that down time to bone up on his sexual lingo — something tells us he’ll need it.
Photos by Getty Images