According to reports, Ripple’s chief technology officer, David Schwartz, has come clean about staging what was billed as a live fan Q&A with Ozzy Osbourne and the members of Black Sabbath.
He admitted on X that during his stint at a firm called WebMaster, technical glitches and a lack of interest in the full band forced him to improvise.
Fans only wanted Ozzy. So Schwartz “cheated,” feeding prewritten questions and edited answers through the company’s old ConferenceRoom software.
Early Online Q&A Shows
Schwartz said that moderators were supposed to relay fan queries by phone and then transcribe the band’s replies. But when no one asked about Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler or Bill Ward, he slipped in “canned” questions to each member in turn.
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…
— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) July 24, 2025
Only “two or three” genuine fan questions ever made it through. At one point, Schwartz mixed what he could hear with answers provided by the band’s manager. He later confessed feeling bad that the session wasn’t the real, unfiltered chat he had hoped to run.
Censoring Ozzy’s Replies
Poor audio meant much of Ozzy’s legendary profanity was barely audible. Schwartz typed out the “C‑word” many times over, but then scrubbed it at the request of his bosses.
He said the bad C‑word was pretty close to the only word he could hear clearly, so he censored it to make the conversation fit a family‑friendly format. The episode left him disillusioned about how hard it was to pull off an authentic live event online.
Fan Tribute And Crypto Surge
Based on reports, the confession arrived just days after Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, at age 76. As fans shared memories, developers launched meme coins in his honor.
One token, The Mad Man (OZZY), rocketed more than 16,000% to trade at $0.0039, briefly topping a $3.80 million market cap before investors began to worry about scams and sudden dumps.
Ripple And SEC Settlement
Meanwhile, Ripple has been making headlines of its own. Last month, CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the company would pull its cross‑appeal against the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC is also expected to drop its appeal. That move cements Ripple’s original $125 million civil penalty but brings both sides closer to ending a nearly five‑year fight over whether XRP sales counted as securities transactions.
Featured image from Getty Images, chart from TradingView
