Female KOL Tiffany Fong, who has 340,000 followers on Twitter, recently found herself embroiled in a bizarre scandal. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Musk had DM'd Tiffany seeking offspring but was rejected.

From being SBF's "confidante" to Musk's "progeny target," Tiffany Fong's everything seems chaotic but actually highly conforms to the intrinsic logic of internet narrative: she, in an outsider stance, becomes an accidental protagonist in every storm. These flashpoints were never truly led by her; she was just continuously drawn into them, then under the social media spotlight, given one label after another.

Without a team, without official resources, without capital endorsement, not even Tiffany herself can say why she was trusted by SBF, why Musk chatted her up, why she always finds herself on the storm's edge. She is not an insider, yet lives in the projection of the situation.

Rights Protection Blogger Turned Prominent

In the 2022 crypto winter, some went bankrupt, to jail, while others built their careers on the crypto ruins.

A previously unknown young woman, Tiffany Fong, entered the public eye due to a disclosure targeting Celsius Network.

She is not from traditional media, has never worked for a financial institution or newsroom, and has never even had a nine-to-five job. But this atypical finance amateur, through disclosure after disclosure, gradually became the advocate in Celsius victims' eyes and unexpectedly embarked on her content creation career in the crypto industry.

Tiffany Fong was born in Las Vegas, with her parents divorced, and her upbringing full of twists and turns. She studied communication at the University of Southern California, admitting that she initially chose this direction because the courses were relatively easy, giving her more time to socialize and travel. After graduation, she backpacked around the world for several years, maintained her life through multiple online stores, achieved a degree of financial freedom, and thus was able to focus full-time on the development of the crypto industry.

In 2011, Tiffany received a Bitcoin from a relative, which has never been cashed out. During the 2021 bull market, she deposited over $200,000 worth of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto assets into Celsius Network, a crypto lending platform promising up to an 18% annual interest rate. However, good times didn’t last long. In June 2022, Celsius suddenly suspended withdrawals, and the next month declared bankruptcy, freezing all of Tiffany's digital assets.

For her, this was not just an investment loss, but also a collision with a low point in her life's emotions. At the time, she was going through a breakup, "That was the lowest point in my life," she recalled. Initially, she simply searched for news about Celsius repeatedly every day, trying to understand what had happened to her assets. Gradually, she began to organize the information she found into tweets, posting them on Twitter and YouTube, trying to share with other victims.

Her tweets caught the attention of Celsius internal employees, and an employee reached out to her, anonymously providing a recording of a company-wide internal meeting discussing a restructuring plan by the company's leadership.

Initially, Tiffany was skeptical of this audio recording, but after confirming multiple times that the content matched and that the voice of the company's CEO at the time, Alex Mashinsky, was indeed present in the recording, she realized the importance of this material. She decided to provide the recording to The New York Times, and the media subsequently conducted an in-depth report on it.

This public disclosure became her true moment in the spotlight. With more insiders coming forward with information, she began to release sensitive information, including executive wallet addresses, potential investor bid schemes, and clearly stated her position—not driven by political motives or intent on becoming a fighter of some kind, she simply believed that since everyone's money was locked in Celsius, as creditors, they should be aware of what was quietly happening behind the scenes.

From being a disillusioned investor seeking help to passively becoming a relay station for empowerment information, Tiffany Fong, without any institutional endorsement, firmly established her foothold in a corner of the crypto world through continuous updates and disclosures. She never planned to become a whistleblower, but the Celsius incident undoubtedly marked a turning point in her life trajectory.

Accidentally Becoming Closer to SBF Than Any Media Outlet

After Tiffany Fong publicly disclosed the Celsius executive meeting, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried followed her on Twitter.

That was the first time she noticed her name being part of a larger narrative. Initially, she didn't pay much attention, just politely replied, "Thanks for the follow," to which the other party responded, "Your leaks are quite interesting." The two exchanged a few brief pleasantries before returning to their own lives. She didn't pursue further questions until a few months later when FTX collapsed, and everything suddenly rebooted.

