Mother Jones illustration; Getty(2)
From a billionaire’s perspective, a US Senate seat can be tantalizingly cheap. In 2022, Peter Thiel bought one for his former employee JD Vance with $15 million in independent campaign expenditures—a pittance for an oligarch whose net worth has increased by about $12 million per day since then.
This year, a handful of cryptocurrency billionaires may be on the verge of helping to secure a US Senate seat in Alabama for even less.
In a state as red as Alabama, whoever wins the Republican primary is almost certain to cruise through the general election. The primary is on Tuesday, but if no candidate wins a majority, there will be a runoff next month. For awhile, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall topped the polls. Then, in January, Donald Trump endorsed GOP Congressman Barry Moore for the gig. Within weeks, Defend American Jobs, a crypto-funded super PAC, opened its checkbook, shelling out more than $5 million in February for ads boosting Trump’s pick. Moore overtook Marshall in the polls and has been leading ever since.
Crypto titans’ decision to get involved in the Alabama Senate race is emblematic of their ongoing efforts to secure favorable treatment in Congress through unprecedented spending. Beyond helping to install another friendly senator, the ads Defend American Jobs has bankrolled serve as a warning to anyone running for Congress that crossing crypto companies means risking millions of dollars being spent against them.
As Rick Claypool, the research director at the watchdog group Public Citizen, wrote about crypto spending in the 2024 election cycle, no industry had ever before “so wholeheartedly embraced raising as much directly from corporations and openly using that political war chest as a looming threat (or reward) to discipline lawmakers toward adopting an industry’s preferred policies.”
Defend American Jobs, which supports pro-crypto Republicans, is almost entirely funded by another crypto super PAC, called Fairshake. Meanwhile, a similar super PAC called Protect Progress—which is also funded by Fairshake—bankrolls crypto-friendly Democrats. Combined, Fairshake and its partisan affiliates spent more than $130 million on congressional elections in 2024. In Ohio alone, Defend American Jobs spent more than $40 million to help Bernie Moreno, a wealthy Republican car dealer, defeat then-Sen. Sherrod Brown, a longtime Democratic incumbent and champion of organized labor.
Almost all of Fairshake’s funding comes from just three sources: the crypto companies Ripple and Coinbase and the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is heavily invested in crypto firms. Each have contributed roughly $90 to $100 million to Fairshake since the 2024 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records. (The contributions from Andreessen Horowitz have been split between the company’s founders: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.)
All three of Fairshake’s major funders have tried to ingratiate themselves with Trump, as well. Andreessen supported Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016. Eight years later, he gave $2.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC in the wake of the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt. Coinbase and Ripple are both helping to fund Trump’s White House ballroom. (Coinbase’s billionaire CEO, Brian Armstrong, once made news for banning political discussions at his company in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.)
A spokesperson for Ripple wrote in response to questions I sent for this article that “Fairshake has backed Rep. Moore – you should go to them for these.” Fairshake did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Coinbase or Andreessen Horowitz.
As of late March, Fairshake had more than $160 million on hand for electioneering, according the latest FEC records. No other industry super PAC has anywhere close to that much. Leading the Future, a pro-AI effort linked to some of the same people as Fairshake, comes in second with more than $60 million between it and its affiliates.
By comparison, the top super PACs affiliated with labor unions have roughly $30 million on hand between them—less than 15 percent of what crypto and AI have to throw around. Claypool has written for Public Citizen that crypto companies’ unparalleled war chest is “akin to a corporate Death Star hovering over elections, poised to annihilate individual candidates” in order to force others to submit to their will.
It is hard to overstate how much Defend American Jobs has spent in Alabama relative to the candidates themselves. By the end of March, the super PAC had shelled out roughly six times as much as Marshall’s entire campaign. Defend American Jobs put another $1.7 million into the race this month after polls showed Marshall and Jared Hudson, a former Navy SEAL, within striking distance of Moore. That brought the super PAC’s total spending to nearly $7 million—more than Moore, Marshall, and Hudson have raised combined, according to the latest FEC records. The spending by Defend American Jobs, along with another pro-Moore crypto group called Fellowship PAC, far exceeds what competing super PACs have spent backing Hudson and Marshall.
Some Alabama voters who have seen ads from Defend American Jobs likely have no idea they are designed to advance the interests of out-of-state crypto billionaires. The only one I have found online highlights Trump’s endorsement of Moore, while making no mention of crypto. Fairshake pursued a similar strategy in 2024. The $40 million of ads from Defend American Jobs boosting Moreno in Ohio, for example, did not mention crypto at all.
