“Capital runs as surely and instantly where it is most wanted, and where there is most to be made of it, as water runs to find its level.”
— Walter Bagehot (1873)
Q: What’s it cost to have dinner with the president?
The official website promoting a “Dinner with President TRUMP” pitches the opportunity as “The most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World.”
(Reader beware, the site has more capitalization than a German dictionary.)
Specifically, the dinner is “Only for the TOP 220 $TRUMP Coin Holders,” which does indeed make it pretty exclusive: You’d need to buy about $380,000 of TRUMP to break into the top 220, per Solscan.
It might not take quite as much as that because some of the addresses in the top 220 are exchanges (which presumably won’t register their holdings) and some are individual holders who might not want to be KYC’d — the Secret Service will want names, not just FmEMyxFASzDyADXycG8CCTrNB1AMSdoigog3SixNzMNb (as the current 220th-largest holder is publicly known).
Still, anything close to that seems like a steep price for a 220 person dinner — even if it is “the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION.”
Also, it’s not.
Slightly lower down on the site is an invitation for the top 25 holders of TRUMP to an “Exclusive Reception.”
I did the math and 25 is less than 220, so I think that must be the world’s most exclusive invitation.
I’m sure they will both feel exclusive — in both cases, “Black Tie is optional and preferred.”
But the top 25 also get a tour: “PLUS, We have separately by us arranged for a Special VIP Tour for you.”
(Correct grammar appears to be optional and not preferred.)
The 25th-largest holder of $TRUMP (excluding exchanges) currently holds about $5 million worth.
Interestingly, this implies that the market is pricing the event with 11x fewer people at 13x the cost — pretty efficient!
If you also add in the value of the VIP tour, I’d say the crypto market is being extremely efficient in the relative pricing of these two invitations — so much so that I’m certain Eugene Fama will soon be writing a paper on it.
Fama — the high priest of efficient markets — will probably wait until we find out the true cost of dinner (however exclusive), which won’t be determined until the ex-date on May 12 (i.e., the date when they take a snapshot for eligibility).
The organizers are being very clever about eligibility: “Your average holdings during this period will determine your ranking.”
I’m estimating that average price will be difficult, so aspiring attendees will have to purchase $TRUMP well in excess of the minimum if they want to guarantee themselves an invite.
That could get expensive, but the final cost will be a function of how much the TRUMP token goes down immediately after the date of record (like when a stock drops after paying a dividend).
The dinner news bumped the price of TRUMP by about 20% yesterday and I’m guessing the market will price in future such invitations, so the token shouldn’t give back all of those gains on May 12.
If it gives back, say, 10%, the real cost of an EXCLUSIVE dinner with the president will probably be in the range of about $40,000.
Good to know!
Q: How do you know this is real?
Because I read the website’s FAQs:
Q: Is $TRUMP still a memecoin?
It has real utility now: dinner with the president! And maybe a tour!!!
So, no, I don’t think it is.
$TRUMP is now a utility coin.
Q: Who is the target audience for the dinner?
Judging by the site, they appear to be targeting people who have $380,000+ to drop on a memecoin utility coin, who like random capitalization and dislike grammar, and who find a 1990s infomercial vibe enticing.
I don’t know who resides in the overlapping middle of that Venn diagram, but I’d love to find out.
More importantly, this raises the question of why people think being one of 220 people in a room with the president is worth putting $380,000 at risk.
The answer could be benign: entertainment value, bragging rights or simple fandom.
But it could also be sinister: buying influence with the president.
Call me naive, but I think it’s the former — mostly because the wacky website seems to signal that this really is for entertainment purposes only and that attending the dinner will not get you pardoned of any federal crimes.
It feels to me like one of those Nigerian prince emails that were deliberately written with poor grammar, implausible stories and blatant red flags to ensure that only the easiest targets would respond to them.
(Scammers don’t want to waste time on anyone who’s likely to figure out they’re being scammed.)
The Trump Dinner website feels similarly calculated to select for those who really do think that being one of 220 people in a room with the president is worth tens of thousands of dollars (with no expectations of anything else).
Q: How much has the Trump family extracted from crypto so far?
The crypto-skeptic Molly White totals it up to about $1 billion, although that’s just a partial accounting (her total leaves out some big ticket items like the 20% of the US bitcoin mining company that Hut8 recently awarded Eric Trump).
But I don’t think you can blame crypto for that — as Bagehot notes, capital (in any form) will flow to where it’s most wanted, like water finding its level.
Capital does seem to flow disproportionately from crypto, however.
By comparison, Amazon is reportedly paying $40 million for the rights to a documentary on the first lady that they know approximately no one will watch.
That seems at least as egregious as any crypto money that the Trump family has earned — but it’s only 0.002% of Amazon’s market capitalization.
By contrast, the $1 billion that the Trump family has probably extracted from crypto is 0.3% of crypto’s market capitalization — 150x more.
Big picture, I think that’s because crypto, where everything is financialized and tradeable, commands attention far in excess of its market value.
That’s good because it creates opportunities for newsletter writers who might otherwise be stocking shelves at Home Depot or something.
But it’s also bad because it creates disproportionately large opportunities for grifting.
Q: Is crypto worth it then?
I hope so — partly because I’m not ready to start my near-retirement job at Home Depot just yet.
But also because I still believe in the Resistance Money thesis that the world is a better place with bitcoin than without it and Chris Dixon’s thesis that crypto can be an anti-corporate, decentralized iteration of the internet.
For a timely reminder of the latter, you might have a listen to the conversation that Tyler Cowen had with Chris Dixon this week.
Among other things, Cowen predicts that “without open source, we might end up with two governments, US and China.”
(Because every other government will be outsourced to an AI model made in either the US or China.)
For better and worse, crypto is open-source money and markets.
Q: Would you buy equity from someone wearing a hoodie?
Not if they had the hood up, no.
But that’s just me.
Mark Zuckerberg famously wore pajamas to a meeting with Sequoia Capital and that worked out pretty well, so maybe Maller’s new Bitcoin venture, Twenty One, will work out too.
(On the other hand, there’s also the counterexample of Sam Bankman-Fried wearing shorts and a T-shirt on stage with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, so maybe not.)
More concretely, Twenty One “will introduce two key performance metrics”: Bitcoin per share (BPS) and Bitcoin return rate (BRR).
This is a take on the “bitcoin yield” metric that Michael Saylor invented for Strategy (née MicroStrategy), so I assume that Twenty One’s business plan is to sell equity above NAV (which is not really a business plan — it’s just financial engineering).
That worked for Strategy, of course, but Strategy was first and it had the special sauce of Michael Saylor.
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