On November 11, 2022, FTX announced bankruptcy. That evening, Tiffany dug up an old private message, with the mindset of "he won't reply anyway," she sent a message to SBF asking if he would be willing to be interviewed, and she even included a seemingly kind greeting: "Hope you are doing well."

She had no idea that five days later, SBF actually replied to her—not only did he reply, but he also gave his phone number, saying, "I have some time in the next hour, we can chat."

At that time, Tiffany was on a date at a bar in Brooklyn. When she received that message on her phone, she was stunned. Tiffany's date was also a user of FTX, who had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Upon hearing this, he immediately urged her to go home, saying, "What are you still doing here? Go back!" She ended up calling Sam with a bit of tipsiness and no preparation, and thus conducted her first truly meaningful "interview" with the individual who was then the most sensational figure in the financial world.

That phone call was later published on her YouTube channel, with one segment in particular causing a sensation. SBF admitted to secretly donating a large amount of political funds to the Republican Party, a statement that was later included in the Federal Election Commission's formal complaint against him. However, at the time of interviewing SBF, Tiffany had no idea what consequences that statement would bring.

On November 20, Tiffany released a second interview with the two of them, just shortly before SBF's mainstream media appearances such as at The New York Times DealBook Summit. This conversation was even more in-depth and intimate. Tiffany gradually realized that SBF seemed to be looking for a listener, not a journalist, not a lawyer, but a stranger without a bias.

SBF also explicitly stated that he liked Tiffany not coming from mainstream media, "no editors to report to," allowing for free expression. His trust in her, to some extent, also came from this non-institutionalized space for expression.

However, with this came misunderstandings and labels from the outside world. The Daily Mail reported on her with the headline "Sexy Crypto Influencer Pays a Late-Night Visit to FTX's Bad Boy," pulling up old photos from her Instagram, yet the content of her interviews was not mentioned. At that time, Tiffany was not used to the logic of these gossip media outlets, and the "entertainment" and "gendered" interpretations briefly made her feel angry and hurt.

Ten Visits to Palo Alto

After being extradited to the United States, SBF was placed under house arrest at his parents' home in Palo Alto, California. Tiffany thought their interaction would end there, but to her surprise, she received a message from SBF at 3 a.m. on the night he returned home: "Hey, I can finally go online again."

She tentatively asked if she could visit, and SBF readily agreed once again. After the first visit, she simply moved to San Francisco, where she rented a short-term house, Ubered south every week, and had dozens of face-to-face conversations with SBF.

SBF's parents' home under lockdown

Tiffany and SBF's conversations were not just about the case, but also about his childhood insecurities, social emptiness, loneliness in the past few years, and the twists of fate that turned former close allies into witnesses in the trial. SBF admitted to having almost no real friends, and Tiffany at the time became a confidante he could briefly trust.

However, Tiffany always remained cautious about this relationship. She knew SBF was not straightforward, trying to use her to convey a certain narrative and sometimes hinting, "You can leak something." But she refused to be completely manipulated and avoided posting too much about what he said during his house arrest. The Department of Justice even contacted her to request records of her interactions with SBF, making her more aware of her unique position in this event.

Perhaps "frenemy and journalist" is the most apt description of this relationship. From a coincidental late-night call to multiple real and intricate meetings, Tiffany occupied an intimate yet distant position in this epic collapse of the crypto world. She witnessed an empire fall and was caught up in it—not as a mastermind, nor as a judge.

Rumor or Existential Crisis

After SBF was sentenced to prison, Tiffany Fong did not take advantage of the situation as the outside world had imagined. She did not sign with a media company, nor did she become a regular on mainstream financial shows; instead, she returned to an almost isolated state. Following the long drama surrounding the FTX collapse, she became the awkward person standing at the edge of the theater, unsure where to go and with no one to tell her how to deliver her lines.

