Elon Musk and Others Cozy Up to D.C.

Dan Gallagher, an attorney who served as an SEC commissioner under President Barack Obama and is currently the top lawyer at the finance and trading service Robinhood, is viewed as Trump’s likely pick to succeed Gensler as leader of the agency. The Republican donor certainly cuts a figure opposite to the current chairman: Gallagher has criticized the SEC’s current approach to crypto while defending Robinhood’s crypto division as the regulator warned of possible securities violations earlier this year. He has spoken at cryptocurrency conferences, and well before the election industry players were buzzing about him as a potential Trump appointee. Amid the speculation, Gallagher said that he hoped any new SEC chair would “ensure the U.S. remains at the forefront of financial innovation.”    

The CEO of BTC Media, which publishes the influential Bitcoin Magazine, David Bailey was instrumental in bringing Trump to speak at his company’s Bitcoin 2024 event in Nashville. Trump raised $25 million from crypto leaders and CEOs he spoke to at a closed event during the conference, and for the rest of the election, Bailey exhorted bitcoiners to support the former president’s reelection bid, at one point posting on X (formerly Twitter) that “if we deliver for him, he will deliver for Bitcoin and Crypto.” He is particularly gung-ho on Trump’s pitch for a national strategic bitcoin reserve, which he wants to see established “as quickly as possible.” Bailey has meanwhile sharply criticized Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats for what he considers anti-crypto policies. Bailey was at Mar-a-Lago on the night of the election, with Bitcoin Magazine streaming live on location, he continues to sing the Trump team’s praises during their transition back into the White House.

The chief executive of the crypto exchange Coinbase, Brian Armstrong was among the biggest winners of the 2024 election: the company’s shares soared the following day, and Armstrong’s stake gave him a $2 billion windfall. He is now expected to meet privately with Trump about cabinet positions. While Coinbase did not donate to groups spending on the presidential race, it has given more tens of millions to the pro-crypto Super PAC Fairshake and associated organizations, which poured their money into congressional races to defeat Democrats who have tried to rein in crypto markets. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, for example, was ousted at the end of the most expensive non-presidential election in American history, with the crypto companies spending $40 million to defeat him. The Super PACs’ wins across the board helped deliver Republican majorities in both the House and Senate for Trump. Armstrong recommended SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, a critic of Gensler’s crackdown who is known in the crypto world as “Crypto Mom,” to replace him. (Another contender for the job, Republican SEC commissioner Mark Uyeda, once joined Peirce in chastising the agency for “misguided and overreaching cases” against crypto companies. He said in a recent interview that “President Trump and the American electorate have sent a clear message” on enforcement.) 

Meanwhile, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, attended Trump fundraisers leading up to the election and has railed against Gensler’s SEC since it charged the company in 2023 for operating as an unregistered securities exchange (that legal battle is ongoing). On election night, he wrote on X that he hoped the agency “understands what has happened tonight,” arguing that voters had rejected their enforcement actions.        

The richest man in the world probably needs no introduction after he campaigned with Trump and founded and funded a Super PAC that spent $200 million to back the president-elect. Elon Musk had plenty of reasons to embrace the MAGA movement, among them the opportunity to lead an as-yet-undefined-and-unformed office called the Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump said Tuesday would gut the federal bureaucracy and slash regulations. The acronym for this new agency, DOGE, is a nod to Dogecoin, a meme coin that Musk has called his favorite cryptocurrency. Dogecoin, like other crypto assets, enjoyed a sudden boom in the week following Trump’s election, rising from $0.15 to $0.44 before trending down again. While the size of Musk’s stake in Dogecoin isn’t known, it surely represents a tiny fraction of his vast wealth. Yet Musk’s enthusiasm for decentralized digital currency will surely factor into any advice he gives Trump as a new member of his inner circle. In his proximity to the president-elect, Musk is also a conduit for his crypto-obsessed peers in Silicon Valley to make demands on the incoming administration.    

Like Coinbase, the crypto firm Ripple gave tens of millions of dollars to Fairshake and associated groups to defeat anti-crypto candidates for Congress. After the election, its CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, confirmed that he has talked to people close to Trump about hiring decisions. He may also have met with Trump himself, a possibility that boosted Ripple shares this week. Garlinghouse has publicly congratulated Trump for winning the presidency and called for him to fire Gensler on day one, “no delays,” advocating for Gallagher as a suitable replacement, though also floated Brian Brooks, a crypto business veteran, and Chris Giancarlo, a former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission with ties to the industry, as suitable candidates. “The Biden administration’s war on crypto is coming to an end,” Garlinghouse told The New York Times in an interview.    

