Dia Dipasupil | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

America’s top 50 philanthropists gave a whopping $22.4 billion to charity in 2025, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s latest annual ranking. Media titan Michael Bloomberg led the Philanthropy 50 for the third year in a row, donating $4.3 billion to support the arts, public health and other causes.

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott is notably absent from the ranking. Scott announced on her blog in early December that she had given away nearly $7.2 billion to about 225 organizations over the past 12 months. She has donated more than $26 billion to nonprofits since 2020, according to a website for her philanthropic organization, Yield Giving.

Maria Di Mento, senior editor at the Chronicle, told Inside Wealth that Scott was excluded because her representatives declined to confirm how much she had contributed to her donor-advised funds, which are popular financial vehicles for charitable giving. The Philanthropy 50 counts donations to donor-advised funds, or DAFs, and foundations, but it doesn’t include disbursements from those funds in order to avoid double counting, Di Mento said.

While Scott publicizes her giving, ultra-wealthy philanthropists have become increasingly secretive about their charitable giving, according to Di Mento, who has worked on the rankings for 21 years.

“I do think the desire for privacy has grown in recent years because the ultra wealthy are under so much more scrutiny than they used to be,” she said. “While I think there has always been some resentment towards the ultra rich, that resentment, particularly very recently, has grown by leaps and bounds.”

She added that philanthropists regularly tell her that they are wary of being hounded by nonprofits eager for funding.

“Donors tell me this all the time: When they attach their name to a gift, they will get bombarded by major gift fundraisers from other organizations,” she said. “That’s a very real concern. Some of these people, believe it or not, do not have a lot of staff.”

Only 19 members of the Forbes 400, a list of America’s wealthiest people, made the Philanthropy 50. Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, last year’s Forbes 400 front-runners, do not appear on the Chronicle’s ranking despite their status as centibillionaires.

Di Mento noted that this proportion has stayed consistent even as the ranks of the country’s richest have gotten richer.

“I think there are two ways of looking at that, and they’re both true,” she said. “I think a lot of the ultra wealthy are not giving as much as they could be, but the other part is that there’s no law that says they have to disclose their giving.”

While many members of the Forbes 400 are likely giving away money, the Chronicle often requires billionaires’ cooperation to verify how much they gave or who they gave to. For instance, Musk disclosed in a regulatory filing that he gifted about 210,000 Tesla shares worth nearly $100 million in December to “certain charities.” Without knowing the recipients and whether they were affiliated with lobbying or political campaigns, the Chronicle could not count the donation toward the list, Di Mento said.

While Ellison has appeared on the list in the past, his representatives have not cooperated with the Chronicle for years, according to Di Mento.

The Oracle billionaire pledged in 2010 to give away at least 95% of his net worth. Last summer, he amended his pledge to focus his resources on technology research instead of traditional nonprofit organizations.

“It’s not really clear what he’s giving to or what he’s giving anymore,” Di Mento said of Ellison.

Get Inside Wealth directly to your inbox

Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

The post Here’s who’s not on the list of America’s top philanthropists appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Misha Zaitzeff and Vik Ghei, founders of HoldCo Asset Management, at their Fort Lauderdale, Florida, offices.

Courtesy: HoldCo

American banks have found an unlikely pair of adversaries in Vik Ghei and Misha Zaitzeff.

Since July, the nine-person hedge fund they run from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, called HoldCo, has challenged lenders with more than $200 billion in combined assets, demanding that they take swift action or face public campaigns to overthrow their boards and fire their CEOs.

The fund notched a victory this month after Comerica, under pressure from HoldCo, agreed to sell itself to rival Fifth Third for $10.9 billion in the biggest bank merger of the year. HoldCo has since announced activist campaigns against two smaller regional lenders, Boston-based Eastern Bank and Billings, Montana-based First Interstate.

A fourth bank is now in their sights, CNBC has learned exclusively: HoldCo plans to launch a proxy battle against Columbia Bank, a lender with $70 billion in assets and 350 branches across Western states, unless it can strike a deal with management.

HoldCo, with $2.6 billion in assets, is bringing back activism to an industry that has largely been insulated from it since the 2008 financial crisis. The demise of bank-specific hedge funds in the post-crisis years and regulatory resistance to mergers meant that underperforming CEOs faced little discipline from the markets until now, according to Ghei and Zaitzeff.

