President Trump on Tuesday pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous dark web exchange Silk Road, which was best known as a once-thriving online marketplace for illegal drugs.
Trump announced the news in a Truth Social post, saying the pardon was in honor of Ulbricht’s mother and the Libertarian movement.
In 2015, a federal judge sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison for operating Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” But last May, while on the 2024 campaign trail, Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s life sentence while speaking to the Libertarian National Convention.
Ulbricht started Silk Road as a Libertarian experiment, and the party has been lobbying to exonerate Ulbricht of his crimes for years now. Within the Libertarian Party, many viewed Ulbricht’s life sentence as a symbol of government overreach.
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On Monday, while tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sat on stage for President Donald Trump’s inauguration, dozens of founders were at parties all across DC, trying to get an audience with the new president’s inner circle.
To hear them tell it, it wasn’t all that hard. Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor spent the weekend party hopping, rubbing shoulders with Sean Spicer or conservative podcaster Jordan Peterson. Taylor’s company wants to use nuclear power to generate synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. He even scored three separate invites to Mar-A-Lago in the last month by sending a two-page document on changes he’d like to see to nuclear regulations to anyone he knew with DC connections. “People are like, ‘please tell me, how do we fix this? We need to build things again,’” he said of the administration.
His story was surprisingly common. All throughout America’s capital, founders enjoyed the fruits of their industry’s political jockeying. They watched Snoop Dogg at David Sacks’ Crypto Ball, attended a wee-hours crypto rave sponsored by the Milady NFT group, and dressed up for a “Coronation Ball” hosted by a publishing company associated with Curtis Yarvin, the controversial thought leader cited by both Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
Tyler Sweatt, CEO of defense tech startup Second Front Systems, said a huge frustration he’s had with the federal government has been bureaucratic opacity. Founders often can’t even figure out who to contact in the government, much less secure a huge contract.
But Sweatt left events like the vice presidential dinner and Trump’s pre-inauguration candlelight dinner feeling like the country might be entering a rare moment where the federal government, big tech and the startup ecosystem are aligned — and where the shroud surrounding the government’s inner workings might be lifted. “Apolitically, that’s pretty freaking interesting for what could we do as a country,” he said.
At a watch party hosted by conservative organization American Moment, the congressional staffers wore suits with red ties and tech workers wore sneakers. Jacob Martin, general partner of crypto fund 2 Punks Capital and co-founder of gaming guild Ready Player DAO kept watching for news that Trump had immediately pardoned Silk Road’s infamous founder Ross Ulbricht, currently serving life in prison. He did not, despite having promised to do so at a Libertarian convention in May.
Martin also lamented missing his chance to buy the Trump meme coin when it launched at Sacks’ Crypto Ball, a time when top crypto donors were away from their computers. Trading on the coin soon soared. “I could have bought. But I didn’t, because it was clearly a scam, right?” Martin laughed. “There were people who made hundreds of millions on it.”
He hopes the Trump administration can make it so “people are able to utilize blockchain technology to make better things, launch tokens when necessary, and not have to worry about jail time.”
Several founders felt Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will open the floodgates for startups to pitch the government on their products in order to fulfill its promise of making the government more efficient. James Layfield, chief sales officer of Samplify.ai, which helps companies identify redundant software, created a website called “DogeProof.com.’ The concept, he said, is to offer up Samplify.ai’s products to government agencies for free, so they can rid themselves of extraneous subscriptions before Musk comes along to slash their costs.
Layfield pitched it to Florida Representative Byron Donalds at an inauguration ball, and said he seemed intrigued. “The whole experience has been incredibly rewarding to just see how open people are to this possibility,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rabi Alam, founder of Counter Health, hopes that DOGE might support his company’s mission to streamline the healthcare system while keeping the quality of care high. First, though, like everyone in the country, he’s got to figure out what exactly DOGE is. Luckily, Alam scored an invite to the Inauguration Ball, where he intended to scout some DOGE employees. “I’d like to get some of what I’ll call finer granularity and more color on what the approach is,” he said.
