DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Besides the executive orders, pardons and other moves, Trump and his family have started selling a brand-new cryptocurrency coin featuring an image of Trump drawn from the assassination attempt he experienced during the presidential campaign. It's a venture that, by some accounts, could make the president billions of dollars, though we'll discuss what that actually means. The new coin, which has drawn criticism from government ethics lawyers, is just one of several moves Trump has made to embrace cryptocurrency. He plans to replace the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who sued many crypto companies. Trump's nominee to head the commission is Paul Atkins, a pro crypto executive. And Trump's nominee for commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, heads an investment bank that's deeply involved with the cryptocurrency that's been used by arms dealers, scam artists and drug traffickers, among others. If you find the whole subject of cryptocurrency confusing, fear not. Our guest today, Bloomberg investigative reporter Zeke Faux, has written a fascinating and accessible book about crypto, and he's reported on Trump's newfound enthusiasm for the industry. We'll talk about Trump's crypto moves, as well as the nature of cryptocurrency, its role in the economy and what the future holds for digital currency. Zeke Faux's book is "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise And Staggering Fall." We recorded our conversation earlier this week.
Zeke Faux, welcome to FRESH AIR.
ZEKE FAUX: Thanks, Dave.
DAVIES: So let's start with a simple understanding of what cryptocurrency is, right? It's a coin or a currency that really only exists as a digital entry in some computers of whoever creates or issues the coin, and people trade for it, right? They speculate in it, hoping that its value will rise or fall, right?
FAUX: Yeah. I mean, the original idea of cryptocurrency, which was unveiled 15 years ago by an anonymous person or group who went only by Satoshi Nakamoto, was that this was going to be a new method of making payments around the world, a decentralized financial system that would revolutionize how people transacted. However, in the 15 years since then, that really hasn't happened. People don't really use crypto in the real world for much of anything at all, except for a new method of gambling, and Trump's new cryptocurrency is a great example of that.
DAVIES: Right. And his is a particular subspecies called a meme coin. You want to explain what that is?
FAUX: Yeah. So, pretty much as soon as bitcoin was created, people started poking fun at it. And one of the early joke cryptocurrencies was called dogecoin. It's kind of the first meme coin. And what this was was, instead of promising this is the future of finance - this is some new way of making payments - they said, hey, this is a cryptocurrency represented by a picture of a dog. And we're not saying it does anything at all, but if you think it's funny, maybe you should buy it. And if other people think it's funny, they'll buy it, too, and the value will go up.
So this idea of a meme coin has been around for about a decade. And in the last year or two, it's been really embraced by the crypto industry. And there's been just this explosion of different meme coins to gamble on. Some of them are by C-list celebrities. Some of them try to attract attention by being as stupid as possible. For example, one popular one was, like, the dogecoin dog with a hat. And the goal is just to get people on the internet to think it's funny or at least to think that other people might think it's funny and to get some attention so that people buy your coin. And in most cases, there's some sort of group of insiders who started this whole thing, who have a lot of coins, and they're hoping to sell them to the public and make money.
DAVIES: Right. So you get people who, for a lark or whatever, just decide to do it for the fun of having this (laughter) digital image. And if they drive the price up, they go - the folks who own a lot can make a lot of money. And people have made fortunes, right?
FAUX: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like a new kind of gambling game, except that it's basically rigged in favor of whoever started the meme coin. And in the case of Trump coin, Trump created 1 billion of these coins, and he is keeping 800 million of them for himself and his associates. He also made money by selling this, like, initial block to the public.
It used to be this took a lot of technical expertise to create a new cryptocurrency, but it's now super easy. There's websites where it's as easy as coming up with your own little joke and uploading an image and clicking a button on this website called pump.fun, where, you know, hundreds or thousands of new coins are created every day. And what Trump is saying is that, hey, the game is on. I've released a meme coin. I am very famous. This will get a lot of attention. Don't you want to buy now, get in early before other people get in? And as soon as he released it, the price soared. It got as high as $72. The best estimates by cryptocurrency analysts are that he has already made 50 or $100 million just from releasing this coin and sending a tweet. A few days after Trump's coin, Melania Trump announced that she was releasing her own meme coin. This led to kind of a negative reaction from crypto traders, driving the price of Trump coin down.
DAVIES: Why?
FAUX: So what they say is that they believe the crypto industry is great and valuable and working all sorts of good, important tech things, and that Trump is discrediting their industry by promoting a coin that's based on nothing at all. And that will inevitably crash at some point and leave people with a bad taste in their mouth. Now, what I would say is that these crypto guys, their attitude is that, we donated a lot of money to Trump so that he would promote our coins that we already own and help us make money, not so that Trump would launch his own coin and make the money himself.
DAVIES: And what are government ethics watchdogs saying about this?
FAUX: From what I've seen, they're very upset. I mean, it's unprecedented for the president to be running a business while he is supposed to be busy setting national policies. And it presents all kinds of conflicts of interest. Right now, Trump's appointees at the Securities and Exchange Commission are determining what kind of rules will apply to the cryptocurrency markets in the future. And I think it's very unlikely that they would pick rules that made Donald Trump's meme coin illegal. But they should be able to set those rules based on what they think is right for ensuring efficient markets and protecting investors, not based on what kind of cryptocurrency projects the president has already launched.
DAVIES: Now, this actually isn't Trump's first (laughter) crypto coin, right? I mean, in July, I think, he launched an enterprise called World Liberty Financial, which issues digital tokens. Want to explain what this is?
FAUX: World Liberty Financial is not a meme coin because it actually promises to do something. And real simplified version is that this was going to be some kind of crypto trading platform, which Trump and his sons endorsed last summer and promoted on Twitter and on livestreams. Now, they also were selling a World Liberty coin, which wasn't a very appealing investment. The terms were that you couldn't sell it. It did not guarantee some sort of share in the profits of this World Liberty Financial, and it didn't serve much of a purpose at all. But they opened up this offering. They were selling World Liberty coins. And 75% of the proceeds of selling these coins were to go to the Trumps.
DAVIES: Wow. Do we have any idea how many he sold?
FAUX: Initially, the offering didn't go very well because this World Liberty offering was more or less rejected by the crypto industry because of the weird terms, until this one particular crypto entrepreneur named Justin Sun came in. And he's one of the top guys in crypto. He's very rich. He's also facing a big lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that's accusing him of fraud. And he stepped in and bought, in total, $75 million of these World Liberty coins, which generates a payout of 56 million to the Trumps.
And, I mean, you can see the crazy opportunity for attempting to buy influence that this presents. It's really in his interest to get in good with Trump because he's facing this serious lawsuit from the U.S. And this Justin Sun was named an adviser to this World Liberty project. And pretty soon after his investment, he met Eric Trump at a crypto conference in the Middle East, where he would've had an opportunity to present the case for why his SEC lawsuit should be dropped.
DAVIES: I have to mention one other colorful aspect of the World Liberty Financial enterprise. And that is that one of the cofounders, I guess, was a guy named Chase Herro. Who is he?
FAUX: Yeah, so Trump didn't appear to pick the top people in the crypto industry to partner with on this. Chase Herro is kind of a online hustler who at one point had a $149 a month get rich quick class. He used to sell colon cleanses online. And he's called himself the dirtbag of the internet and said that regulators should kick people like him out of the industry.
DAVIES: Wow.
FAUX: But he was able to connect to the Trumps through the son of Steve Witkoff, who is Trump's Middle East envoy, a Florida real estate developer. And he became friendly with Eric and Don Jr. and became the cofounder of this World Liberty coin, which he got the Trumps to endorse.
DAVIES: Wow. You know, we have a little audio clip of this guy, Chase Herro. And he's driving a car, which I think he says is a Rolls-Royce in the audio, right? And kind of explaining kind of I guess what you might call the amorality of the crypto industry. Let's listen to this.
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CHASE HERRO: This space is run by a bunch of middle-aged men, you know, like, the mid-30-year-old men who understand the power of social media. And you can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin for $1 billion if the story is right because people will buy it. And that is what is going on in the crypto space.
DAVIES: Wow (laughter).
FAUX: Yeah, and I agree with him. He's not wrong. You know, I've spent years looking into crypto trying to see if there's something there, something more than just gambling on the price of made-up coins. And what I've found is a lot of scams, a lot of grift, a lot of even worse things, but not a lot of actual uses for regular people. But I guess Chase found that and said, why don't I start a World Liberty coin with the president? Rather than saying, hey, this area seems a bit fishy. Maybe it should be more regulated.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Zeke Faux. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise And Staggering Fall." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and our guest is Zeke Faux. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. He's talking about Donald Trump's moves to support the crypto industry now that he has moved into the White House.
Trump was not always a fan of cryptocurrency. Here's something he said. I believe this was on Fox business in 2021.
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DONALD TRUMP: Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I was surprised. You know, with us, it was at 6,000 and much lower. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar. Essentially, it's a currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world. That's what I've always said.
DAVIES: OK, throwing cold water on crypto about four years ago, a little less, I guess. What accounts for his conversion, do you think?
FAUX: There has been a big, coordinated effort by some of the biggest players in the crypto industry to donate money to politicians, to spend money on lobbying and to win influential people over to their cause. And it's been really effective. Trump signaled some openness to crypto in late 2022, when he started selling a series of Trump NFTs. These are basically Trump digital trading cards with, like, cartoons of a jacked-up Trump looking like a superhero for $99 each.
DAVIES: Again, not a real card. It's a digital card, right? What do they call it, a non-fungible token? Yeah.
FAUX: Yes, I was trying to...
DAVIES: Avoid that awkward phrase, yeah.
FAUX: ...Keep the jargon to a minimum. But yes, those were Trump NFTs. You get your digital card for $99 each. And some crypto guys realized, hey, maybe we could get Trump on our side. And one of the most influential people was, weirdly, the chief executive officer of a publication called Bitcoin Magazine. His name is David Bailey, and he started mustering support among crypto guys to raise money for Trump. And in July, after bitcoin advocates raised $25 million for the campaign, Trump actually came to Nashville to David Bailey's annual bitcoin conference and gave a big speech, where for the first time, he endorsed cryptocurrency. He promised to loosen up regulations on the industry and to make, in his words, the United States the crypto capital of the planet.
DAVIES: Wow. You know, I think we have a clip of some of that speech. It's probably worth spinning that. Let's listen. This is Donald Trump at the Bitcoin Magazine convention in July.
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TRUMP: If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted and made in the USA. It's going to be. It's not going to be made anywhere else. And if bitcoin is going to the moon - as we say, it's going to the moon - I want America to be the nation that leads the way, and that's what's going to happen. No, you're going to be very happy with me. You're going to be so happy. You're going to say, he's the greatest guy. That's why I'm proud to be the first major party nominee in American history to accept donations in bitcoin and crypto.
(CHEERING)
DAVIES: All right. Warmly received by the bitcoin crowd. You know, one of the things he has said is that we ought to have a - you know, a national crypto - I don't know if it's a bitcoin or crypto generally, but a stockpile. I mean, you know, there's a - you know, a strategic reserve of petroleum, right? And we have gold in Fort Knox. How do we explain the idea of a crypto coin national stockpile? What would be the purpose?
FAUX: This was one of the craziest things in that speech. And I was in the audience, and I was shocked by just how closely the speech reflected the talking points of the crypto industry and the wish list of policies that they were pushing for. And this bitcoin strategic reserve - it would just be bitcoin - is one of the most out-there of these plans. And it's something that these bitcoin guys have been talking about for years.