Regional banks have struggled to regain their footing after the 2023 crisis that consumed Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, leaving them exposed to activists seeking undervalued targets. At the same time, mergers are now viewed as more likely to be approved by regulators in the Trump administration, giving activists like HoldCo a clear exit strategy.

Coming from a hedge fund that few outside of banking circles had heard of, HoldCo’s moves have garnered admiration in some corners of Wall Street, while making them a pariah in others.

Ghei and Zaitzeff say HoldCo has been banned from attending a banking conference held next month outside Miami by Piper Sandler, an investment bank known for advising regionals on mergers. A spokesman for Piper Sandler didn’t have a comment.

The millennial upstarts now find themselves key players in a larger story of industry consolidation. While retail banking is dominated by three giants, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, the country has more than 4,400 banks, and a long-expected merger wave began this year.

Bad incentives

The HoldCo thesis on regional banks is simple: Many are undervalued because their CEOs have put their own interests above that of shareholders, Ghei and Zaitzeff told CNBC in interviews over the past month.

That’s because the CEOs earn millions of dollars more in annual compensation if they grow by acquiring other banks, even if the deals prove disastrous for shareholders, according to the investors. Bank boards mostly operate as rubber stamps for such deals, they say, because directors are often handpicked by the CEOs themselves.

“We’re trying to shame them into doing the right thing,” Ghei, 43, told CNBC. “At some of the banks we own, the CEOs have doubled compensation while their stocks have dramatically underperformed, or even fallen.”

On top of that, some of the investment bankers and research analysts that cater to small and medium banks are complicit, because their firms earn fees from mergers, and shareholders are usually silent because they risk losing management access if they challenge bank leaders, said the HoldCo founders.

“We feel that the way to rectify this is to publicly shame banks and aggressively pursue things like proxy battles,” Ghei said. “CEOs should be fired, and the boards should be fired, because they rolled the dice and lost; there should be consequences.”

Regional banks face pressure to bulk up through mergers to compete with super regionals and megabanks, which have far larger budgets for technology and compliance, according to industry consultants who requested anonymity to speak candidly. Poorly managed firms are more the exception than the rule, they said.

As a group, regional banks have trailed both larger peers and broader stock indexes in recent years, partly because of the hangover from the 2023 tumult. The S&P Regional Banking ETF is still 14% below its 2021 peak, and shares of regional lenders tumbled again this month on concern over a trio of defaults tied to alleged corporate fraud.

In April, after bank stocks plunged in the sell-off sparked by President Donald Trump’s so-called liberation day tariff policies, HoldCo began loading up on shares of beaten-up regionals, including Columbia, Citizens Financial and KeyCorp.

Those bets kick-started their recent round of activism and raised their profile: HoldCo “is quickly becoming a household name in both the regional banking space and the world of activism,” Gordon Haskett analyst Don Bilson wrote in an Oct. 21 research note.

The firm’s rise has rattled executives across the U.S. regional banking landscape; several banks have quietly started reviewing their capital plans in anticipation of possible activist scrutiny, according to the industry advisors who spoke to CNBC.

HoldCo said it now owns more than $1 billion in regional bank shares.

‘Best job in the world’

Over steak dinners, Zoom meetings and phone calls, Ghei and Zaitzeff began private discussions with a succession of bank CEOs in recent months, hoping to persuade them to commit to their shareholder-friendly actions.

When that approach has failed, they’ve gone public, releasing their presentations online and in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

It’s a playbook more familiar to other sectors including technology, media and health care, where hedge funds far larger than HoldCo have attempted to sway management with public campaigns.

“I wish I could say there’s more nuance involved,” Ghei said. “But you actually need to put the CEO’s job at risk and make this very legitimate case that you can defeat them.”

HoldCo’s campaign against Columbia Bank is one of the firm’s largest bets yet. Its position is worth roughly $150 million and makes up about 1.9% of the company’s voting shares.

In a 71-page presentation, the activist said that while CEO Clint Stein quadrupled Columbia Bank’s assets through two acquisitions since taking over in 2020, the bank’s shares have fallen 36% during his tenure.

At the same time, Stein’s most recent pay package rose 80% to $6.3 million from his 2021 compensation, the year he began announcing the takeovers.

Columbia Bank declined to comment for this article.

“Being a bank CEO is the best job in the world,” Ghei said. “You have incredible job security because shareholders never show their face and the board feels like they work for you. Everyone’s happy to meet you, and you have a bunch of investment bankers who want to make fees off of you.”

Stein and his chief operating officer flew to Fort Lauderdale in August to meet the activists at a steakhouse two blocks from HoldCo’s offices on bustling Las Olas Boulevard, according to Ghei and Zaitzeff.

Their meal was amicable enough, but the tone changed afterward when it became clear that HoldCo would pursue a proxy battle unless a deal was struck, meaning they would aim to replace directors with their own picks, with the ultimate goal of replacing Stein, according to the HoldCo duo.

In late September, the HoldCo founders delivered their presentation to board members, slide by slide, over a Zoom call.

HoldCo wants Columbia to swear off from doing more acquisitions, instead using excess cash to buy back their own cheap stock for five years, after which they should explore selling themselves to a larger bank.

“They are honestly accomplished people, but not in banking,” Ghei said of the Columbia directors. “I don’t think they understood how bad the transactions they did were.”

‘Don’t take it personally’

The HoldCo partners said they developed their appetite for confrontation in the rough-and-tumble world of distressed debt.

Ghei, a former Goldman Sachs analyst covering financial firms, had figured out a way to make money picking through the remains of banks that had collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis.

Then an analyst at Owl Creek, a hedge fund that specialized in the debt of failed companies, Ghei realized that bonds from the parent company of Washington Mutual were trading at deep discounts because everybody assumed that they wouldn’t be repaid.

But they were ultimately repaid at full price, plus interest, making hundreds of millions of dollars for Owl Creek, according to an American Banker profile of Ghei from 2013.

Ghei would repeat that trade at another Manhattan hedge fund, Tricadia, where he met Zaitzeff, a Brown University computer science graduate who ran models of new financial instruments called subprime collateralized debt obligations.

Tricadia made millions by both creating subprime CDOs and then separately betting that other CDOs would fail, similar to trades from Goldman Sachs and others chronicled in the Michael Lewis book “The Big Short.”

The men immediately hit it off, and in 2011 started their own firm out of “crummy offices” in New York’s Financial District, says Ghei. They called it HoldCo because of their early trades acquiring the debt of 70 holding companies whose banking subsidiaries had failed in the crisis.

Ghei and Zaitzeff say they would spend most of their waking hours over the next 14 years together, angering their wives with their singular focus on batting around ideas for investments until they came to consensus.

“We’re friends, first and foremost,” Zaitzeff, 42, said. “We spend a lot of time debating investments, but we don’t take it personally.”

They believed the bonds of dead banks had value because of assets like tax refunds on corporate ledgers. But the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which took over the failed banks’ subsidiaries, believed it was entitled to the assets, not HoldCo.

So HoldCo battled the FDIC in bankruptcy courts around the country, winning enough of the time on the strength of their arguments to develop a reputation as scrappy fighters.

By 2013, the pair had raised their first institutional funds from an endowment; word of mouth then spread, and they eventually garnered investment from about 20 universities, hospitals and family offices in a series of ever-larger funds.

One battle after another

Their go-anywhere investment style led them to buy the distressed debt of a New Orleans-based lender named First NBC Bank in 2016; the bank had been established a decade earlier to help the city rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

After realizing that First NBC would soon be undercapitalized, HoldCo shorted the lender and published letters revealing their concerns. The bank’s auditor resigned and the institution was seized by the FDIC. In 2023, the former First NBC CEO Ashton Ryan was sentenced to 14 years in prison for bank fraud.

It was experiences like that led Ghei and Zaitzeff to their dim view of bank management. By proving to themselves that they could identify situations where the market wasn’t functioning like it should, the HoldCo partners had the conviction to take on regional banks this year.

First NBC Bank Chief Executive Ashton Ryan, center.

Source: Nasdaq

Banks didn’t understand the scope of HoldCo’s ambitions at first, the partners said.

“People were surprisingly nice to us after Comerica,” Zaitzeff said. “When we went after Comerica, they viewed it as us going after a bigger bank. But a lot of regional banks view Eastern and First Interstate as much more like them.”

Bank CEOs may believe that if they don’t engage with HoldCo, they can avoid activist campaigns, Zaitzeff said. The activists believe that’s why they were blacklisted from a recent banking conference.

But the hedge fund has purchased almost 5% of the shares of BankUnited, a Miami Lakes, Florida-based lender with $35.5 billion in assets, without speaking to management, according to the pair.

HoldCo plans to wage a proxy battle unless they can come to an agreement with management over increasing shareholder returns. BankUnited didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.

On Tuesday, after publication of this story, Columbia Bank rose 4.4%, the biggest gainer of the more than 140 banks in the S&P Regional Banking ETF. BankUnited climbed 2.1%.

The investors, convinced of the righteousness of their position, say they also plan to publish regular dispatches about banks destroying shareholder value, even when they don’t hold a stake in the firm.

“The problem is that for so many years there’s been no accountability, and the world has gone insane,” Ghei said. “We’re trying to call out bad decisions and incent them into doing the right thing.”

— CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes contributed to this report.

The post Activist investor HoldCo targets America’s underperforming banks appeared first on Our Story Insight.

A logo of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) displayed on a smartphone screen

Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images

The Trump administration is pushing Taipei to shift investment and chip production to the U.S. so that half of America’s chips are manufactured domestically, in a move that could have implications for Taiwan’s national defense. 

Washington has held discussions with Taipei about the “50-50” split in semiconductor production, which would significantly reduce American dependence on Taiwan, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick told News Nation in an interview released over the weekend. 

Taiwan is said to produce over 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors, which, according to Lutnick, is cause for concern due to the island nation’s distance from the U.S. and proximity to China. 

“My objective, and this administration’s objective, is to get chip manufacturing significantly onshored — we need to make our own chips,” Lutnick said. “The idea that I pitched [Taiwan] was, let’s get to 50-50. We’re producing half, and you’re producing half.” 

Lutnick’s goal is to reach about 40% domestic semiconductor production by the end of U.S. President Donald Trump’s current term, which would take northwards of $500 billion in local investments, he said. 

Taiwan’s stronghold on chip production is thanks to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest and most advanced contract chipmaker, which handles production for American tech heavyweights like Nvidia and Apple. 

Taiwan’s critical position in global chips production is believed to have assured the island nation’s defense against direct military action from China, often referred to as the “Silicon Shield” theory.

However, in his News Nation interview, Lutnick downplayed the “Silicon Shield,” and argued that Taiwan would be safer with more balanced chip production between the U.S. and Taiwan.

“My argument to them was, well, if you have 95% [chip production], how am I going to get it to protect you? You’re going to put it on a plane? You’re going to put it on a boat?” Lutnick said. 

Under the 50-50 plan, the U.S. would still be “fundamentally reliant” on Taiwan, but would have the capacity to “do what we need to do, if we need to do it,” he added.

Beijing views the democratically governed island of Taiwan as its own territory and has vowed to reclaim it by force if necessary. Taipei’s current ruling party has rejected and pushed back against such claims. 

This year, the Chinese military has held a number of large-scale exercises off the coast of Taiwan as it tests its military capabilities. During one of China’s military drills in April, Washington reaffirmed its commitment to supporting Taiwan. 

More in return for defense

Lutnick’s statements on the News Nation interview aligned with past comments from Trump, suggesting that the U.S. should get more in return for its defense of the island nation against China. 

Last year, then-presidential candidate Trump had said in an interview that Taiwan should pay the U.S. for defense, and accused the country of “stealing” the United States’ chip business. 

The U.S. was once a leader in the global semiconductor market, but has lost market share due to industry shifts and the emergence of Asian juggernauts like TSMC and Samsung. 

However, Washington has been working to reverse that trend across multiple administrations. 

TSMC has been building manufacturing facilities in the U.S. since 2020 and has continued to ramp up its investments in the country. It announced intentions to invest an additional $100 billion in March, bringing its total planned investment to $165 billion. 

The Trump administration recently proposed 100% tariffs on semiconductors, but said that companies investing in the U.S. would be exempt. The U.S. and Taiwan also remain in trade negotiations that are likely to impact tariff rates for Taiwanese businesses. 

The post Taiwan should only produce half of America’s chips, says U.S. Commerce Chief appeared first on Our Story Insight.

A living space in the new J.P. Morgan financial center branch format in Palm Beach.

Courtesy: JP Morgan

JPMorgan Chase thinks it has cracked the code on managing more money for America’s millionaires.

It’s not a new financial product, a novel software program or an enticing sign-up bonus. Instead, it’s a refurbished take on an old concept — the brick-and-mortar bank branch — along with new standards for service that are at the heart of its aspirations.

The bank is unveiling 14 of these new format branches — each acquired when JPMorgan took over First Republic in 2023 — in tony ZIP codes in New York, California, Florida and Massachusetts, including Napa, Palm Beach and Wellesley Hills.

It’s part of JPMorgan’s push to convince affluent Americans, many who already use Chase checking accounts or credit cards, that the bank is ready to manage their millions.

JPMorgan is the country’s biggest bank by deposits and assets and has a top share in areas as disparate as Wall Street trading and retail credit cards. But one of the only major categories where it isn’t a clear leader is in wealth management; peers like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America exceed it there.

While half of the 19 million affluent households in the U.S. bank with JPMorgan, it has just a 10% share of their investing dollars, according to Jennifer Roberts, CEO of Chase Consumer Banking.

“We have this giant opportunity to convince customers to have their wealth management business with us in addition to their deposit relationship,” Roberts said in a recent interview.

Helped by its acquisition of First Republic, which was known for catering to rich families living on either coast, JPMorgan decided to launch a new tier of service. Called J.P. Morgan Private Client, it is anchored by the new physical locations, of which there will be 31 by the end of next year.

The service comes with its own mobile banking app, but its main appeal is the in-person experience: Instead of being handed off to multiple employees like at a Chase branch, J.P. Morgan Private Client members are assigned to a single banker.

“What First Republic did really well was deliver a concierge-level of service where if you have an issue, a person owned it for you and you didn’t have to worry about it,” Roberts said. “So with this experience we are going to deliver a more elevated concierge type of service, like you would expect at a high-end hotel.”

The price of entry: at least $750,000 in deposits and investments, though Roberts said the bank is aiming for those with around $2 million to $3 million in balances.

Quiet opulence

The new locations, dubbed J.P. Morgan Financial Centers, have a warm feel and an earth-tone color palette that intentionally sets them apart from the nearly 5,000 Chase branches operated by the bank.

During a recent visit to a Manhattan location, the vibe is family office-meets hotel, with soaring ceilings, living room-style seating areas and art-filled meeting rooms scattered over two floors.

Gone is the traditional row of bank tellers; there is instead a concierge desk and a solitary ATM machine. Instead of lollipops, visitors are offered squares of Dylan’s chocolate. The space is quiet, except for the crack of a Perrier being opened or the whir of an espresso machine.

JP Morgan’s Palm Beach Reception.

Courtesy: JP Morgan

The design elements and hushed environment are “really meant to illustrate that we’re there to have a more serious, less-transactional conversation about your wealth planning over the course of time,” said Stevie Baron, JPMorgan’s head of affluent banking.

Those conversations involve planning for long-term goals and examining clients’ portfolios to see whether they are on track to reach them, he said.

Elements of the new high-end branch format could find their way to regular Chase branches, especially the 1,000 or so that are in high-income areas, Baron said.

JPMorgan executives have said the bank’s branch network has already succeeded as a feeder into the firm’s wealth management offerings.

The new service tier — which sits above the bank’s Chase Private Client offering, which is for those with at least $150,000 in balances and is delivered in the regular branches — is expected to help JPMorgan’s retail bank double client assets from the $1.08 trillion it reached in March.

“Obviously it’s a big challenge, because clients already have their established wealth managers, but it’s something that we’ve been making really strong progress in,” Roberts said.

Come one, come all

But attempting to create a new, more luxurious brand from a mainstream one — think the difference between Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus — is not without its risks. Or at least, momentary confusion.

So far, the two flagship financial centers in New York and San Francisco opened late last year haven’t seen heavy foot traffic, Roberts admitted.

“Our biggest challenge is that we don’t have people walking in because they don’t really understand what they are,” Roberts said. “So we just need to get the awareness out there.”

While JPMorgan is leaning on the first part of its name, rather than Chase, to signal exclusivity for the new branches, that may deter people from walking through the doors and starting conversations.

“I just want this to be acknowledged: We’re never going to turn someone away. Any customer can come and leverage any of our branches at any time,” Roberts said.

“We want people walking in, having the experience, meeting with our experts and understanding how we can help support their financial goals over time,” she said.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

The post JPMorgan Chase is heading upmarket to woo America’s millionaires appeared first on Our Story Insight.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as Crypto czar David Sacks, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Executive Director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets Bo Hines attend the White House Crypto Summit at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 7, 2025. 

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Bo Hines has no professional background in crypto. He earned his law degree three years ago from Wake Forest. He’s twice unsuccessfully run for Congress in North Carolina.

Now the 29-year-old former football player is wrapping up his second month as one of the leaders of President Donald Trump’s crypto agenda.

“We’re well on our way in delivering on the President’s promise to welcome in the golden age for digital assets,” Hines told CNBC in an interview this week. “And make the United States the crypto capital of the planet.”

Hines is repeating a high-level message Trump has been uttering since the waning months of his campaign last year, when he became the crypto industry’s clear choice to run the country. Hines is working under former venture capitalist David Sacks, who Trump tapped to be the first White House AI and crypto czar.

Hines said he and Sacks are working “hand in glove” to not only rewire crypto regulation, but to do it quickly.

“The president’s given us the authority to do that,” Hines said. “He trusts his advisors.”

Hines played wide receiver for North Carolina State’s football team, and has said his interest in digital assets began as far back as 2014, when he played in the BitPay-sponsored Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl. N.C. State beat the University of Central Florida by a touchdown in the game, and Hines caught three passes.

Hines went to Wake Forest to pursue a law degree. He explored regulatory issues related to crypto and became a retail investor. He then turned his attention to public office, losing campaigns for Congress in 2022 and 2024.

But along the way, in the 2022 primary, Hines won the endorsement of Trump, who called the candidate a “proven winner both on and off the field” in a news release from his Save America PAC.

In late 2024, Hines was tapped by President Trump to lead his Council of Advisers on Digital Assets. Now, he’s tasked with helping steer national crypto strategy, under Sacks, with a promise to “move at tech speed.”

Hines said much of the group’s early work has focused on dismantling what industry insiders call “Operation Choke Point 2.0.” It’s how they refer to an alleged crackdown by legacy banks on digital asset firms.

“They were victims of lawfare for the last four years,” Hines said, referring to the Biden administration. “These are people that are doing nothing but helping our American economy grow.”

Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro

On March 24, the group will hit its 60-day milestone — and deliver its first set of recommendations. Though Hines was light on specifics, he previewed a range of ideas under consideration, from proposals to scrap and rewrite outdated IRS rules to building up a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” through “budget-neutral” purchases.

“We view bitcoin as digital gold,” he said. “We want as much of it as we can possibly have for the American people,” he said. “And it’s not going to cost the taxpayer a dime.”

Hines floated one idea from the Bitcoin Act introduced by Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., which involves using the unrealized value of U.S. gold reserves to acquire crypto.

“There’s a bunch of creative ways we could get into,” he said.

Hines added that, like Sacks, he’s fully divested from crypto, though he declined to say whether others in the working group would follow suit.

“I can only speak for our office,” he said.

However, Hines said he’s not concerned about Trump’s own crypto-related financial entanglements, which could pose very obvious conflicts of interest. Trump and his family have launched several memecoins, digital collectibles, and a yet-to-be-launched crypto bank.

“He engaged with those assets before he took office,” Hines said. The Trump memecoin was introduced during inauguration weekend. “He’s an American citizen. He has a right to engage in any market that he wants to.”

Hines lauded SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who was tapped to lead a new crypto task force, as well as leadership at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. Regulators are already “on the ground making changes,” from throwing out lawsuits to rewriting enforcement rules, he said.

He’s also watching Congress, where a bipartisan Senate committee recently advanced stablecoin legislation, a move Hines called “monumental.”

“Stablecoins could usher in U.S. dollar dominance for decades to come,” he said. “It could alter the course of the way our financial markets work.”

WATCH: David Sacks on bringing people from tech industry to Washington

The post Bo Hines is ex-football player steering America’s crypto strategy appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Bernie Moreno, Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, attends a campaign event in Holland, Ohio, on Saturday, October 26, 2024. Moreno is running against Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. 

Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

Prior to announcing his Senate candidacy in April 2023, Bernie Moreno was a political no name. A former car salesman in the Cleveland area, his only prior experience in politics was a losing bid for Ohio’s other Senate seat in 2022.

Moreno has since accomplished the once unthinkable. 

On Nov. 5, as part of the election that swept Donald Trump back into the White House, Moreno defeated Democratic incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown, who was first elected to the House in 1992, before winning his Senate seat in 2006 and chairing the powerful Banking Committee since 2021.

Moreno’s rise from unsung Ohio businessman to prominent political leader was no accident. His campaign was backed by $40 million from the cryptocurrency industry as part of a highly targeted effort to get friendly candidates elected and, perhaps more importantly, its critics removed. Moreno’s victory was one of the Senate seats Republicans flipped to take control of the chamber.  

In total, crypto-related PACs and other groups tied to the industry reeled in over $245 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. Crypto accounted for nearly half of all corporate dollars that flowed into the election, according to nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen. Advocacy group Stand With Crypto Alliance, which Coinbase launched last year, developed a grading system for House and Senate races across the country as a way to help determine where money should be spent.

Crypto execs, investors and evangelists saw the election as existential to an industry that spent the past four years simultaneously trying to grow up while being repeatedly beaten down. Nearly 300 pro-crypto lawmakers will take seats in the House and Senate, according to Stand With Crypto, giving the sector unprecedented influence over the legislative agenda.

The crypto political lobby worked so well this cycle because it made something complicated, like campaign finance, simple: Raise a ton of cash from a handful of donors and buy ad space in battleground states to either support candidates who back crypto or smear the candidates who don’t. It also required thinking of candidates as a bit of a binary: They were either with the industry or against it.

Crypto companies and their executives mobilized rapidly, and they successfully figured out how to deploy their cash through a sophisticated ad machine across the country. They also took cues from what big tech got wrong. Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying legislators post-election, the crypto industry invested in targeting their opponents ahead of the election so they wouldn’t have to deal with them at all the next few years.

For over a year, Moreno was grilled by Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks about blockchain technology, digital asset policy and the shifting terrain of global finance.

“They didn’t just jump in head first,” Moreno said, describing the scores of meetings that stretched back to his run in the primary. “We had to build a lot of trust.”

Moreno also met with Coinbase co-founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam as well as policy chief Faryar Shirzad. Armstrong and Ehrsam did not respond to CNBC’s request, through Coinbase, for comment about the meetings.

Coinbase is the largest digital asset exchange in the U.S. and has been battling the Securities and Exchange Commission in court for over a year. The company was the crypto kingmaker in the 2024 cycle, giving more than $75 million to a super PAC called Fairshake. It was one of the top spending committees of any industry this cycle and exclusively gave to pro-crypto candidates running for Congress. Fairshake’s candidates won virtually every race that it funded in the general election.

“Being anti-crypto is simply bad politics,” Coinbase’s Armstrong wrote on X following Moreno’s victory. 

As the price of bitcoin has multiplied by about sixfold in the past four years, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has taken major crypto players like Coinbase and Ripple to court for allegedly selling unregistered securities and has avoided working with companies to develop new specialized regulations.

Meanwhile, Sen. Brown sided with the expressly anti-crypto Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in targeting crypto for allegedly funding terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Brown became more vocal in calling for crackdowns of the industry after the failure of crypto exchange FTX in late 2022. 

As FTX was spiraling into bankruptcy, Brown on Nov. 10 retweeted a post from the Senate Banking Committee calling the event “a loud warning bell that cryptocurrencies can fail” and can “have a ripple effect on consumers and other parts of our financial system.”

The bipartisan Fairshake won all but three races in the general election, spending big on Republicans and Democrats gunning for key seats. Protect Progress, a PAC affiliated with Fairshake, gave more than $10 million apiece to Democratic candidates for the Senate in Arizona and Michigan. Both won. Defend American Jobs, another one of Fairshake’s affiliated PACs, spent more than $3 million to support Republican Jim Justice in West Virginia, who will take the former seat of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin when the new session gets underway in 2025.

In California, Democratic Rep. Katie Porter lost a Senate primary after Fairshake spent more than $10 million on ads against her. 

“I was, like, ‘What the heck is Fairshake?'” Porter told The New Yorker.

How tech bros made their pick

Those vetting Moreno wanted to understand what he would do differently than the current administration and regulatory regime, the senator-elect told CNBC in an interview.

