Quick Takeaways
- Ripple CTO David Schwartz says he faked questions and edited Ozzy Osbourne’s responses in a 2001 fan Q&A.
- Only two or three real fan questions made it to the band, with most of the session scripted.
- His confession, coming days after Ozzy’s passing, has reopened conversations about authenticity in online experiences.
Ripple CTO Admits He Faked Ozzy’s Q&A and Still Regrets It
Tech workers occasionally make choices they later regret, and David Schwartz, CTO of Ripple, is admitting to one such instance.
In a heartfelt post on X (formerly Twitter), Schwartz confessed to faking parts of a fan Q&A session with Black Sabbath back in 2001, a job he handled before his time at Ripple.
The session, which was supposed to give fans a real-time chance to talk to their rock idols, turned out to be… well, not that real.
Schwartz admitted he not only fed pre-written questions to band members but also cleaned up Ozzy Osbourne’s notoriously colorful responses.
“I cheated,” he wrote. “To me personally, it was a failure, but to everyone else it was a success.”
Ripple CTO Says He Censored Ozzy and Wrote Fake Questions
At the time, Schwartz was working for a company called WebMaster and was tasked with running a live fan Q&A with Black Sabbath using a platform called ConferenceRoom.
His job was to talk to the band over the phone, get their answers, and type them out for fans watching online.
But there was one problem: fans only wanted to talk to Ozzy.
I requested that the moderators ask me questions that weren’t intended for Ozzy. Simply put, there weren’t any,” Schwartz stated.
So, instead of letting the other band members sit in silence, he used canned questions basically, pre-written fallbacks to make it seem like fans were engaging with everyone.
Then he mixed in bits and pieces of what he could hear on the phone.
It didn’t stop there. Schwartz also admitted to cleaning up Ozzy’s language, which, if you know Ozzy, means he had a lot of censoring to do.
“Ozzy’s answer featured the C-word a lot. The bad C-word,” he recalled. “It was pretty close to the only word I could hear clearly.”
Ripple CTO’s Honest Confession Comes After Ozzy’s Death
Why bring it now? Well, this is partly time. Ozi Osbourne died this week at the age of 76, and as fans mourned rock legend, Schwartz took a moment to reflect an experience that clearly stayed with him.
In addition, the story is beyond a single Q&A session; This highlights a more important issue about authenticity in online events.
It can feel like a betrayal at a time when fakes, even with the best intentions when fans crave for real interactions. Schwartz is now aware of it.
“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 wrote.
Meanwhile… Ozzy-Inspired Crypto Coin Surges
While the Ripple CTO was coming clean, crypto markets did something unexpected.
A memecoin called “The Mad Man (Ozi)” inspired by Ozi exploded more than 16,800%, priced at $ 0.003851 and is a market cap of $ 3.85 million.
It’s likely just a result of fans honoring Ozzy, but the timing alongside Schwartz’s confession certainly adds a strange twist to the story.