Crypto CEO claims he’s a billionaire while humiliating intern. ‘He’s not,’ says Reddit
A candidate who applied for an internship at a cryptocurrency firm claims he was mocked, belittled and humiliated by the CEO Yao Meng.
A candidate who applied for an internship at a cryptocurrency firm claims he was mocked, belittled and humiliated by the CEO after clearing three rounds of tests and interviews. Peiyuan Jin criticised the CEO of Trade Terminal for his “unprofessional and demeaning behaviour” in a LinkedIn post.
Jin said he had the “worst interview experience” for the Quant Developer Intern position at California-based Trade Terminal. For the fourth round of the hiring process, he had an interview with the company’s CEO, Yao Meng.
However, Jin claims that the chief executive’s behaviour during the interview was rude and unprofessional. Meng apparently kept interrupting the candidate as he was speaking, mocked his previous experience and ended the interaction by telling him that he had managed to accomplish nothing. The whole interview lasted a whole of seven minutes.
“From the start, as I began my self-introduction, he interrupted me to mock my experience as a software engineer at John Deere, expressing disbelief that a tractor company would even need software services,” wrote candidate Peiyuan Jin.
After constantly interrupting Jin with questions about why some process or the other was not used at John Deere – decisions that were obviously above his pay grade as an intern – the CEO then belittled him for “not ‘thinking big’ for the company.”
The CEO of Trade Terminal also boasted that once, as an intern, he convinced his manager to quit and join him in a crypto venture.
“The interview, which lasted only 7 minutes, ended with him humiliating me by saying, ‘I’m a billionaire because I think big, but look at you—you’ve accomplished nothing,’” Jin revealed.
Take a look at his LinkedIn post below:
The internship applicant ended his post by calling on higher management to be more respectful and professional while engaging with juniors.
His post has gone massively viral online, having been shared on Reddit, Twitter (now rebranded X) and other platforms. It has been viewed over a million times on social media.
Meng was called “delusional,” among other things, in a Reddit thread.
On Reddit, people raised doubts about Meng’s claim of being a billionaire. “No real billionaire tells someone they are a billionaire in an interview,” one Redditor commented.
“Billionaires who think big don't spend their time interviewing software development interns,” another said.
“The guy is a billionaire, yet not much is written about him?” a third person asked. Several others also noted how this so-called billionaire does not feature on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index or on Forbes.