Apart from Musk, Howard Lutnick, the billionaire chairman and CEO of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, is the key crypto enthusiast in Trump’s immediate orbit. The co-chair of Trump’s transition team and a campaign donor, he’s a bitcoin true-believer who was under consideration for Treasury Secretary, with Musk publicly pushing for him to get the job over hedge fund manager Scott Bessent. (Instead, Trump tapped him for Secretary of Commerce.) Lutnick introduced Musk at Trump’s Madison Square Rally in October, strongly supported the DOGE concept, and has been sought after by others in Silicon Valley looking to make their mark on government policy under Trump — including those eager to sit on a promised presidential advisory council that will recommend regulations for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. (Jeremy Allaire, CEO of the crypto company Circle, which donated $1 million to Fairshake, has expressed interest in joining.) When Trump spoke at Bitcoin 2024, Lutnick wrote on X that it was “exciting to see him take a supportive stance on #Bitcoin, innovation in the industry, and its role in the U.S.,” calling him a “great friend and a great man.”     

Venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital did not link his support of Trump to the crypto question as explicitly as others on this list. In explaining why he gave the campaign $300,000, however, he did make room to complain that “Democrats have been trying to regulate […] open source AI and crypto in ways that incentivize the best builders to build outside of America.” His other reasons for supporting Trump included “crime and homelessness” in California, illegal immigration, the “Far Left, and especially Antifa,” and the slew of criminal indictments against the former president, which he called a danger to democracy. Maguire gave half a million to Musk’s America PAC. After Trump clinched the election, he posted on X that it was “Renaissance time,” predicting that the U.S. would deregulate and “innovate with crypto.”  

Like Maguire, Joe Lonsdale didn’t necessarily need the crypto incentive to back Trump: the venture capitalist spends millions on right-wing causes, and he’s a protégé of Trump’s oldest ally in the tech world, billionaire Peter Thiel (who kept a low profile in this election). The two co-founded Palantir Technologies, known for their surveillance and military products and likely to score more lucrative government contracts under Trump. Lonsdale is also friends with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, whose own career in venture capital and subsequent political rise were the results of Thiel’s tutelage and sizable bankroll. Lonsdale has said he believes Vance could be the Republican nominee for president in 2028. Most crucially for Trump, however, Lonsdale helped Musk establish America PAC and corralled its first mega-wealthy donors. He chipped in $1 million himself.      

The chief legal officer of the crypto exchange Kraken, Marco Santori was among those industry leaders in attendance at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago election night party, and has reportedly spoken to the transition team about a role in Washington. Like Coinbase, Kraken was charged by Gensler’s SEC for operating as an unregistered securities exchange, in a case that remains ongoing. Santori has argued that the agency “cannot credibly regulate crypto by enforcement,” suggesting that he, too, is looking forward to a post-Gensler reality.

The Winklevoss twins are billionaire crypto investors first made famous through a lawsuit claiming that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them when all three were students at Harvard (a case Zuckerberg paid millions to settle). The brothers were as vocal as any in 2024 about the need to elect Trump — specifically to the benefit of the crypto scene — and each attempted to donate $1 million in bitcoin directly to the Trump campaign. This exceeded the $844,600 maximum the Trump committee could legally receive per person, and it had to refund the difference. No matter, as the Winklevosses had other ways to financially support the Republican nominee and other GOP candidates: a combined half a million to Musk’s America PAC, and millions to the crypto Super PAC Fairshake. Between all that spending and their triumphalist tone following Trump’s victory, they will probably want a say in what happens to the crypto landscape next.

A tech investor and podcaster with longstanding ties to Musk — both are members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” a group of employees and founders at the financial services company around the turn of the millennium who wield great influence in Silicon Valley to this day — David Sacks was initially cautious about endorsing Trump. Yet early on in the election cycle, he and Musk held a secretive Hollywood dinner for billionaires opposed to Biden, and it’s not hard to guess where this group eventually put their money. Sacks would go on to note that Trump was “saying the right thing” about crypto, even if it “might have been pandering,” and he hosted a June fundraising event for the Trump campaign at this home in San Francisco. By then, he was reliably beating the drum for Trump on X, pointing to a number of issues, including crypto. “This should be an easy choice for anyone in the industry,” he posted in July. 

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the billionaire founders of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, each donated $2.5 million to the pro-Trump Right for America Super PAC, and each gave $12.5 million to the pro-crypto Super PAC Fairshake. Although Horowitz also donated to Harris, a personal acquaintance, after Biden dropped out, he agreed when Andreessen said on a post-election episode of their podcast that Trump’s win “felt like a boot off the throat” — specifically with respect to crypto regulation. “I’ve talked to so many crypto founders who are just like, ‘We can build these products now,’” Horowitz said. Their firm, which invests in tech startups, released a statement that was similarly ebullient, announcing that “we have an incredible opportunity to build on the bipartisan progress from the last Congress and bring the best of crypto to the world.”