“These are people who know how to vet investments, know how to vet people and they took that same discipline” with me, Moreno said.

It helped that he’d built a blockchain startup, a company called Champ Titles that digitizes automobile ticketing and registration.

“What they didn’t want was to put time, effort and energy behind somebody who, at the end, would be a disappointment,” Moreno said.

A spokesperson for Andreessen and Horowitz, who are co-founders of a venture firm bearing their names, declined to comment. Sacks, founder of Craft Ventures, didn’t respond to CNBC’s request for an interview.

Coinbase’s Shirzad met Moreno over breakfast in Washington in the spring. Moreno wasn’t an expert on the details of the policy issues he’d be pursuing but had a clear understanding of crypto technology and how it could be applied, Shirzad told CNBC in an interview. 

“It was a really great meeting of minds between me as a policy guy and him as kind of a business guy that saw the potential of the technology,” Shirzad said. 

Moreno was out of cash after spending all he had on a tough and expensive primary, said David McIntosh, an early backer of Moreno’s Senate bid and president of the Club for Growth, a conservative organization that focuses on American economic issues. Fairshake played a crucial role for Moreno’s campaign starting in the summer, McIntosh said. 

Moreno’s victory over Brown “sent a really strong signal to Washington that the voters are going to support candidates who are pro-blockchain,” McIntosh said.

McIntosh noted that the Club for Growth spent $6.5 million to help Moreno with advertising in the primary through its different super PACs, including the Bitcoin Freedom Fund.

Brown’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Brown told Politico he hasn’t ruled out running for Vice President-elect JD Vance’s open Senate seat in Ohio, which will be filled by special election in 2026.

Moreno benefited from branding himself as the “change” candidate while Brown “became a defender of the status quo,” Shirzad said.

“Crypto thematically is a change issue,” Shirzad said. “It appeals to not only a younger demographic, but it also appeals to voters who want to change.”

Fairshake declined to comment on whether it would spend to block another Brown Senate run, but the super PAC has already raised $78 million for the 2026 midterms.

“We stuck to our core strategy from Day 1, supported pro-crypto candidates and opposed those who played politics with jobs and innovation, and won,” Fairshake told CNBC in a statement.

‘Most pro-crypto Congress ever’

The past two election cycles featured spending from the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for stealing more than $8 billion worth of customer money through FTX. 

This year’s contributor list was more robust but saw large sums of funding come from companies that have been at odds with SEC Chair Gensler for years. That includes Coinbase and blockchain giant Ripple Labs. Prominent venture fund Andreessen Horowitz, which has a large portfolio of crypto companies, was one of the other primary contributors.

A lot of crypto’s big names also gave significantly in 2024. 

FEC filings show Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were among the largest individual crypto donors this election cycle, giving a combined $10.1 million. Top executives from Ripple contributed millions, led by billionaire founder Chris Larsen, who gave around $12 million this cycle.

Coinbase CEO Armstrong gave over $1.3 million to a mix of PACs including Fairshake and JD Vance for Senate Inc. He also gave directly to Democrats and Republicans running for House and Senate seats. Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal attended at least two Trump fundraisers, including one in Nashville, Tennessee, on the sidelines of the biggest bitcoin event of the year.

Kraken Chairman Jesse Powell donated over $1 million to the Trump campaign.

Other individual crypto contributors include ex-Bitfinex strategy chief Phil Potter (over $1.6 million), Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani ($878,600), Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam ($735,400), Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson ($1,4 million), Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla ($198,500), BitGo CEO Mike Belshe ($119,825), Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko ($67,100), and Xapo Bank founder Wences Casares ($374,899).

This week, Armstrong reportedly met with the president-elect to discuss appointments. Within a day, conversations swirled about the potential for the White House’s first crypto czar. By the end of the week, SEC Chair and longtime crypto foe Gensler, whose term doesn’t expire until June 2026, announced he was retiring on inauguration day.

One of Trump’s promises to his crypto fans on the campaign was that he would fire the SEC head and choose crypto-friendly regulators if elected. Gensler may have taken a look at the pressure that faces him across Washington and decided it just wasn’t worth trying to stick it out.

“Welcome to America’s most pro-crypto Congress ever,” Armstrong wrote on X on Nov. 5.

The post How tech bros bought ‘America’s most pro-crypto Congress ever’ appeared first on Our Story Insight.