If this weekend shows anything, it’s that the hardest challenge founders will face, between balls and Mar-A-Lago trips, might just be staying focused on their day job. “There’s people who are trying to be in the right room,” Taylor said. “And there are people trying to get the work done.”
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Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) is upset that Apple Maps still calls the Gulf of America the Gulf of Mexico. So upset that he tagged Apple CEO Tim Cook on X and said he’d filed a complaint. “Hey @tim_cook, just noticed Apple Maps still calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Sent a report through the app, but thought you’d want to know!” said the former Navy Seal.
It seems that Crenshaw is upset, triggered if you will, that Big Tech isn’t changing as fast as he’d like it to. He’s so upset that he did a cringe post in the style of a suburbanite upset at Target. Crenshaw’s whining typifies a behavior I’ve seen in right-wing pundits and politicians in the last few years, the rise of a kind of post and style once attributed to the left in online spaces.
Crenshaw is posting cringe and doubling down on the culture war. They’re obsessed with identity politics, attempting to cancel their enemies, policing gender norms, and demanding that the culture bend to their whims despite the culture not being interested. This is all the stuff they’ve long accused the left of doing.
Hey @tim_cook, just noticed Apple Maps still calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Sent a report through the app, but thought you’d want to know! pic.twitter.com/fA7cWtOGY1
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) January 21, 2025
Less than 24 hours ago, as of this writing, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.” Along with a host of other changes, the order said that the U.S. would henceforth call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Google and Apple haven’t updated the name.
These things take time. But just because Trump says the name is different doesn’t make it so. It’s a body of water that’s not exclusively used by the U.S. and Mexico, and the rest of the world will still call it the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of people who don’t live in the U.S. use Google and Apple Maps and it’s a good bet that the name won’t change for them.
Wikipedia also hasn’t changed the name on its entry for the Gulf. “Even if it was official, America does not get to own Wikipedia entries. [It] stays the Gulf of Mexico as the rest of the world calls it,” said an unnamed Wikipedia editor in the editing history of the page.
“This is a modern version of the Freedom fries jingoism, having nothing to do with geography and everything to do with politics,” another Wikipedia editor said, referring to a post-9/11 attempt by conservatives to rename french fries. “We have the same sort of thing as a perennial complaint with British Isles from a series of Irish editors. This nothing new or special, and can be documented on its own and with simple passing mention in the article if and when it becomes more than a sound bite at a news conference.”
But Conservatives like Crenshaw will publicly make the demand, posting cringe and embarrassing themselves. Ignoble in victory, they now exhibit the traits they’ve long accused their opponents of having.
The American right has control over the Supreme Court, the presidency, and the legislature. That kind of total political victory isn’t enough. They want you to like them too. They want you to laugh at their jokes, take their memes seriously, and call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
The pinned post on Crenshaw’s X account is a “Conservative Guide to the Culture Wars” from 2021. The second item on the list is the claim that a “victor mentality is better than a victim mentality.”
Over the next four years, I suspect we’ll see a lot more cringe posts from Crenshaw and others as the victors twist themselves into victims when every little thing doesn’t go their way. Or when it doesn’t go their way quite as fast as they’d want.
In sweeping executive orders, Trump clears the way for incandescent bulbs and powerful toilets while revoking Biden’s old orders.
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at restoring TikTok service in the U.S.
The order instructs relevant government agencies to “pursue a resolution” that “protects national security” while “saving [TikTok.]” Via the order, Trump is instructing the U.S. Attorney General not to take any action for 75 days to enforce the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), the act that effectively banned TikTok in the U.S. on Sunday, January 19.
“During this period, the Department of Justice shall take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act,” the executive order reads. “Even after the expiration of the above-specified period, the Department of Justice shall not take any action to enforce the Act […]”
Trump’s move comes on the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court decision to uphold the PAFACA, which passed with bipartisan Congressional support during former President Joe Biden’s term.
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