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    Elon Musk and the Tech Billionaires Steering Trump’s Transition Team

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    The involvement of wealthy investors has made this presidential transition one of the most potentially conflict-ridden in modern history.The week after the November election, President-elect Donald J. Trump gathered his top advisers in the tearoom at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to plan the transition to his second-term government.Mr. Trump had brought two of his most valued houseguests to the meeting: the billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk and the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison. The president-elect looked around the conference table and issued a joking-not-joking challenge.“I brought the two richest people in the world today,” Mr. Trump told his advisers, according to a person who was in the room. “What did you bring?”Mr. Trump has delighted in a critical addition to his transition team: the Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires who have been all over the transition, shaping hiring decisions and even conducting interviews for senior-level jobs. Many of those who are not formally involved, like Mr. Ellison, have been happy to sit in on the meetings.Their involvement, to a degree far deeper than previously reported, has made this one of the most potentially conflict-ridden presidential transitions in modern history. It also carries what could be vast implications for the Trump administration’s policies on issues including taxes and the regulation of artificial intelligence, not to mention clashing mightily with the notion that Mr. Trump’s brand of populism is all about helping the working man.The presence of the Silicon Valley crew during critical moments also reflects something larger. Silicon Valley was once seen as a Democratic stronghold, but the new generation of tech leaders — epitomized by Mr. Musk — often has a right-wing ideology and a sense that they have an opportunity now to shift the balance of power in favor of less-fettered entrepreneurship.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bitcoin Price Surges to a Milestone: $100,000

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      The price of a single Bitcoin rose to six figures for the first time, an extraordinary level for a 16-year-old cryptocurrency once dismissed as a sideshow.In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, an early cryptocurrency enthusiast, used Bitcoin to buy two pizzas from Papa John’s. He spent 10,000 Bitcoins, or roughly $40 at the time, in one of the first purchases ever made with the digital currency.It has turned out to be the most expensive dinner in history.On Wednesday, the price of a single Bitcoin rose to more than $100,000, a remarkable milestone for an experimental financial asset that had once been mocked as a sideshow and a fad. The total cost of those pizzas today: $1 billion.Bitcoin now stands as arguably the most successful investment product of the last 20 years. The value of all the coins in circulation is $2 trillion, more than the combined worth of Mastercard, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase. The motley assortment of hackers and political radicals who embraced Bitcoin when it was created by an anonymous coder in 2008 have become millionaires many times over. And the invention has spawned an entire industry anchored by publicly traded companies like Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, and promoted by celebrities, athletes and Elon Musk.Even the president-elect says he is a believer. During the campaign, Donald J. Trump marketed himself as a Bitcoin enthusiast, vowing to create a federal stockpile that could push its price even higher.

      Note: As of 10 p.m. Eastern on Dec. 4Source: Investing.comBy The New York TimesBitcoin began as “essentially an experimental hobbyist project,” said Finn Brunton, the author of a 2019 book about the history of cryptocurrency. “To see where it is now is to see a really impressive feat.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bitcoin Price Sets Another Record as Post-Election Rally Continues

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      The cryptocurrency hit $82,000 as a rally that began after President-elect Donald J. Trump’s election gained steam.Cryptocurrency backers continue to bid up Bitcoin prices, pushing the digital token to a new high of about $82,000 on Monday.The cryptocurrency has surged since Election Day, on investor hopes that President-elect Donald J. Trump and his appointees would be friendlier to the industry after the Biden administration’s aggressive enforcement of securities law that targeted several crypto companies.Cryptocurrencies have become a major component of the so-called Trump trade.Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which got the regulatory green light to trade this year, have been booming over the past week. Crypto-related companies have also jumped in value: Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin miner, is up 40 percent since Election Day and Coinbase, a crypto exchange, is up 50 percent over the same period.The industry poured millions of dollars into the election. Prominent crypto executives, including Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the founders of the Gemini crypto exchange, donated large sums to support Mr. Trump. A group of super PACs also raised well over $100 million to elect pro-crypto congressional candidates.Just weeks before the election, Mr. Trump promoted a crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, in which several members of the Trump family have roles. More

