White House Tech Adviser Owns Millions in Bitcoin and Filecoin

Andrew Harrer/Getty Images

White House adviser Tim Wu holds a stack of bitcoin and a small amount of Filecoin, another top cryptocurrency, according to personal financial disclosures.

His holdings include $1 million to $5 million in bitcoin, and $100,001 to $250,000 in Filecoin, according to the documents, first obtained by Politico. Wu joined the Biden administration in March on the National Economic Council as a special assistant for technology and competition policy to the president. He served council previously under President Barack Obama.

Wu hadn’t disclosed the holdings previously, but did weigh in on the topic in a 2017 op-ed for The New York Times, when he wrote that bitcoin was “part of something much larger than itself,” and said it was a sign of people “losing faith in humans and depending instead on machines.”

Comparing it to traditional fiat, he added: “Bitcoin isn’t backed by any sovereign, and unlike a stock or a bond, it gives you a claim to nothing other than Bitcoin itself. Yet that illusory quality is true of most forms of money, a shared hallucination that we tolerate as long as it works. If enough others value something, that can be enough to make it serve as a store of value. Sure, Bitcoin will crash again, but over its lifetime, it has already withstood multiple crashes, runs and splits. It actually feels tested.”

Wu, best known for his 2003 invention of the phrase “net neutrality,” taught as a professor at Columbia University before and after his service in the Obama administration. The school paid him $617,500 over the 16 months before he joined the Biden administration. His earnings included another $24,800 for columns he contributed to The Times in 2020, which paid him $1,550 for each piece, and another $15,400 for giving speeches. The disclosures indicated a holds a total net worth of $4 million to $11.5 million, with cryptocurrency holdings comprising roughly 25 to 45 percent of that figure.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet Newsletter
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!