Mahbod Moghadam

Moghadam graduated from Yale University in 2004 with a major in history and international studies. In 2005, he went to France on a Fulbright scholarship. When he returned in 2005, he enrolled at Stanford Law School, and graduated in 2008 with a J.D.[1]

Moghadam is known for his "outlandish" personality and behavior.[2][3][4] In 2013 he received media attention for using explicit insults against Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett in an interview and in a tweet from the Rap Genius Twitter account, and for his public apology to them both during an onstage appearance at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference.[5][6][7][8] He later attributed some of his behavior to a benign brain tumor that was discovered and removed in 2013, saying "it was the cause of me acting like an asshole".[7]

In September 2018, Moghadam had an epileptic seizure attributable to a second brain tumor, and had brain surgery later that month,[9] saying that "The second tumor was a big wake up call"[9]

In August 2018, Moghadam appeared on Sacha Baron Cohen's satirical television series Who is America?, in which Cohen adopts various disguises and personas in an attempt to capture guests behaving in embarrassing ways.[10] Believing he was doing a photoshoot with a "playboy photographer" named Gio, Moghadam is shown making the Bloods gang sign and imitating shooting a gun when Cohen asks him to "do something like a black guy." Later Cohen has Moghadam pose in front of a green screen so he could later be photoshopped into scenes as though he is feeding starving children, and Cohen pads Moghadam's crotch with the detached arm of a doll.[4][11][12][13]

After graduating from law school, Moghadam became an attorney at the law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf.[1] In 2009, he agreed to take "deferral time" from the firm, where he was paid a partial salary to take a year off.[14] In August 2009, Moghadam and Tom Lehman founded Rap Genius, a website that initially allowed users to annotate and interpret song lyrics.[15][16] Moghadam was included in the 2013 Forbes 30 Under 30 list along with the other Rap Genius cofounders.[15] In 2014, Rap Genius rebranded to Genius and expanded to support annotations for news stories, poetry, and other documents.[17] Moghadam was fired from Genius that same year after receiving negative media attention when he used Genius to add annotations to the manifesto written by the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings. His comments were described by the news media as "tasteless and creepy", and Genius co-founder Lehman said in a statement that the annotations "not only didn't attempt to enhance anyone's understanding of the text, but went beyond that into gleeful insensitivity and misogyny."[4][18][19]

In 2015, Moghadam met Sam Kazemian and joined him as a retroactive co-founder and the chief community officer of Everipedia, a wiki-based online encyclopedia.[20][21][22][23] Moghadam announced he had resigning from Everipedia on March 21, 2019, saying it had become "too corporate" for him.[24] On March 22, Moghadam joined venture capital company Mucker Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence.[25]

• Mahbod Moghadam on Instagram