She continued to be active on Twitter, using the platform's content creation revenue as her main source of income, making a living by tweeting, which became her semi-joking self-definition. She would write about cryptocurrency, election politics, and even conspiracy theories, occasionally sparking controversy and attracting a wave of traffic.

“Every crypto boom cycle comes with its own drama.” She said this with a smile in her podcast, but there was a hint of weariness in her tone. She knew that these cycles come and go, and it seemed like her life could only revolve around these ups and downs.

Refusing to Become a “Musk Minion” Baby Machine

What once again thrust Tiffany into the public eye was a bizarre scandal.

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “How Elon Musk Deals with His ‘Many’ Children and Their Mothers,” detailing how the world's richest man manages a dozen children and a “harem strife” while running his companies and advising Trump; he also recently underwent a paternity test due to a money and privacy dispute with far-right influencer Ashley St. Clair, who claimed to be carrying Musk's child.

In this article, the author claimed that Musk had sent a direct message to Tiffany on Twitter asking if she would be willing to bear a child for him. The author stated that Tiffany did not pursue further involvement with Musk because she aspired to have children in a more traditional nuclear family setting. However, she confided her thoughts on this matter to a few friends. Upon learning that Tiffany had disclosed this request to others, Musk reproached her for being indiscreet and withdrew his attention from her.

At the end of last year, Tiffany and Musk had very frequent interactions on Twitter, to the point where someone even created a topic on Polymarket to bet on whether Tiffany was actually pregnant with Musk's child.

In a recent podcast episode, the host brought up this scandal and asked Tiffany if she was indeed pregnant. Sitting up straight, Tiffany announced, “I officially declare on this podcast: I am not pregnant.”

To understand how Tiffany became involved with Musk, one must go back to the October 2023 courtroom scene of SBF. Just as the trial had concluded and SBF's parents were preparing to leave, Tiffany, intending to offer some words of comfort, was unexpectedly met with a burst of emotion from SBF's mother, Barbara Fried, who started yelling at Tiffany, accusing her reporting of harming SBF.

Later, Tiffany posted a tweet on Twitter recounting the incident, and Musk replied to a FOX article in the comments, calling it the article that SBF's mother referred to as the one that ruined her son.

In the following months, Musk frequently appeared in Tiffany's Twitter comments until the recent scandal, which led them both to coincidentally lash out at the mainstream media.

Crypto Nomad

The last time Tiffany Fong spoke to SBF was when he was under house arrest at his parents' house in California, where they met ten times in that house. She still remembers the atmosphere of that house, remembers his parents quietly closing the door when they saw her, and remembers the silent space of perpetual scrutiny.

After SBF's imprisonment, Tiffany's persona lost its anchor. She was no longer the grassroots whistleblower challenging Ponzi schemes, nor the sole outsider in SBF's private conversations. Her identity became a blurry shadow: not a journalist, not a victim, not a VC in the crypto circle. She said she felt a bit of an existential crisis: "During the Celsius phase, it was driven by anger, during the FTX phase by curiosity, and now... it's just tweeting."

The present Tiffany Fong still tweets every day, sometimes with images, sometimes commenting on current events, sometimes just dropping a witty remark to stir some ripples. She lives in her old apartment, living frugally, not rich, but not free either. She is no longer frequently quoted by mainstream media, nor has she truly found a new role to replace her identity during the FTX era.

She witnessed an empire's collapse firsthand and became one of the rare unofficial chroniclers of that collapse. Now, as the empire returns to dust, journalists return to their newsrooms, judges return to their courtrooms, the crypto world continues its ups and downs. And she, a person who doesn't belong anywhere, can only continue to wander on the social media timeline, like an unclaimed drifting lotus leaf, hearing her own echoes grow lonelier after the heat has faded.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdpWqVkXg6o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VYzYVmYLgQ&t=62s

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/tiffany-fong-crypto-influencer-sam-bankman-fried-1234862132/

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