Logo
BusinessBusiness

Taking the measure of Tinder’s p.r. disaster last week, it’s hard to know where to begin.

It wasn’t just that CEO Sean Rad bragged to a British newspaper, on the eve of his parent company’s initial public offering, that a “really, really famous” supermodel was “begging” him for sex.

Rad went on make what sounded like a veiled threat to a Vanity Fair journalist, and even proved that he had no idea what the word “sodomy” meant.

Which is why it’s easier to understand how most of the coverage (ours included) of Rad’s self-immolation in the London Evening Standard skipped over another, equally eyebrow-raising detail.

The night before Rad’s fateful interview, he had dinner with public-relations maven Matthew Freud.

The 29-year-old said in his interview that he “wants to start an art collection” with the help of Freud, who is the nephew of the late painter Lucian Freud.

So is it possible that Rad and Freud didn’t delve into questions of p.r. strategy over their duck confit and Bordeaux? We certainly hope so — for Freud’s sake.

Perhaps, given Rad’s Freudian slip on sodomy, the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud and Rad were talking about repression or anal personalities, both concepts developed by the father of psychoanalysis.

Comments
anonymous profile image
Powered by RoundtableBuilt on infrastructure designed for real-time media. Learn more at RTB.io.© Roundtable 2026. By using this site you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy