OK, let's just let's try to unpack this, because
I have to be honest, if you handed me the script
five years ago and told me it was a movie pitch,
I would have thrown it in the trash. Oh, absolutely.
I would have said it's too much. It's too unrealistic.
The writers are they're trying way too hard.
It does strain credulity, doesn't it? I mean,
if this were fiction, the critics would pan it
for being unbelievable. They absolutely would.
We are looking at a story today that just. It
feels like a massive glitch in the simulation.
We're talking about a man who, as of right now,
January 24th, 2026. Right now. Is the richest
Canadian in history. Not just right now, but
ever. He is the 21st richest person on the entire
planet Earth. Which is a number that's almost
impossible to really comprehend. It is. He's
sitting on a net worth of $88 billion. A staggering
sum. Just to put that in perspective for you,
that's more than the entire GDP of nations like
Bulgaria or Luxembourg. Right. But here's where
it gets really interesting. Yeah. Just over a
year ago, this man was inmate number. Well, he
was an inmate. He was wearing a jumpsuit. He
was sitting in a federal prison cell at Lompocay
in California. He was a convicted felon with
the United States government breathing down his
neck. A spectacular fall from grace, or so it
seemed at the time. And now. Today, he holds
a full and unconditional pardon from the president
of the United States. It is the ultimate turnaround
story or perhaps the ultimate lesson in the physics
of power. We are talking, of course, about Changpeng
Zhao. CZ. Everyone knows him as CZ, the founder
of Binance, the man who conquered crypto, lost
his freedom and somehow, I mean, truly against
all odds, managed to navigate the political minefield
of 2025 to get right back on top. And not just
back on top. You could argue he is more powerful
now than he was before the prison sentence. How
is that even possible? Well, this isn't just
a story about charisma or, you know, luck. It's
a story about leverage. It's about timing. And
it is about the very specific, very messy intersection
of high finance and political machinery that
we're all seeing unfold in this second Trump
administration. Exactly. So our mission for this
deep dive is to figure out the how. Because the
headline is easy to read. billionaire pardoned,
but the mechanics. That is a tangled web. We
need to understand how a guy goes from flipping
burgers at McDonald's. Literally. That's not
a metaphor. Not a metaphor. From flipping burgers
to building an empire faster than almost anyone
in history. And then we need to understand the
crash. You know, how does that mantra of growth
over compliance actually land you in a federal
prison? What were the specific decisions? And
then the third act. The part that I think really
confuses people. How does he pull off this rehabilitation?
How do you go from being the DOJ's number one
target to being the White House's friend in less
than 12 months? Well, we've got a really dense
stack of sources today to help us answer that.
We're looking at his biography, obviously, but
we're also pulling from the heavy legal filings
from 2023 and 2024. The stuff most people just
skimmed. Exactly. The stuff most people skimmed
but didn't actually read. We have the pardon
documents from October 2025 and some really fascinating
investigative reporting on his business dealings
during that critical window when he was supposedly
out of the game. And I wanted to ask you, the
listener, right now, just put yourself in these
shoes for a second. Imagine having $88 billion.
You can buy anything, a country, an island. But
you can't walk out the door. You are confined
to a cell. Total power and zero freedom. And
then imagine walking out and within a year shaking
hands with the president. It's just a wild, wild
ride. It is. And I think to understand the destination,
this... pardon, this massive wealth, we have
to understand the engine that drove him there.
Because this isn't just a biography. It's a case
study in risk tolerance. I would argue almost
pathological risk tolerance. Let's start at the
beginning then, the origin story. Because every
time I read about CZ's early life, I'm struck
by how... Well, how humble it is, but also how
heavy the context is. It's the classic immigrant
narrative, but you have to understand the specific
intellectual backdrop of 1970s China. It's not
just any immigrant story. He was born in 1977
in Lianyongjiang. His parents were educators.
But in the late 70s in China, being an educator
wasn't exactly a safe job, was it? No. Not at
all. He was dangerous. His father was a university
instructor, which sounds prestigious to us. But
the cultural revolution had just ended, and its
shadow was long. An atmosphere was created where
intellectuals were deeply suspect. His father
was branded a pro -bourgeois intellect. Pro -bourgeois
intellect? That's a label that gets you sent
away. Gets you exiled, yeah. He was sent to rural
areas shortly after CZ was born. So right from
the start, from his earliest memories, CZ's life
is shaped by this friction. The intellectual
versus the state. The individual with ideas versus
the government with the boot. Precisely. That
has to leave a mark on a kid. It has to plant
a seed of maybe not rebellion in a political
sense, but certainly a deep skepticism of authority,
of centralized power. I can see that. You see
your own father, a smart man, punished by the
system. And it leads to the escape. The family
managed to emigrate to Vancouver, Canada in 1989.
This was very shortly after the Tiananmen Square
protests. CZ was 12 years old. So he arrives
in a new country, new language, new everything.
And this is where the underdog narrative really
kicks in. Because when you hear tech billionaire,
you think, you know, boarding schools, Ivy League,
maybe a small loan of a million dollars from
dad. Right. But CZ was grinding. He was. The
family didn't have much. In his teenage years
in Vancouver, to help support them, he was working
at a gas station overnight. And as you mentioned,
he was flipping burgers at McDonald's. I love
that contrast, but I don't want to just gloss
over it as hard work. Is there something in that
specific experience, flipping burgers, working
a gas station, that you think actually translates
to running a global exchange? I think there is,
actually. It teaches you about systems. Fast
food isn't about culinary art. It's about efficiency.
It's about speed. And it's about repetition under
immense pressure. Process optimization. It's
all process optimization. How do you serve the
most customers in the least amount of time with
the fewest errors? That's the same problem as
running a financial exchange. But the real foundation,
the intellectual foundation for all of this,
was laid at McGill University, where he majored
in computer science. Okay, so this is where the
tech whiz part of the equation comes in. But
he didn't go the Mark Zuckerberg route. He didn't
build a social network. He went straight into
the belly of the beast, finance. This is the
crucial missing link for a lot of people who
don't understand why Binance succeeded where
so many others failed. After college, CZ went
to Tokyo. He worked for a subcontractor of the
Tokyo Stock Exchange building trade order systems.
Then he moves to New York City, works for Bloomberg
Tradebook, and he's developing futures trading
software. So long before Bitcoin was even a thing,
before Satoshi's white paper, CZ was obsessed
with speed. Exactly. He was building high frequency
trading systems, HFT. OK, let's pause there.
Because high frequency trading is a buzzword
we hear a lot. But I think for a lot of people,
it's just this vague, scary thing Wall Street
does. What does it actually mean in terms of
the code he was writing? To understand Binance,
you have to understand the specific engineering
problem of a matching engine. Which is the digital
equivalent of the guy on the floor of the NYSE
shouting, I'll buy at 10 and pointing at the
guy who's shouting, I'll sell at 10. Right. But
now imagine doing that a million times a second.
Wow. Most crypto exchanges in 2017 were built
by, let's be honest, web developers. They treated
buying Bitcoin like uploading a file. They built
their systems using standard web technologies,
PHP, JavaScript, things like that. Things that
are great for building a blog, but maybe not
for handling billions in transactions. Not at
all. CZ approached it like a Wall Street quant.
He wrote his code in C++ nation, a much lower
level language, specifically to shave off microseconds
from every transaction. Why does that matter
to the average user, though? I mean, if I'm buying
$50 of Bitcoin, do I really care about a microsecond?
You don't. Until you do. You care when the market
crashes. When Bitcoin drops 20 % in an hour,
what does everyone do? They rush for the exit
door at once. Sell, sell, sell. Exactly. And
the web dev exchanges would just, they'd crash
under the load. You'd see the infamous 404 error
of death. You're watching your money vanish on
your phone and you can't even log in to sell.
I remember that so clearly. The Coinbase is down.
Memes were everywhere back then. It was a running
joke. A very painful joke for a lot of people.
But Binance stayed up. Because CZ's engine was
built from the ground up to process 1 .4 million
orders per second. That stability, that reliability
under fire, that was the product. So that HFT
background wasn't just a resume point. It was
the core architectural advantage that allowed
him to swallow the market. It was everything.
He knew the plumbing. He had spent his entire
career building the machine that makes the sausage.
And in 2005, he moves back to China, to Shanghai.
And starts a company called Fusion Systems. Again,
more of the same. Building high -frequency trading
platforms, but this time for brokers. He was
successful. He was established. He had money,
a nice apartment, a career. He'd made it. But
he wasn't $88 billion successful yet. Not even
close. And this is where we get to the movie
scene. The poker game. I feel like every great
business story has a poker game or a garage moment.
This was 2013. It was. He was playing a casual
game of poker with Bobby Lee. Now, for those
who don't know, Bobby Lee is the brother of Charlie
Lee, who founded Litecoin. So these are early,
early crypto royalty, the first wave. And Bobby's
at this poker game and he drops some advice on
CZ. He tells him, you should put 10 % of your
net worth into Bitcoin. 10%, which, you know,
that's a reasonable, diversified, financial advisor
approved amount of risk. Dip your toe in. Test
the waters. Right. It's a hedge. It's a speculative
asset in a broader portfolio. Yeah. But this
is where we see the psychology that separates
CZ from you or me or, frankly, most sane people.
Yeah. He didn't do 10 percent. In 2014, he sold
his apartment in Shanghai. This was his home,
his major asset. He sells it and puts everything
into Bitcoin. 100 percent. All in. OK, hang on.
I have to stop you there because we look back
now. With Bitcoin trading at, what is it today?
$150 ,000. And we call CZ a genius. But in 2014,
when he sold his house. Didn't the price crash
right after that? Oh, catastrophically. It went
from around $600 down to $200. He lost two -thirds
of his net worth almost overnight. See, that's
not conviction to me. That looks like mental
illness. That looks like a gambling addiction.
Imagine that dinner table conversation. Honey,
I sold the house and I lost two -thirds of the
money in a week on magic internet beans. It's
a very fine line, isn't it? The line between
a visionary and a degenerate gambler is often
just the final outcome. It's barely a line. If
Bitcoin had gone to zero, which was a very real
possibility in 2014, he's not a visionary. He's
the guy sleeping on his friend's couch because
he blew the family fortune. That's absolutely
fair. And his family did reportedly think he
was crazy. They were dismayed. But this is the
differentiator. A gambler bets on a card turn.
It's pure chance. CZ was betting on a protocol.
What's the difference? He was looking at the
code, not the price ticker. He's a computer scientist.
He understood the mathematics of it, the game
theory, the distributed consensus. He believed
the math was inevitable, even if the market sentiment
was terrible. So he held. He held to that entire
crash. He didn't sell a single coin. That is
the part that gets me. Selling the house is impulsive.
Holding through a 60 plus percent drop. That
is, I don't know, it's almost an inhuman discipline.
Or obsession. Or maybe both. Most people diversify
to protect wealth. CZ concentrates to build wealth.
And that psychology explains everything that
happens next with Binance. So let's talk about
the rocket ship, Section 2, Binance. He launches
this thing in July 2017. The timing was impeccable,
just impeccable. This was right before the massive
2017 crypto bull run that brought Bitcoin to
the mainstream. And he raised money through an
ICO, an initial coin offering. He raised $15
million. And back then, an ICO was just the Wild
West of fundraising. It was essentially printing
your own stock certificates in the form of tokens
and selling them on the Internet with a white
paper. But look at the velocity. In less than
eight months, Binance became the world's largest
cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume. Eight
months. Eight months. That is insane. How do
you go from zero to number one in eight months?
Eight months. That's like starting a car company
today and outselling Toyota by Christmas. It
just doesn't happen. It comes back to that engine
we talked about, the reliability. But it was
also aggressive, almost predatory tactics. He
listed coins faster than anyone else. What does
that mean exactly? Well, if there was a new mean
coin or some new project with a lot of hype,
an established exchange like Coinbase would take...
months, maybe years to do due diligence and review
it. If they ever listed it at all. Right. Binance
would list it in days. He understood that traders
don't care about fundamentals. They care about
volatility. They want to gamble. So he gave the
people what they wanted, even if what they wanted
was, you know, complete garbage. Especially if
what they wanted was garbage. Volume is volume.