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      Bitcoin Documentary ‘Money Electric’ Reopens Search for Satoshi Nakamoto

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      The identity of the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator has eluded sleuths for years. But does finding the real Mr. Nakamoto really matter?There are two ambitious missions behind “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” a new documentary by the filmmaker Cullen Hoback that was released Tuesday by HBO.The first is to solve one of the internet’s great mysteries by revealing, at long last, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous programmer who created Bitcoin in 2008.The film’s second mission is to make the case that the identity of Bitcoin’s creator actually matters — that Bitcoin, for all its flaws, represents an important technological breakthrough with far-reaching implications, and that there are good reasons, aside from prurience, to care who created it.Let’s start with the first part. Among Bitcoin buffs and cryptocurrency journalists, the mystery of Mr. Nakamoto’s identity has been the subject of fierce debate and painstaking investigation for more than a decade. But nothing has been proved conclusively, and a handful of bungled attempts to crack the case — most notoriously a 2014 Newsweek cover story that put the blame on a physicist, Dorian Nakamoto, who turned out to have nothing to do with Bitcoin at all — have only muddied the waters.(My former colleague Nathaniel Popper suggested that Nick Szabo, who created a digital currency with similarities to Bitcoin, was most likely Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2015, but Mr. Szabo has denied it, and no conclusive evidence has emerged.)Mr. Hoback, who spent years diving down the rabbit hole of the QAnon conspiracy theory for his last film, “Q: Into the Storm,” took a similarly exhaustive approach this time. He and a camera crew spent three years flying around the world interviewing early Bitcoin contributors, following digital breadcrumbs buried in ancient message board posts and piecing together the evidence.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down’

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      Tanya Pérez and Diane Wong and Listen and follow ‘The Daily’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioIf Próspera were a normal town, Jorge Colindres, a freshly cologned and shaven lawyer, would be considered its mayor. His title here is “technical secretary.” Looking out over a clearing in the trees in February, he pointed to the small office complex where he works collecting taxes and managing public finances for the city’s 2,000 or so physical residents and e-residents, many of whom have paid a fee for the option of living in Próspera, on the Honduran island of Roatán, or remotely incorporating a business there.Nearby is a manufacturing plant that is slated to build modular houses along the coast. About a mile in the other direction are some of the city’s businesses: a Bitcoin cafe and education center, a genetics clinic, a scuba shop. A delivery service for food and medical supplies will deploy its drones from this rooftop.Próspera was built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development). It is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. Now, the Honduran government wants it gone.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      Naked Emperors and Crypto Campaign Cash

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      Once upon a time there was an emperor who loved being fashion-forward. So he was receptive to some fast-talking tailors who promised to make him a suit out of new, high-technology fabric — a suit so comfortable that it would feel as if he were wearing nothing at all. “Fortune favors the brave,” they told him.Of course, the reason the suit was so comfortable was that it didn’t exist; the emperor was walking around naked. But the members of Congress who made up his retinue didn’t dare tell him. For they knew that the tailors deceiving the emperor controlled lavishly funded super PACs that would spend large sums to destroy the career of anyone revealing their scam.OK, I changed the story a bit. But it’s one way to understand the remarkably large role the crypto industry is playing in campaign finance this year.Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was introduced 15 years ago and was promoted as a replacement for old-fashioned money. But it has yet to find significant uses that don’t involve some sort of criminal activity. The crypto industry itself has been racked by theft and scams.But while crypto has thus far been largely unable to find legitimate applications for its products, it has been spectacularly successful at marketing its offerings. Cryptocurrencies, which are traded for other crypto assets but otherwise mainly seem suited for things like money laundering and extortion, are currently worth around $2 trillion.And in this election cycle the crypto industry has become a huge player in campaign finance. I mean huge: Crypto, which isn’t a big industry in terms of employment or output (even if you posit, for the sake of argument, that what it produces is actually worth something), accounts for almost half of corporate spending on political action committees this cycle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      From Tips to TikTok, Trump Discards Policies With Aim to Please Voters

