A statue of Prometheus has been proposed for Alcatraz. The monument to the Titan would be 450 feet — larger than the Statue of Liberty which stands at a mere 305 feet — and 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 seems unbothered by the message the statue could 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 says the tech elite are obsessed with neoclassical forms, calling it 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 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 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 crypto 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 would 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, led by leading Trump supporter Brian Armstrong,  has been the top contributor to Fairshake, donating $25 million in the first half of 2025 alone, half the sum it raised during the same period to elect crypto- and Trump-friendly candidates.

Ripple Labs, a crypto firm founded by San Francisco billionaire Chris Larsen, was the top technology donor to Trump’s lavish $239 million inauguration fund. Ripple and Coinbase have been among the companies that have donated to Trump’s destruction of the White House’s East Wing in order to build a ballroom.

Trump, who values loyalty above all, has amply rewarded the tech industry’s support, appointing crypto-friendly regulators and all but eliminating regulations on the fledgling industry. He’s gone further, dropping investigations into crypto firms and crypto crime and tapping 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 in his innocence. The more plausible explanation is that Zhao’s and Trump’s business dealings are enmeshed. Once a crypto skeptic, the president has become a crypto entrepreneur, investor, and 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. 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 tech investor Michael Moritz.

Politically active crypto chiefs Larsen and Jesse Pollak have pushed  more traditional forms of authoritarianism. Nationally, Larsen has donated to political candidates who hold regulators at bay, specifically to evade consumer protection laws in place since the Great Depression. Larsen has become a top political donor in San Francisco where he has funded various law-and-order initiatives including two 2024 ballot measures, one that tied welfare payments to proofs of sobriety and another that expanded the police department’s use of surveillance.

More recently, he 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 which he  donated. The center is in an office building leased by Larsen’s company and owned by Trump, raising questions about Mayor Daniel Lurie’s creation of a public-private partnership able to evade the oversight of a traditional government agency.

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 discipline.

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 that will include statues of figures as diverse as George Washington, Billy Graham and Elvis Presley. Trump’s plan is likely to have no greater fans for his tribute to American exceptionalism than the crypto executives who share the president’s authoritarian tendencies.