Keep in mind that at this point, people have largely abandoned the idea that bitcoin would be used for anything, that we would use it to buy our pizza or to, you know, send money from one country to the other. Instead, its advocates are promoting it as digital gold. And the pitch, essentially, is that because the supply of bitcoin is limited, its price is sure to increase. They've actually called this Number Go Up technology, the idea being that as the price goes up, people get more excited. More people buy, and the price will go up more. But at this point, a lot of people have bought, and the price has gotten pretty high. So you need to bring in new buyers with lots and lots of money. So who's got more money than the United States? And the idea is that the United States would spend a hundred billion dollars of real money to buy bitcoin, and that this is a good idea because the price will go up, and we will turn a profit. The only group of people that this is guaranteed to help are people who already own bitcoin. And just Trump talking about this has already helped them. It's driven the price of bitcoin up a lot.
DAVIES: Right. And just to clarify, you know, you mentioned that the supply of bitcoin is limited. That's different from other, you know, meme coins, where people can just make up as many as they want. Bitcoin - when it was established, there was a limited quantity that can be made. So that - there is a real supply and demand there, I guess.
FAUX: I mean, yes, but just because something has a limited supply doesn't mean that it's valuable. So bitcoin's supply is limited to 21 million. I've done some research on this, and actually, there only were ever created 21 million VHS tapes of the movie "Toy Story."
DAVIES: (Laughter).
FAUX: You can go on eBay and buy one of those for three bucks. You don't see anybody saying the U.S. should establish a strategic "Toy Story" VHS tape reserve. And you know what? The factory to make those VHS tapes has probably, you know, long been abandoned. I don't know if we have the technology to make those anymore. So those should be a rare collector's item by this logic.
DAVIES: All right, all right. So a limited item isn't necessarily valuable. All right, we're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Zeke Faux. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise And Staggering Fall." We'll talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAY-Z AND BEYONCE SONG, "'03 BONNIE & CLYDE")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're speaking with Bloomberg investigative reporter Zeke Faux about the mysterious world of crypto currency and its embrace by President Donald Trump. While Trump once regarded crypto as a scam, he's now nominated a pro crypto executive to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commerce Department in his new administration. And he's begun selling a brand-new crypto coin featuring an image drawn from the assassination attempt on him during the presidential campaign. Zeke Faux's book about crypto is "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise And Staggering Fall." We recorded our conversation earlier this week.
Donald Trump has gotten support from some of the giants in the tech world - you know, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and I think Peter Thiel probably, too. Are those folks also crypto advocates? What is their relationship with the crypto world?
FAUX: For most of the biggest money players, the bulk of their wealth is not in cryptocurrency. I would rate them in general as being kind of crypto curious. Elon Musk likes to joke about dogecoin, and he has used the dogecoin icon to represent this Department of Government Efficiency that he'll be running. But in general, these guys care a lot more about their real businesses, like, you know, Facebook or Tesla or Amazon, than they do about whatever cryptocurrency they may hold. And the reality is that the crypto industry is really not that big compared to the real economy. It's just - it's a really well-funded special interest group whose finances are really directly affected by government policy. And so they were very motivated to throw their money around in this election, and they did with great effect.
DAVIES: Let's talk about some of the appointments that Trump has made, which, again, are good news for crypto supporters. He wants a change at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The - Gary Gensler, the previous chair, was very unpopular in the crypto world. Why?
FAUX: Under Gensler, the SEC brought a number of lawsuits against crypto companies that basically alleged that much of the activity that goes on today on crypto apps like Coinbase or Binance is illegal. He was saying that these cryptocurrencies that people are trading in the U.S. all day long - in fact, a lot of our traditional securities laws apply to them. They're not following those laws, and this activity should either stop or be changed to fall into existing regulations. So the industry has been fighting these lawsuits. They've appealed. But Gensler's position basically represents an existential threat to the industry. So that was a huge applause line at Trump's Bitcoin conference speech when he said, I'll fire Gary Gensler.
DAVIES: Yeah. Now, just so I understand the principle in these lawsuits, the idea is that, you know, if investors buy money in the stock market, there are rules that say that in order to get your security on the stock market, you have to provide certain information - you know, orderly reports and earnings reports and assets and liabilities - and so that there's, in theory, some basis that an investor has to evaluate the value of it. In the case of cryptocurrency exchanges, what - any of that required?
FAUX: Yeah. There's not - I mean, with Trump's new coin, we don't know who his business partners are on the Trump meme coin. There's, like, all sorts of details about it that you would have to reveal if this was a stock on the stock market, and that doesn't get revealed in the crypto world. And the crypto industry likes to say that some of the stuff is outdated. It's not needed anymore.
I like to look at the example of WeWork. When that company tried to go public back in 2019, they had to file this big prospectus that said, here's all the information about our business. And investors could read this before they decided if they wanted to buy WeWork stock. And instead of buying the WeWork stock, in fact, people analyzed this and said, hey, this company, it seems like there's - a lot of what's going on there is no good. Adam Neumann, its founder, was forced out, and the IPO failed. If he'd been able to just launch a WeWork cryptocurrency, he wouldn't have had to disclose any of that information, and he could have just sold it based on hype.
DAVIES: Right. Now, these cases that the Securities and Exchange Commission filed, are they still pending in courts?
FAUX: The cases are pending. Trump's SEC is expected to settle or drop them. The position now is that the SEC is going to find some lesser way of regulating cryptocurrency, where there are some rules, but they are not as strict as this hundred-year-old system of securities regulation.
DAVIES: We're speaking with Zeke Faux. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise And Staggering Fall." We'll talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Zeke Faux. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg, and he has written a book called "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise And Staggering Fall." He's also been covering a number of moves by Donald Trump to support the crypto industry as he enters the White House.
So Zeke Faux, let's talk about Howard Lutnick, who is - been designated as the commerce secretary by Donald Trump. He's been nominated. He faces confirmation. He is the chief executive officer and a principal owner of a New York investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, which some may remember was famous for having lost more than 600 employees in the 9/11 attacks, including Howard Lutnick's brother. There has been concern about Lutnick and his bank's ties to a cryptocurrency operator called Tether. You want to explain what Tether is and what it does?
FAUX: So Tether is one of the most important companies in the crypto world. Investigating Tether is what got me started on this multi-year quest to figure out what is up with this whole crypto industry. And Tether is the one cryptocurrency whose price is not intended to go up. It's called a stable coin, and its price is supposed to stay at $1 because it's backed by real money held in a bank somewhere. And Tether got my attention because back in 2021, it had grown bigger than $50 billion, but there was a lot of doubt about whether they had the real money to back all those tokens.
DAVIES: You mean there were 50 billion Tether coins in circulation, for which they presumably had 50 billion in U.S. dollars somewhere?
FAUX: Yes. And as I set out to look into this company, everyone in crypto agreed that this was kind of the linchpin of the whole crypto economy. But even people who were big crypto supporters each had their suspicions about Tether. And When I went to look into it, the company that created it was not based anywhere. It was run by a former plastic surgeon from Milan who had never given an interview. One of its other executives was so reclusive that people online speculated that he didn't exist at all. And so I went to go and try and find out did they really have this money? And it's a journey that took me around the world, but took me to meet Sam Bankman-Fried, who ran the crypto exchange FTX and was one of the biggest users of Tether. And I learned that Tether was used by all sorts of criminals around the world from the North Korean regime to Mexican drug traffickers, to Russia has been using it to circumvent sanctions.
DAVIES: How is Howard Lutnick connected to Tether?
FAUX: So Tether, because of its kind of sketchy origins, it had trouble finding banking partners who would hold the money to back it. And a couple of years ago, they were introduced to Howard Lutnick and his bank, Cantor Fitzgerald. And since then, Lutnick's bank has held what's grown to be most of Tether's $130 billion or so in assets. And those assets are largely invested in U.S. treasury bonds. And that's turned this Tether company, which still only employs a few dozen people, into one of the most profitable companies on a per employee basis in the world. They say they made $10 billion last year, and the former plastic surgeon who's its boss is now one of the richest men in Italy. And none of this would be possible without Lutnick's bank holding the reserves and Lutnick coming out and vouching for Tether.
DAVIES: Yeah, so it's not like Lutnick himself is personally making deals with human traffickers or drug dealers. He accepts assets from this company, Tether, that uses its stable coin for transactions with all kinds of people, including people who in some cases are criminals. Is that the case?
FAUX: Tether would say that this is like digital cash, and just like the U.S. Treasury can't control where every hundred dollar bill goes, Tether can't control who uses its digital currency. Lutnick actually reported at Bloomberg that his bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, owns a minority stake in Tether the company. Now, he said that were he to become commerce secretary, he would divest all his business interests. We'll see exactly what that means. But he's also said he would have nothing to do with any company that was engaged in illicit activity, and that Tether cooperates with law enforcement when they find bad guys using their payments network.
DAVIES: You know, in your book, you describe discovering a center of rip-off artists, scammers based in Cambodia, like a whole kind of little mini-city of apartment blocks of people in these rooms, calling people, luring them into handing over their money. And Tether is involved in all this. Tell us what you found.
FAUX: So if you have ever received one of those wrong number text messages that says, hey, Bill, like, how's it going? Did you pick up the cat food on your way home? That's an example of one of these scam messages. And the people who send them will try to win your trust, gain your friendship. Often they'll pretend to be an attractive person of the opposite sex. Eventually they will invite you to invest in some sort of cryptocurrency trading opportunity. And in general, they will ask you to acquire some Tether and to send it to their anonymous address identified by a 31-character string of letters and numbers.
And once you send those Tethers, that money is gone, and you can't get it back. And there's not much for law enforcement to go on because there's no name or address associated with where you sent your cryptocurrency. And so I went over to Cambodia to look into this. It was truly a horrible problem. There are these complexes where thousands of people are sending these scam messages, and many of them are themselves victims of human trafficking who've been lured to these compounds with the offer of, like, a high-paying job in customer service. Once they get there, their passports are taken. And they're forced, under the threat of torture or even worse, to try to perpetrate these scams on people around the world.
And there's no reason to believe that the people who run Tether the company know any of these bad guys personally or do business with them personally. But they've created this means of exchange that allows somebody in Illinois to just zap $100,000 to someone who's actually a Chinese gangster in Cambodia and without leaving much of a trail of evidence for law enforcement to look into. And while I was in Cambodia, I visited one of the many places where they have money exchange stores, where you can just walk in, take the Tether or whatever cryptocurrency you have on your phone, send it to the clerk's anonymous wallet digitally, and they will hand you cash. No questions asked. And Tether has gotten so popular that there are these cash for Tether store fronts in places all around the world, and it's possible to move big amounts of money this way.
DAVIES: Alright, I have to ask you, since, you know, people read stories about, you know, crypto going through the roof and Bitcoin being worth $100,000, have you invested in any crypto, and what do you say - I'm sure friends must ask you since they know you're reporting on this, hey, should I get into this?
FAUX: Yeah. So anybody who asked me about this in the last few years and listened to me when I said that crypto was dumb, has missed out on potentially a big score. But I have to say that I believe that in the long run, for an asset to have value it has to have some kind of use. It has to generate some kind of profit. And a lot of people like to say, hey, you know, isn't the stock market all rigged anyway? Aren't there a lot of abuses in the - on Wall Street? And sure, there are a lot of abuses on Wall Street. But if you buy a share of Apple, you have a claim on some tiny piece of the profit every time they sell an iPhone. If you buy a Dogecoin, you have a claim to an entry in a database that I guess is some sort of joke about a dog.
DAVIES: Alright. Well, we'll leave it there. Zeke Faux, thanks so much for speaking with us.
FAUX: Thanks, Dave.
DAVIES: Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise And Staggering Fall." We recorded our conversation earlier this week. Coming up, we remember cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, who died last week. This is FRESH AIR.
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