Tiffany Fong flames Celsius, FTX and NY Post: Hall of Flame – Cointelegraph Magazine
3 min read
Name: Tiffany Fong
Anonymous: No
Twitter followers: 51.7K
Known for: Breaking leaked info on Celsius and interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried after the FTX collapse
Who is Tiffany Fong anyway?
Tiffany Fong is 28 years old, has a background in marketing, and describes herself as a “reluctant crypto content creator” who developed a following after $100,000 worth of her crypto assets were locked up by bankrupt crypto lender Celsius.
She’s posted more than 20 critical videos about the company since June 2022 and has been blocked by Celsius, founder Alex Mashinsky and his wife, Krissy.
“I had no plans to be an influencer or citizen journalist or anything. I just personally lost a bunch of money to Celsius Network, and I was just mad and wanted somewhere to vent.”
“So, I started posting on YouTube and Twitter about it after Celsius went down, and then it kind of snowballed into more,” she adds. Fong says she got into crypto back in 2010 as one of her relatives was mining Bitcoin. Scooping up a bunch of BTC and some other assets early on, Fong said she hodled and remained on the periphery of the space until the Celsius disaster.
How did she get popular on Twitter?
Fong attributes most of the growth of her Twitter following to her reporting on leaks from Celsius insiders and her interactions with FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) — not to mention some good old-fashioned shitposting.
“I started getting leaks from Celsius employees. [From that] I think I gained a little bit more newsworthy attention,” she says. “So, I think that grew my audience a bit bigger. And that’s when Sam [Bankman-Fried] started following me.”
Her famous follower would become a massive opportunity down the road. Amid the chaos of the FTX bankruptcy, Fong reached out to SBF on multiple occasions and managed to score a series of interviews and private conversations with him, and even visited him twice recently during his house arrest in Palo Alto.
As such, she has drawn a lot of attention from the media, and even U.S. politicians.
Top quality beef: Krissy Mashinsky
Alex Mashinsky’s wife, Krissy, has taken aim at Fong, claiming she is part of SBF’s inner circle.
Fong’s header photo on her Twitter page displays a tweet from Krissy Mashinsky claiming that she hacked into Celsius Zoom calls.
The two had numerous spats on Twitter (before the blocking), and Fong does not mince her words: “She’s done a lot of stuff that’s insane. She posts videos of their multi-million-dollar penthouse in Manhattan after they’ve ruined the lives of 1000s of people. So, I think she’s just absolutely deranged.”
Twitter likes and dislikes
“It’s fun having a community. And I guess it’s nice to some degree to have a voice that some people are interested in listening to,” she says about the positives.
“What do I not like? I mean, things can become inflammatory really quickly and, obviously, taken out of context. And I don’t know — Twitter can become an echo chamber where everyone just wants to hear the same thing,” she said.
Looking ahead
Fong says she has no idea where her social media fame will take her. “I never had a plan about any of this. I was just posting, initially just upset about Celsius,” she says.
“And it snowballed into this. So, I feel like I’m just taking it day by day and just in whatever direction the wind blows me. So, I don’t have a career plan with this. And I didn’t plan on becoming an influencer or citizen journalist.”
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