Will Gottsagen
Appearances
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
Well, initially, when Trump coin was introduced, sort of around the time of the inauguration, it accounted almost, I think Axios estimated that it was 89% of his total net worth within that first weekend. It's since crashed, as these meme coins tend to do. But there was such a massive boom right after that introduction that
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
that I think it was, we're talking tens of billions of dollars that were basically instantly printed into life. So Trump's meme coin was really a surprise to almost everyone in the crypto community. Trump had appointed a crypto czar, David Sachs. He sort of had tried to assemble a team of crypto experts to really roll out or maybe roll back crypto regulations in a sort of measured and sober way.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
And then all of a sudden he releases Trump the meme coin kind of out of the blue. Well, actually, like, there was a crypto gala going on in D.C. for sort of Trump-affiliated crypto people to kind of celebrate the inauguration. It was during that gala, while everyone was kind of pleasantly drunk and chattering and not really watching their Twitter feeds, that Trump decided to drop this thing.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
All of a sudden it shoots up tens of billions of dollars in crypto. It was really just a chance to cash in on the hype surrounding the inauguration and also the possibilities of a second Trump term.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
Oh, constantly. He's constantly posting on Truth Social, like, if not directly by my coin, I don't think he would be so silly as to say my coin because that makes the link even more explicit than it already is. But he's constantly posting about promotional events tied to the coin.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
There's a Trump coin gala that I think has generated over $100 million in terms of like extra, or people have spent over $100 million trying to get entry to the gala. The gala is an attempt to basically pump the price of Trump coin, get people interested in it. It's rare that he's not talking about his businesses on Truth Social.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
So he had some NFTs back when NFTs were really kicking off, which were basically like digital collectibles tied to the Trump brand name.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
It was something in the Trump playbook, right? He's been doing this for years, putting the Trump name on something and then saying, here's a piece of me, right? You can now own a piece of the Trump name, put it in your home. In this case, like put it, you know, in your digital wallet.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
And then closer to his actual election, he unveiled World Liberty Financial, which is known as a DeFi firm. Basically, DeFi is decentralized finance. It's a broad sort of umbrella term for crypto protocols that do a lot of different things. It was really the first...
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
sort of intimation that Trump was going to start personally enriching himself by way of crypto companies, not just like by way of a few throwaway NFTs, right? Or by courting donations from crypto billionaires, but really by getting into the business himself.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
Well, that's an interesting question because so much of the value of these companies, and it's not just World Liberty Financial, it's sort of the Trump meme coin. There's American Bitcoin, which is a Bitcoin mining firm. That's a more recent venture. All of these things are... They have some distance from Trump in the sense that maybe the directors are his sons.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
Maybe some of the assets that accrue from these companies are – they accrue to a trust. Trump the man and Trump the business are –
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
ostensibly separated but also one doesn't exist without the other right the value of trump the business is nothing without the name trump presidents have always been good at turning the position of the presidency into money i mean look at obama right like netflix deals speaking fees this there's nothing there's nothing new about wanting to get really rich off of being the president it's a tale as old as time that said uh there's something really unprecedented and direct about what crypto allows you to do there
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
It's saying, here's a direct, not just a direct financial path to the president, but like, here's a way to cash in on the biggest position in the whole world.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
well there's a huge amount of like security risk that comes with it right i mean specifically from trump the meme coin the fact that crypto is anonymous basically means that anyone can invest in the case of trump meme coin there are like firms with ties to china that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in trump coin firms that we don't really know much about but because crypto is kind of fast and loose digital money
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
Anyone can buy in. And when you're buying into something that directly enriches the president, because Trump coin is so much of Trump's net worth, you're kind of getting his ear, right? You are saying, you know, we have campaign finance laws in this country for a reason. And the fact that you can basically, anyone in the world can personally enrich Trump by buying into Trump coin is,
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
is sort of a shortcut. It's a legal shortcut around those pesky campaign finance laws.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
Well, I think to understand that question, you have to sort of go back and look how crypto has been regulated over the past sort of throughout the Biden presidency. Biden had appointed Gary Gensler as the head of the SEC, and he was largely seen as a pretty, pretty kind of lefty, pretty aggressive regulator, especially when it came to crypto.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
I mean, he had a background teaching a crypto class at MIT. He knew his stuff, and he kind of wanted to make an example of the crypto industry. And so now, Trump, fast forward to 2024, Trump is elected. As soon as he's inaugurated, basically, he rolls back a huge amount of the investigations that were kicked off by Biden's SEC, Gensler's SEC, Lina Khan's FTC.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
These are like, these were, you know, they had a real track record for being very harsh on crypto. And now it's like a total free-for-all. I mean, there are still... regulations that the rules really haven't changed that much. It's just how they're enforced and they're being enforced a lot less harshly than they were during the Biden administration.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
As much as the industry and the good actors in the industry, of which there are many, have tried to say, look, crypto is a double-edged sword. The fact of it's being kind of fast and loose and anonymous, there are a lot of really good qualities that come with that, but it's also enabled some of the worst in people and maybe the worst of Trump's impulses to really come to the fore.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
It has directly transmuted the Trump brand into money. And it has muddied a lot of those pathways. I mean, exactly what's worrying people on both sides of the aisle about the Qatar plane situation, like, we've taken that to, like, a whole different degree with the sort of anonymous money situation stemming from Trump's crypto businesses.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
So it wouldn't surprise me if as that continues to come out and continues to be muddier and muddier, that people on both sides of the aisle start to react to that.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
His latest piece is all about how... The Trump family business has become crypto more than like, you know, Trump stakes or The Apprentice or any of the other millions of things that Trump has made his name on. Right. The Trump brand has been... gold for him for his entire career. But he's found something finally to like really turn it into a digital gold mine.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
It has become crypto, yeah. Eric and Don Jr. are sort of on the crypto press circuit right now.
Today, Explained
All the president’s side hustles
Both have kind of managerial director positions on some of these Trump-affiliated positions. crypto companies that have been making trump money in recent years they've taken a lead role both on the managerial side and the sort of press tour side as we've seen in the middle east