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For a few precarious hours last week, Elon Musk reportedly lost his title as the world’s richest man.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Yesterday afternoon, after hearing that the conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot, I turned, as I often do when news breaks, to social media.
The Trumps have never been known for their subtlety: They like to do things fast, big, and loud. This is especially so in the context of cryptocurrency, a noisy and chaotic industry by nature. Remember our president’s collection of NFTs? Among the depictions on these digital trading cards is a portrait of Donald Trump in an Iron Man–inspired suit, accompanied by the caption “SUPERTRUMP.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Right at the beginning of the second chapter of The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump declares that his “style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward.” Crucially, this was long before the invention of cryptocurrency.
Early Monday morning, the leader of the free world had a message to convey. Not about the economic turmoil from tariffs, any one of the skirmishes playing out abroad, or a surprise shake-up in his White House staff. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to post about something called the “$TRUMP GALA DINNER,” with a link to gettrumpmemes.com.
Donald Trump never misses a good brand opportunity. You can buy collectible Trump trading cards, limited-edition autographed Trump guitars, $499 “Trump Won” low-top sneakers, and Trump-endorsed Bibles. Long before he got into politics, Trump peddled liquor (Trump Vodka), education (Trump University), and meat (Trump Steaks). But Trump’s latest enterprise—a new cryptocurrency token named $TRUMP—might be his most brazen yet.
If there’s a single image that defines the crypto frenzy of 2021 and 2022, it’s that of the actor Matt Damon, calm and muscled, delivering the immortal proverb “Fortune favors the brave.” It was part of an ad for Crypto.com, yet it somehow captured the absurdity of what the crypto industry promised at the time: not just a digital asset, but a ludicrously magnified vision of the future.
Sam Bankman-Fried was the opposite of all that.
There was a time, not so long ago, when you actually had to show up at a concert to get ripped off. Scalping, the process of buying tickets for cheap and reselling them to desperate fans, usually on the day of a show, used to be limited to crowded stadium entranceways and sidewalk waiting areas.These days it all happens on Ticketmaster.
In the hours before Sam Bankman-Fried surrendered to police at his home on the Bahamian island of New Providence, he was still engaged in something like a last-ditch press tour: a final, desperate attempt to make amends after his $32 billion crypto empire unraveled last month. Asked during a Monday-afternoon roundtable on Twitter Spaces whether he thought the prospect of returning to the U.S. might result in his arrest, Bankman-Fried responded with a resounding no.
After losing more than $1 billion of his customers’ money, the disgraced crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried had just one thing to say.“1) What.”That inscrutable message, posted on Twitter last weekend, followed a cataclysmic week for the 30-year-old. FTX, the cryptocurrency-trading site he’d founded and turned into a global behemoth, went insolvent. Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth plummeted from $15 billion to $0 in just one day, and the company filed for bankruptcy.
When I spoke with Sam Bankman-Fried three weeks ago, he was crypto’s golden boy. Worth about $15 billion, this quirky 30-year-old led one of the industry’s largest empires. Over the past few years, he’s palled around with Bill Clinton, graced the cover of Fortune magazine, and turned himself into a three-letter initialism: SBF. Toward the end of our rambling, 90-minute interview, Bankman-Fried dropped a casual hint at the state of his finances.
Sam Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is a $15 billion enigma. As one of the richest and most powerful men in crypto, “SBF” is already a political megadonor in the vein of Peter Thiel and George Soros: He spent millions in support of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and was one of the biggest Democratic donors in the country in the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections.
Last Monday marked one of the biggest TV events of June—Game 5 of the NBA finals. So naturally the crypto exchange Coinbase used the opportunity to air an ad poking fun at crypto’s more enthusiastic doomsayers. A series of tweets declaring “Crypto is dead”—some new, others nearly a decade old—fades in and out over a rendition of Chopin’s funeral march. Then a new slogan rises up in a harsh blue font: “Long live crypto.