From the outside, Marshall and Moore, who are 61 and 59, respectively, appear quite similar. As an op-ed from the Alabama Political Reporter put it, both men are “bona fide, right-wing Conservatives” who “spent their entire time in office striving to convince voters that they are to the right of Atilla the Hun.” The crypto industry, however, has concluded that Moore is a better ally.
Stand With Crypto, an industry advocacy group, gives Moore an A rating. In Congress, he has voted for crypto companies’ top legislative priorities. He’s also backed by Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who is one of the most loyal crypto defenders in the Senate. Judging by the press release on Moore’s campaign website, Lummis’ endorsement of Moore was largely due to his loyalty to the crypto industry. The Wyoming senator also made a point of lauding Moore for being one of the “few members of Congress to personally own crypto assets.” Indeed, he owns between $1,001 and $15,000 worth of bitcoin, according to a 2024 House financial disclosure.
Marshall, meanwhile, gets a D rating from Stand With Crypto—despite the fact that he wrote an op-ed in February hailing “visionary” crypto entrepreneurs that appeared designed to ward off the industry’s wrath. That apparently wasn’t enough to make up for Marshall’s past transgressions, like failing to join a suit filed by other Republican attorneys general in opposition to the Biden administration’s more restrictive crypto policies.
Fairshake’s huge spending in 2024 has already helped to secure an conspicuously crypto-friendly Congress full of lawmakers the industry had supported—and even more who are suddenly terrified that the industry might try to defeat them. Last year, House Financial Services Committee chair French Hill (R-Ark.) announced that the week of July 14 would be “Crypto Week.” Unlike Infrastructure Week, Crypto Week actually happened. The House passed three bills in one day that were major priorities for crypto companies.
Two of those bills attracted significant Democratic support, particularly from members in swing districts who are more vulnerable to potential opposition from Fairshake. One, which Trump signed into law last year, created a framework for regulating so-called stablecoins tied to the value of traditional currencies. Another would give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission, more authority over digital commodities.
Consumer advocates have said that the latter legislation, which has passed the House but is still working its way through the Senate, would leave crypto holders more vulnerable to serious harm, including “self-dealing and conflicts of interest.” That warning is a reminder that crypto super PACs and the companies that bankroll them do not necessarily represent the interests of crypto owners, just as banks often have different goals than their customers.
Marshall is now pushing back against the crypto onslaught by attacking “out-of-state billionaires” who are trying to “buy” the seat. “Most aren’t even conservatives. They aren’t for Trump,” Marshall has said. “They’re America-last types, who spend now millions electing Democrats across our country, but also right here in Alabama.” Instead, Marshall laments, they are outsiders from “California, New York, and Chicago,” and represent the “swamp” in Washington, DC. (Stand With Crypto, the industry advocacy group, has rated Marshall’s complaints about crypto campaign spending as “Very Anti-Crypto.”)
Marshall is correct that Fairshake backs members of both parties. In 2024, the Fairshake affiliate Protect Progress spent about $35 million supporting Democrats across the country. The super PAC spent most of that money backing Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who each benefitted from just over $10 million in spending.
Fairshake’s efforts to sway races have not always been successful. Earlier this year, it spent nearly $10 million trying to defeat Illinois Lieutenant Gov. Juliana Stratton in the state’s Democratic US Senate primary. Stratton won by 7 points. It also spent more than $1.8 million on a failed effort to defeat Illinois State Rep. La Shawn Ford in a Democratic congressional primary.
But in Alabama, Trump’s support for Moore gives Fairshake a simple—and likely effective—message to tout in ads. And even if it doesn’t work, the financial investment won’t pose much of a burden for the tech titans behind the effort. Armstrong, Coinbase’s CEO and co-founder, has a net worth of roughly $10 billion, according to Forbes, and bought a $133 million estate in Bel-Air in 2021. That was substantially less than the $177 million Andreessen and his wife paid for a Malibu compound that year. The Wall Street Journal reported that they went on to purchase two nearby properties for $44.5 million and $34 million—bringing their Malibu spending spree to $255.5 million.
Thus far, Andreessen is personally responsible for roughly 15 percent of donations to Fairshake. That puts his share of upending an entire US Senate race at a relatively modest $1 million or so. For Andreessen, whose venture capital firm invested in Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and Slack, it could soon prove to be yet another bargain.
