A new disclosure shows how corporations and individuals, including many in the crypto business, wrote big checks while seeking favor from the president.
Activity tagged "Donald Trump"
Trump Jr.-advised prediction markets invite bets on president’s demise
The scale of Trump's pay-for-access scheme outlined by the Times is mindblowing. Crypto contributions resulting in business deals with the Trump family crypto businesses, oil companies buying influence and later reaping benefits from friendly policies, and a $1 million pardon.
The article only mentions Crypto.com's $10 million contribution to Trump's super PAC, but doesn't mention that after Trump took office, the SEC dropped their lawsuit against the company. His Truth Social company is now partnering with them to sell crypto ETFs.
And with the internet eating major broadcasters’ lunch, it’s very likely that the Ellison family paid billions of dollars for a network whose fortunes are headed to the toilet, and whose viewers are headed elsewhere. They have the potential to create a right wing propaganda bullhorn that rivals Fox News; but it’s just as likely their disastrous management turns the network of Walter Cronkite into a sad, historical footnote.
Trump speaking to crypto executives while signing the GENIUS Act stablecoin bill: “I got you guys out of so much trouble... They’ve got plenty of cash, and it’s great that you’re on our side.”
Note: I retained Trump’s comments about Biden to avoid taking his statement out of context, but his claim that Biden “dropped all charges” against crypto executives during his (or Harris’s) campaign is false.
Trump is seeking to direct Americans' retirement funds to a sector in which he and his family are heavily invested.
The team behind Trump's World Liberty Financial project has proposed lifting restrictions on the WLFI "governance token" to make it tradeable. I predicted shortly after its launch that if Trump succeeded in gutting the SEC, he would do this.
This would lift the substantial restrictions on the token (non-US or accredited investors only, locked tokens with no secondary sales) that were aimed at sidestepping attention from the previous SEC, and could be enormously lucrative for Trump.
It could also be enormously lucrative for early buyers like Justin Sun or the Emirati Aqua 1 Foundation, who hold $75 million and $100 million worth of WLFI, respectively.
Prior to the Trump administration, a token like this would likely have been considered an unregistered security by the SEC, and its sales illegal offerings.
I think this is a more or less up-to-date map of the businesses, LLCs, and people associated with the Trump family crypto projects.
The relative separation between World Liberty Financial and the Trump memecoin projects, both of which are trying to develop defi trading platforms, may help to explain the chaos around the latter’s wallet launch announcement yesterday.
It is very plausible to me that Trump has sold his likeness to so many separate projects, not to mention his sons also using the “Trump” branding, that no one really knows what’s going on in aggregate.
However, it’s still not fully clear to me how the memecoin end of the business could launch a wallet using Trump’s name and likeness without the sons’ knowledge unless the original licensing agreement for the memecoin was extremely broad.
This diagram is of course limited to what is publicly disclosed, and you’ll see a few places where links are uncertain, and where LLCs’ operators are partially or completely unknown. The flow of money is also a very partial accounting.