'Now that the cryptos lost and a piece of American history is very likely to double as a tax break, the whole enterprise has gained a kind of collectivist afterglow, whether that’s deserved or not'
People take pictures of the extremely rare first printing of the United States Constitution which was sold this week by Sotheby’s auction house in New York. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images If anything can make the world more sympathetic to the aims of the cryptos, it would be one of the world’s richest hedge fund managers winning an auction for a copy of the U.S. Constitution.
Griffin, of course, is a big spender, a what’s-the-point-of-all-of-this-money-if-I’m-not-going-to-use-it kind of guy. He closed on the world’s most expensive apartment, a 24,000-square-foot penthouse overlooking Central Park, in 2019 for $238 million. The Museum of Modern Art named its east wing after him, and he got the whole entire Chicago Museum of Science and Industry to rename itself for him following a $125 million gift.
What makes this auction result rife with tension is the obvious Big Rich Mean Man versus The People narrative. On the winning end you have Griffin’s Citadel, which has the dubious distinction of being one of the hedge funds that the Internet can name and likes to get mad at.
On the losing end was the cryptos, who’d raised $47 million but still ended up short. According to the group, there were 17,437 of them, all organized under a kind of Kickstarter campaign called a DAO — short for decentralized autonomous organization. The idea was this: What if people all over the world could pool their crypto into this kind of shell company, buy a copy of the Constitution, and then display it for the public good? It was a hit.
It’s not a bad thing that Arkansans will get a chance to view the historic document, and just about every major museum is backed or owned by the extremely wealthy, so it’s not like Walton is some outlier. The New York City Public Library already has a copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting, and the actual Constitution is available at The National Archives in Washington D.C.
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