Ripple CTO Admits He Faked Ozzy Osbourne Fan Q&A: “I Cheated”

Ripple’s chief technology officer David Schwartz has admitted that he once faked a fan Q&A session with Ozzy Osbourne and the members of Black Sabbath.

Key Takeaways:

• Ripple CTO David Schwartz admitted to faking a live fan Q&A with Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath.
• Schwartz used pre-written questions and censored Osbourne’s profanity due to technical issues.
• Following Osbourne’s death, meme coins like The Mad Man (OZZY) surged over 16,800% in value.

“I cheated,” Schwartz said in a post on X Thursday, explaining how he fabricated portions of a supposedly live fan interaction during his time at a company called WebMaster.

Schwartz recounted being tasked with moderating the event using the firm’s old ConferenceRoom software.

The plan was to relay questions from fans to the band over the phone and transcribe their answers in real time. However, fans weren’t interested in Black Sabbath as a group — they only wanted Ozzy.

“I specifically asked the moderators to give me questions that weren’t for Ozzy. There just weren’t any,” he wrote. To avoid sidelining the rest of the band, Schwartz resorted to prepared material.

“I passed a canned question to each of the other band members in rotation. And I mixed what I could make out of what they said with the canned answer from their manager,” he said.

The experience left Schwartz disillusioned. “At the time, I felt really bad about the whole thing. It wasn’t the authentic interaction with celebrities that I wanted it to be and that I tried to make it,” he added, noting that only “two or three” genuine fan questions ever reached the band.

Schwartz also recalled having to sanitize Osbourne’s responses due to heavy profanity.

I typed up Ozzy's answer as closely as I could, probably getting it way off due to the poor connection quality. I censored the C-words.

And then I cheated. I passed a canned question to each of the other band members in rotation. And I mixed what I could make out of what they…

“Ozzy’s answer featured the C-word a lot. The bad C-word. The one that Americans really don’t like to say. It was pretty close to the only word I could hear clearly,” he said.

“I typed up Ozzy’s answer as closely as I could, probably getting it way off due to the poor connection quality. I censored the C-words.”

The post comes days after the news of Osbourne’s passing at age 76. As tributes poured in, meme coins inspired by the rock legend surged in value.

One token, The Mad Man (OZZY), jumped more than 16,800% to trade at $0.003851, reaching a $3.85 million market cap.

Last month, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse revealed the company plans to withdraw its cross-appeal against the SEC, adding that the regulator is also expected to drop its own appeal.

The announcement followed a US district court decision rejecting a joint request from Ripple and the SEC to reduce Ripple’s $125 million civil penalty and overturn the ruling that classified Ripple’s institutional XRP sales as securities transactions.

Meanwhile, XRP saw a spike in notional open interest for its perpetual futures contracts last week.

Notional open interest, the total value of leveraged positions held by traders, climbed to an all-time high of $8.8 billion, according to CoinGlass. The figure corresponds to nearly 2.9 billion XRP in open contracts.

The previous record for XRP notional open interest stood at $8.3 billion, which was hit in late January before the start of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

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