Internal Company Emails Made Public Ahead of Match Group’s Trial

The emails at the heart of the case against Match Group and IAC have been revealed, just prior to the trial which is set to begin in November. Former Tinder CEO Greg Blatt was accused by former Tinder employees, including founder Sean Rad, of undervaluing Tinder’s worth to cheat them out of billions of dollars in stock options. 

According to The Daily Mail, emails revealed that Blatt valued the dating app at nearly $12 billion in 2016, more than a year before Match Group valued Tinder at only $3 billion as Sean Rad and other employees were forced to exit the company. Rad and the other plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit claim Blatt purposefully devalued the stock in their negotiations, citing the emails as evidence. 

Match Group owns dating app Tinder, and they along with IAC are the defendants in the lawsuit.

The emails have been contested by Match Group from the introduction of the lawsuit, since the company said that they were obtained by the plaintiffs illegally. The content of the emails however, wasn’t known until news of it broke in October. The emails are now part of the public record.

The internal company emails show that Blatt projected the company’s value in 2016 to be around $11.75 billion and used that data to attract talent from other tech companies. One of his emails from January 2016 read: “I want to pull together a four page power point that helps us sell prospective execs on the future valuation of Tinder.”

“How quickly can we pull that together,” Blatt asked in the email. “We're trying to land a head of engineering right now who just received a $40m offer from Uber and a $30m offer from Facebook.” 

Orin Snyder, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs, told the judge in the pre-trial hearing: “[Match Group] breached their duties in 2017 by lying to the banks and painting a doom-and-gloom picture of a company whose meteoric rise was about to plummet to the earth.”

The defense for Match Group maintains that that the numbers used to recruit job candidates were based on hypothetical numbers, not vetted third-party evaluations. They also maintain that the numbers were dependent on certain growth factors being met by the dating app, which the company claims they did not meet by the stock evaluation in 2017 when Rad and the other plaintiffs departed the company.

Blatt was named interim CEO in December 2016 when Rad became chairman, and the valuation was completed in June 2017. Blatt resigned two weeks after the valuation, in part due to another Tinder employee who had reported him for sexual harassment.

The trial is set to begin in November.