The house takes a cut on every trade. He also
introduced the Binance coin, BNB. This was a
brilliant loyalty play. Right. The feed discounts.
Exactly. If you held their token, BNB, you got
a discount on your trading fees. It created this
incredibly sticky ecosystem where it was just
cheaper to trade on Binance than anywhere else.
And it made people want to hold BND, which drove
up his price. A perfect flywheel. But he was
also building a moving target. We have to talk
about the Nomad CEO thing, because for a long,
long time, if you asked, where is Binance headquarters?
The answer was essentially a shrug. Earth was
his usual answer or the Internet. And for a while,
people thought that was just him being a philosophical
tech bro. We're decentralized. We have no headquarters.
But it was a calculated legal strategy. It's
called regulatory arbitrage. It means shopping
for the laws you like. He started in China. In
late 2017, China banned crypto exchanges. So
he didn't fight it. He just moved the servers
and the team to Japan overnight. OK. Then Japan
started getting strict about licensing. So he
looked at Malta, the blockchain island. He was
constantly on the move, staying one step ahead
of any jurisdiction that tried to pin him down.
He was like a fugitive before he was even a criminal,
just staying one step ahead of the rule book.
He called it decentralized operations. Regulators
called it willful evasion. He eventually settled,
for the most part, in Dubai, in the UAE, and
became a citizen there. But for years, this lack
of a headquarters meant that when a regulator
in the U .S. or the U .K. wanted to sue Binance
or serve them papers, they literally didn't know
where to send the mail. It's the catch me if
you can strategy for corporate governance. Precisely.
And while he was running, the wealth was just
exploding. By February 2018, just months after
launch, Forbes had him as the third richest person
in crypto. By 2025, just before the pardon, he's
up to that $88 billion number. But you can only
run for so long, right? The bigger you get, the
bigger the target on your back. And the U .S.
government especially does not like it when you
play in their sandbox, but refuse to follow their
rules. And that brings us to section three, the
crash. The fall. The walls started closing in
around 2023. You had the CFTC, that's the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission, and the SEC both
filing massive civil lawsuits. And behind the
scenes, the Department of Justice was building
a criminal case. And these weren't just you forgot
to file a form lawsuits. These were heavy, heavy
accusations. Very heavy. The CFTC lawsuit was
particularly damaging because they had the receipts.
They had internal chat logs from Binance employees.
Oh, the golden rule of corporate crime. Never,
ever write it down. They broke that rule spectacularly.
The CFTC lawsuit cited internal chats where senior
employees and compliance officers explicitly
acknowledged that illicit groups were transacting
on the platform. Like who? Groups like Hamas,
Al -Qaeda, and various darknet markets and ransomware
gangs. They knew. There was one chat where a
compliance officer wrote something like, we need
a banner that says, is washing drug money too
hard these days? Come to Binance. No way. They
actually wrote that in a company chat. They did.
It was obviously dark humor. But it proved they
knew. It showed a culture of, at best, willful
blindness. They knew bad actors were using the
platform, and they let it happen. because turning
them off would mean turning off revenue. So this
is the growth over compliance mantra we mentioned
in the intro. They prioritize the fees over the
law. Absolutely. But, and this is a really critical
point for you to understand, we have to separate
CZ from someone like Sam Bankman, freed of FTX.
Please, let's clarify that, because to the average
person, to my mom, crypto CEO in jail, sounds
the same. They just think they're all thieves.
They're fundamentally different cases, and that
difference is everything. I want to use an analogy
here. Think of Sam Bankman -Fried as a valet
parking attendant at a fancy restaurant. Okay,
I'm with you. You drove your car, your asset,
to his restaurant. You gave him the keys for
safekeeping. While you're inside eating dinner,
he took your car, drove it to a casino, gambled
with it, lost, and crashed it into a wall. That
is theft. That is fraud. He stole the customer's
asset. Precisely. He stole customer money. Now,
CZ is different. CZ... ran a toll road, a very
fast, very efficient toll road. He didn't touch
the cars. He didn't siphon the gas. If you put
your money on Binance, your money was there.
