A statue of Prometheus has been proposed for Alcatraz. The monument to the Titan would be 450 feet — larger than the Statue of Liberty who stands at a mere 305 feet — is planned as a  tribute to American exceptionalism, no matter that the island is a sacred site for the Lisjan Ohlone people.

The story of Prometheus is one of hubris: He defied the gods to give man fire only to be punished by having his liver eaten by an eagle. Denver crypto chief Ross Calvin appears unbothered by the message the statue may  send. He’s asked President Donald Trump to fund its construction, estimated at $450 million, or about about $1 million a foot. Last year, Calvin created the nonprofit American Colossus Foundation to promote projects like that of the giant Prometheus.

It would be easy to dismiss Calvin’s plans as those of a lone crank. However, respected art historian Erica Doss finds the tech elite’s obsession with neoclassical forms as a chapter “right out of the fascist playbook. Name an autocracy that doesn’t have a neoclassical obsession.”

Much has been written about Silicon Valley’s dramatic shift to the right. Previous generations of tech executives had been, for the most part, reliable Democrats, albeit with libertarian leanings. A younger group has fully embraced Trump, among them billionaires like Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Even those whose support had originally been tepid, like Facebook founder and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, have set aside their reservations and cozied up to the new president.

Nowhere has the move to the right been more pronounced than among executives in the cryptocurrency industry. Andreessen, an enthusiastic cryptocurrency investor, has been a regular guest at Mar-a-Lago, advising the president on policy and personnel. Garry Tan, an early investor in Coinbase, has publicly expressed the belief that Trump’s election would result in a tech renaissance, one that could see as many as 1500 startups created each year.

 Fairshake, a crypto political action committee, became the dominant Super PAC in the 2023-2024 election cycle spending nearly $200 million to defeat crypto critics like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana. Coinbase has been the leading contributor to Fairshake, donating $25 million in the first half of 2025 alone, half the sum it raised during the same period.

 Trump, who values loyalty above all else, has amply rewarded the tech industry’s support, appointing crypto-friendly regulators, all but eliminating regulations on the fledgling industry. The administration has dropped investigations into crypto firms and crypto crime. He tapped billionaire tech investor David Sacks, a generous donor to his campaign, as the White House’s first crypto and artificial intelligence czar. 

In a largely symbolic gesture, Trump recently pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, the world’s largest crypto currency exchange. Zhao had been sentenced to 4 months in prison after pleading guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering effort at Binance. Trump maintained that the crypto chief “had a lot of support” from those who believed he had not committed a crime. The more plausible answer is that Zhao’s and Trump’s business dealings were enmeshed. Once a crypto skeptic, the president has become a crypto entrepreneur, investor, and hence, booster, doing his part to rehabilitate an industry plagued by irregularities and bad press.

Trump shares a sensibility with crypto executives. Like them, he has a monumental drive toward self-interest and an impulse toward authoritarianism. For example, Andreessen associate Balaji Srinivasan, a former executive at Coinbase, has promoted a scheme called the Network State in which tech elites abandon democracy to form their own sovereign states. Notably, the coin of these realms would be cryptocurrency. Srinivasan’s program, strange as it may sound, has attracted enthusiastic support from leading tech figures like Andreessen, Tan and billionaire investor Michael Moritz.

Politically active crypto chiefs Chris Larsen and Jesse Pollak have funded more traditional forms of authoritarianism. Nationally, Larsen, who founded cryptocurrency giant Ripple, has donated to political candidates who hold regulators at bay, specifically to evade consumer protection laws that have been in place since the Great Depression.

Larsen has become a top political donor in San Francisco where he has funded various law-and-order measures including two 2024 ballot initiatives, one tying welfare payments to proofs of sobriety and another to expanding the police department’s use of surveillance. More recently, Larsen spent nearly $10 million on the SFPD’s Real-Time Investigation Center, which collects and analyzes surveillance data gathered by cameras scattered throughout the city. Many of those cameras were previously donated by Larsen. The center is in an office building leased by Larsen’s company and owned by Trump.

Pollak, a Coinbase executive, poured about $400,000 into recent Oakland elections, through Abundant Oakland and Families for a Vibrant Oakland. The money was used to promote candidates who pursued a narrative of a crime-ridden city, despite statistics that proved otherwise. They promoted increased policing to combat drug use and homelessness, two social ills that have proven impervious to harsh measures.

After dozens of Confederate memorials and statues were removed in recent years, monuments to American power are, again, having a  moment. Trump has promised to build a National Garden of American heroes, including  statues of figures as diverse as George Washington, Billy Graham and Elvis Presley. The president’s plan will have no greater fans than the cryptocurrency executives with whom he has much in common.