The Lever - 💵 Who actually owns crypto?

👇 Spend four minutes reading this 1,021-word newsletter to learn about: 

• Trump’s reward for the richest of the rich.
• Why Jeff Bezos can hear everything you say.
• How Big Oil netted a major win against the Constitution.

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💣 Musk sets off a deregulation bomb. Yesterday, Delaware’s Democrat-controlled state legislature advanced a $56 billion taxpayer bailout for Elon Musk, with a final vote expected this week. The pro-business bill — written by Musk’s lawyers — awards the tech billionaire the largest individual payout in history and destroys decades of legal precedent allowing workers and employees in the state to hold wealthy executives accountable.

• How did Big Business pull it off? By threatening to leave the state. Apparently just a suggestion that Meta might incorporate elsewhere led Delaware’s Democrat Gov. Matt Meyer to call an emergency weekend meeting with Meta executives to help smooth things over.

🔪 Did Amazon kill the FTC? The White House staffer who wrote and signed the letter firing the Democratic antitrust regulators on the Federal Trade Commission this week is a former corporate lobbyist whose firm represented Amazon in antitrust matters. 

🌍 Big Oil blocks your right to protest. In a blow to the First Amendment, the fossil fuel giant behind the Dakota Access Pipeline just successfully sued Greenpeace for $660 million after claiming the group used “misinformation” to “incite” anti-pipeline protests. Greenpeace, which claimed its involvement in the protests was limited and at the request of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, will appeal.

• Energy Transfer CEO Kelcy Warren, a billionaire and longtime Trump donor, has exploited the legal system to try to silence opponents before. After Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke criticized Warren for trying to buy the Texas governorship on the 2021 campaign trail, Warren tried, and failed, to sue for defamation. 

👂 Bezos is always listening. On March 28, Amazon is sunsetting its “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” privacy option for Echo home devices — meaning everything users say to their Echos will be recorded and sent to Amazon’s cloud platform, where the data will never expire. Why? To train artificial intelligence. This month, Amazon is rolling out a new and improved generative AI-powered Alexa+. 

• Big Tech’s embrace of generative AI has led federal regulators to issue new consumer guidance warning about fraudsters’ abuse of the technology. Meanwhile, just this week the FTC opened a new lawsuit into a massive AI e-commerce scheme involving fraudulent Amazon storefronts.

🔍 Check our work — we link to all our sources in the web version of this newsletter.

If the federal minimum wage kept pace with productivity, it would be more than $23 an hour today. (Source: Center for Economic Policy and Research)

The floodgates are opening. Has the time finally come? Yesterday, when asked whether Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) should step down after he passed Trump’s DOGE-enabling spending bill, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett (D) said, “It’s important for people to know when it’s time to go.” A growing coalition of Democratic lawmakers are openly demanding Schumer resign from leadership.

President Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference on July 27, 2024.

A bailout for the select few. On March 6, President Donald Trump established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, which will prevent the Treasury Department and other agencies from selling Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency that has been seized during criminal investigations. The move is almost certain to boost the value and legitimacy of the volatile and resource-hungry digital assets, and little else. Who stands to benefit from this government bailout? People who own crypto — which, it turns out, is hardly anyone.

Crypto is by the wealthy, for the wealthy. A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a branch of the main financial and banking regulator, found that roughly 4.3 percent of American households own cryptocurrencies. That’s equal to just 5.7 million households. Moreover, the wealthiest households in this group hold far more crypto than lower-income households: While the bottom 25 percent of crypto investors hold an average of just $648 in the digital currency, the wealthiest own $92,400.

The crypto bros lied to you. Throughout the 2024 election cycle, Coinbase, the nation’s most prominent cryptocurrency platform, routinely touted its own survey claiming that 52 million Americans own crypto, or roughly 20 percent of the adult population. They used this research — which also concluded the majority of crypto owners apparently make less than $100,000 a year — to land stories in prominent news outlets and argue that digital assets were an “increasingly important aspect of local economies.” Too bad their data was apparently bogus.

No, really, these are stable geniuses. Crypto industry groups worked hard to deliver the bitcoin reserve bailout for the select few who own their currencies; no other industry spent more trying to influence the 2024 election. And they could soon get another government boon, courtesy of the STABLE and GENIUS acts, GOP-backed bills to create digital assets attached to traditional currencies like the U.S. dollar. Who cares that other stablecoins have failed or that intertwining crypto with traditional finance could lead to an economic meltdown on par with the 2008 financial crisis? At least a very small group of crypto bros will be happy.

Contributing reporting from Freddy Brewster.

TAKE ACTION

Audit Elon Musk! Between SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla, Musk’s companies have received over $38 billion in taxpayer dollars. The American people deserve an independent audit of Musk’s contracts. Demand an audit of Elon Musk now!

🐁 If you give a mouse a first-aid kit… Scientists recently discovered that mice attempt to revive unconscious companions with CPR-like actions.

📲 Are you in a mixed-phone relationship? Great news — texts between Androids and iPhones will be encrypted now too. 

💊 We have Ozempic at home. Student researchers in Canada have figured out how to grow GLP-1 receptor agonists using plants.

The new political conversation about creating “abundance” implies that society currently lacks abundant resources, rather than acknowledging that we have abundant resources — they’re just hoarded by a handful of oligarchs. 

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