Match Group distances itself from Tinder CEO’s comments ahead of IPO
Tinder chief executive Sean Rad has been sidelined by parent company Match Group following a number of controversial remarks made during an interview with the London Evening Standard ahead of its IPO today (19 November).
In the piece Rad boasted of his conquests on the dating app, claiming to "fall in love with a new girl" every other week and how he fended off a "supermodel, someone really, really famous" who had been begging him for sex.
Rad went on to invite ridicule by attempting to claim he was only interested in intelligent women, before somewhat ruining the image by incorrectly describing such attraction as ‘sodomy’.
Given market sensitivities around its stock market launch Match was forced to issue a swift rebuff, stating that the article was ‘not approved or condoned’ and nor was Rad authorised to make statements on their behalf.
More seriously Match was keen to disavow itself from the user figures cited by the Standard, stating that claims it had 80m users worldwide and 1.8bn swipes per day were inaccurate. Match insists that it actually has 9.6m active daily users who swipe through an average of 1.4bn profiles each day.