Time.news – They are called ‘Lambo’, due to the passion that the Anglo-Saxons – and the Americans in particular – have for diminutives and acronyms. They are the Lamborghinis, status symbol par excellence of the Masters of Cryptocurrencies: if you get to own one, it means that you are in the empyrean. For the rest, with a few exceptions, they shun the stylistic features of finance: no tie, never a pinstripe suit and above all never, ever a double-breasted suit.
However, they love to live in luxurious homes, even if they prefer those in the Hamptons to duplexes on Park Avenue and they like to prance along airport runways towards chartered jets wearing comfortable sneakers rather than stiff Churches. And this is the only thing they have in common with a financial icon like Warren Buffet who has owned the Brooks sports shoe brand since 2006 and who said of cryptocurrencies, without half measures, that they are nothing more than “poison for mice” destined to “come to a bad end”.
© NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP
Warren Buffett
But they don’t seem to care. The ‘Crypto Kings’ make a mockery of traditional finance and have bet on the immateriality of virtual currencies. There are those who created them, like the mythological Satoshi Nakamoto, and those who have developed the method to manage them. But they all have one thing in common: they’re pretty weird.
Nerds, they could be defined by attaching to them the same label that was first the stigma, then the fortune of people like Brin, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk. But it would be simplistic, because some of them lead an existence decidedly outside the stereotype of the loser locked in a room full of screens and computers.
Take the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, who was 60th on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires until he saw his fortune go from $26 billion to $991 million in a matter of hours. A photo taken at an event in the Bahamas, where he lives, shows him with former US president Bill Clinton – under whose administration the first dot.com bubble thrived and then burst – and with the former British prime minister Tony Blair.
Sam Bankman-Fried
Both don’t have ties, Clinton even sporting a sports shirt, but both are wearing suits. Bankman-Fried passes them on the right, appearing on stage in a white T-shirt, military green Bermuda shorts and sneakers with mid-ankle socks. It is said that he lives in a sort of commune with ten other people, goes to work in a Toyota Corolla (no Lamborghini for him) and doesn’t mind sleeping in the office, in a sleeping bag under his desk.
He is the type of person who, the son of two Stanford professors, after graduating in physics from MIT comes up with phrases like “school is useless for most jobs”. Except then saying “upset” by the ruin of his creature of him, Ftx, and admitting that he “fucked everything”.
Putting the final nails on her (millionaire) coffin was another sui generis character, Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, son of Chinese exiles who emigrated to Vancouver in the 1980s. Someone who, metaphorically speaking, gambled for his house with cryptocurrencies, given that he built his fortune with the million dollars obtained by selling the house and investing in that leap of faith that is virtual currencies.
It was Zhao who decreed the end of Ftx con a series of tweets questioning the soundness and solvency of Bankman-Fried’s company. And, nomen omen, the virtual banker is cooked to perfection.
© ERIC PIERMONT / AFP Zao Changpeng
But to imagine the cryptocurrency world as dominated by wacky late teens would be falling into another stereotype. Take the example of Chris Larsen, founder of the Ripple currency trading system and creator of Xrp, the seventh largest cryptocurrency in the world. He was the first to realize that virtual currencies – and bitcoin in particular – are monstrously energy intensive and by themselves pose a threat to the climate. Hence the slogan ‘Change the Code, Not the Climate’, an environmental initiative that has so far not produced great results.
A successful bet is instead that of Song Chi-Hyung, today one of the richest men in Korea thanks to the intuition of bringing crypto-speculation to the smartphone: his is the KakaoStock app, with 300,000 users. A graduate of the prestigious Seoul State University, he was thinking about which MBA to enroll in when Korea was swept by the great wave of the early days of the Internet. He rode her and turned her into a gold mine.
#Crypto Billionaires after the #cryptocrash:
Changpeng Zhao $29.7B (#BNB)
Sam Bankman-Fried $15.34B (#FTX)
Gary Wang $4.6B (#FTX)
Song Chi-hyung $3.1B {#UP)
Chris Larsen $3.1B (#XRP)
Brian Armstrong $2.8B (#COIN)
Jed McCaleb $2.5B (#XRP)Source: coingape
— Watchlists.com (@WatchlistsC) October 25, 2022
The last few months have been a bloodbath for everyone who invests in or manages cryptocurrencies, except for one person: Jed McCaleb who was worth two and a half billion dollars in April and is now worth two and a half billion dollars. His art was to enter and exit the sector at strategic moments, to the point of creating his own virtual currency, the Stellar, one of the least known, but also one of the least devalued.
Overall, the Crypto Kings are elusive characters, who like to appear in their contexts, outside of which they are almost incomprehensible figures. The kind of person you might happen to meet while loading a ‘Lambo’ onto a megayacht in Portofino, but when someone tries to explain how they earned them, one’s jaw drops and they are anything but sure they understood.
The twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, consigned to fame by the film ‘The social network’, are definitely not part of this clique: they are the brilliant rowing Olympians duped by Zuckerberg who allegedly stole from them the magic formula from which Facebook was then born. With the 65 million dollars they had at the end of the legal battle with the patron of Meta, they created a fortune of 4.2 billion with which they decided to launch a personal revenge: a metaverse of their own to oppose to that of Zuckerberg. Likely to end badly for everyone.
© Marco Bello / AFP I gemelli Winklevoss
Should Congress decide to investigate the cryptocurrency industry for anti-competitive activity, Barry Silbert and his Digital Currency Group would be the first to come under fire. Unlike many of his peers who abhor traditional economics, Slbert said he inspired DCG’s strategies at Standard Oil, the conglomerate created by John D. Rockefeller. As a result, he has investments across the industry, including digital currency trader and lender Genesis and digital asset management firm Grayscale.
You know the legend of the giants born in the garage. Well, there’s an immaterial behemoth – Coinbase – that was born in Brian Armstrong’s high school room when he was still writing code for Californian startups, including that of Airbnb. Coinbase is today the main US cryptocurrency exchange, he owns a fifth of them and although the company has lost 90% since the IPO in spring 2021, almost two billion dollars remain in his hands.
He’s another of those who has weird whims like banning employees from talking about politics in the workplace. The thing he hates most of all is the European Union’s fixation on new cryptocurrency rules.
At nearly 50, Matthew Roszak has seen it all in the world of blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies. He founded Tally Capital, a privately held cryptocurrency-focused investment firm with a portfolio of companies including Binance, Block.One, Blockstream, Civic, Messari, Orchid, Spacechain, Tzero, and Qtum.
1/ @MatthewRoszak believes blockchain is one of the biggest inventions of our time. A novel software network platform for human innovation.
“lock your door, turn off your phone, and study this technology for a day” pic.twitter.com/8XyJ7Yluvy
— Disruptive Brains (@DisruptiveBrain) May 11, 2022
He is perhaps the one with the most institutional profile in the sector in the world, to the point of being president of the Digital Chamber of Commerce, the largest trade association in the world. He is convinced that technology is not just about making money and for this he is on the board of directors of BitGive, a philanthropic foundation with which digital moguls try to appear more generous than greedy.
His approach is perhaps the most secular and least fundamentalist, so much so that he produced the first documentary dedicated to cryptocurrencies whose very explanatory title sounds perhaps a little optimistic today: ‘The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin’. Age, as we know, is a good advisor and Roszak knows that there is no worse mistake than burning one’s bridges behind.
For this reason, in addition to having made himself available to the United States Congress and the Federal Reserve as a cryptocurrency expert, he is careful to court the big names in information such as CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Financial Times by offering himself as a consultant.