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      The former president’s economic agenda has made some notable reversals from the policies he pushed while in the White House.At his convention speech last month, former President Donald J. Trump declared that his new economic agenda would be built around a plan to eliminate taxes on tips, claiming that the idea would uplift the middle class and provide relief to hospitality workers around the country.“Everybody loves it,” Mr. Trump said to cheers. “Waitresses and caddies and drivers.”While the cost and feasibility of the idea has been questioned by economists and tax analysts, labor experts have noted another irony: As president, Mr. Trump tried to take tips away from workers and give the money to their employers.The reversal is one of many that Mr. Trump has made in his bid to return to the presidency and underscores his malleability in election-year policymaking. From TikTok to cryptocurrencies, the former president has been reinventing his platform on the fly as he aims to attract different swaths of voters. At times, Mr. Trump appears to be staking out new positions to differentiate himself from Ms. Harris or, perhaps, just to please crowds.To close observers of the machinations of Mr. Trump’s first term, the shift on tips, a policy that has become a regular part of his stump speech, has been particularly striking.“Trump is posing as a champion of tipped restaurant workers with his no-tax-on-tips proposal, but his actual record has been to slash protections for tipped workers at a time when they were struggling with a high cost of living,” said Paul Sonn, the director of National Employment Law Project Action, which promotes workers’ rights.In 2017, Mr. Trump’s Labor Department proposed changing federal regulations to allow employers to collect tips that their workers receive and use them for essentially any purpose as long as the workers were paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. In theory, the flexibility would make it possible for restaurant owners to ensure that cooks and dishwashers received part of a pool of tip money, but in practice employers could pocket the tips and spend them at their discretion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies plunge, mirroring global markets.

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      The prices of Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies plunged over the last two days, mirroring the volatility in global stock markets and ending a run of growth and excitement in the crypto industry.Bitcoin’s price has dropped about 12 percent since Sunday, falling to roughly $53,000. The price of Ether, the second most valuable cryptocurrency, was down nearly 20 percent over the same period.The precipitous falls show that digital currencies, once envisioned as an alternate asset class that would be shielded from gyrations in the world economy, remain vulnerable to the same broader economic forces that affect technology stocks and risky investments. And the panic is a reminder that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are highly volatile, prone to dramatic increases and decreases in value.Just a few days ago, the crypto industry was flying high. In January, the approval of a new financial product tied to the price of Bitcoin prompted a market surge that propelled Bitcoin to its highest-ever price. The excitement even led to a wave of new memecoins, the digital currencies tied to internet jokes.That enthusiasm came to an end on Sunday, as global markets plunged. The panic was caused by several factors, including a slowdown in U.S. job creation and concerns that tech stocks had increased too quickly.As the price of Bitcoin cratered, investors shared despondent memes on X, while industry leaders tried to reassure crypto fans that the market would rebound.“Yikes,” Cameron Winklevoss, one of the founders of the crypto exchange Gemini, wrote on X on Sunday. And then a few minutes later: “Everything is fine.” More

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      24 horas en la campaña de Trump

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      Cuando Donald Trump intenta ganarse a un público que no es inherentemente el suyo, los resultados pueden ser algo incómodos.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El fin de semana pasado, en solo 24 horas, Donald Trump visitó dos mundos muy diferentes al suyo.El viernes por la noche se presentó ante líderes religiosos en West Palm Beach, Florida. La tarde siguiente estuvo en Nashville, charlando con miles de criptoevangelistas en una conferencia sobre bitcóin.Estos grupos no podrían ser más diferentes, y Trump —que ni es devoto ni domina la tecnología— no era el defensor ideal para ninguno de los dos. Y, sin embargo, las dos apariciones proporcionaron un caso práctico para observar cómo él va cambiando de códigos —del cristianismo a las criptomonedas— mientras hace campaña.Suplica, fanfarronea, hace promesas extravagantes. Y sus intentos de ganarse a un público que no es inherentemente el suyo pueden ser muy incómodos.El viernes habló en la Cumbre de los Creyentes, una conferencia religiosa organizada por Charlie Kirk, fundador de Turning Point USA, un grupo activista conservador. Se trataba de un evento de producción impecable, adecuado para los televangelistas sureños y los cientos de pastores y jefes de ministerios que acudieron a la cita.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More