But he let everyone use the road, the school
buses, the family minivans, but also the drug
cartel convoys, the terrorists, the money launderers.
The U .S. government came to him and said, you
have to put up a checkpoint. You have to check
IDs. You have to implement anti -money laundering
or AML controls. And CZ said what? He essentially
said, checkpoints slow down traffic. I am the
business of speed. My customers don't want checkpoints.
He prioritized the toll fees over the security
check. Exactly. And in the eyes of the law, that
is a serious crime, specifically violating the
Bank Secrecy Act. It's a felony. But he didn't
steal customer money. Binance had the funds.
At any point, every user could withdraw 100 %
of their money. That nuance is huge because one
guy is a thief and the other guy is what? Negligent?
Or willfully blind. Willfully noncompliant. And
that distinction is the only reason he got the
deal he got. Okay, so November 2023, the hammer
finally dropped. It did. The DOJ announced a
global settlement. CZ agreed to step down as
CEO of Binance, effective immediately. He agreed
to pay a $50 million personal fine. $50 million.
A lot of money, but for him, it's a rounding
error. A speeding ticket. Yeah. But the big number
was for Binance, the company. They agreed to
pay $4 .3 billion in fines and forfeitures. Which
is a GDP of a small country level of fine. Which
is one of the largest corporate penalties in
United States history. And yet, Binance could
pay it. That tells you how much money they were
making. They wrote a check for $4 .3 billion
and stayed in business. And then came the sentencing
for CZ himself, April 2024. The lawyers argued
for no jail time. They said, look, he's a billionaire.
He's a public figure. He's a target. Prison is
unsafe for him. And the Biden administration's
DOJ, they pushed hard. They wanted three years.
They wanted to make an example of him, to send
a message to the entire crypto industry that
no one was above the law. But the judge landed
somewhere in the middle. Much closer to the defense's
side, actually. The judge. looked at the sentencing
guidelines. He noted the fact that there was
no fraud, no loss of customer funds, and he decided
four months was appropriate. Four months. It
feels light. It was seen as very light by critics
of the industry. They were outraged. But it goes
back to that distinction we made. It wasn't theft.
It was a failure of controls. So he goes to Lompoc
High, a federal correctional institution in California.
Not a club -fed minimum security camp, but a
low security facility. He had to surrender. He
put on the uniform. So just picture that scene.
It's mid -2024. CZ's an inmate. He's worth nearly
$50 billion at this point. But he has to stand
in line for the cafeteria. The humiliation must
have been total. It was the system's way of saying,
we own you now. Doesn't matter how rich you are.
The state is stronger. At least that's the message
they wanted to send. And usually that breaks
people. They fade away. They do their time. They
get out. They retire to a yacht in the Mediterranean
and stay very, very quiet. But CZ was looking
at the calendar. He was looking at November 2024.
He knew that the entire regulatory environment
that put him in that cell was up for a vote.
The entire philosophy of government was on the
ballot. This is where the story shifts, isn't
it? It goes from a crime drama. to a political
thriller. Because while he was sitting in that
cell, his checkbook was still very active on
the outside. This is where we get into the intersection
of crypto and the new political reality of 2025.
This is Section 4, The Twist. Because he didn't
just sit there and meditate. He, or rather his
organization, started spending money on influence.
A lot of it. Lobbying money first. Binance spent
over $800 ,000 in 2024 and 2025 lobbying for
clemency and for broader pro -crypto policy issues.
But that's small change. That's the front door.
The real leverage came from business alignment.
We have to talk about World Liberty Financial.
This is the part of the story that just makes
my head spin. Yes. This is the smoking gun, if
you will, of the 2025 crypto resurgence. In early
2025, after Trump's inauguration, reports began
to surface that Binance was quietly administering
the trading platform for a new project called
World Liberty Financial. And for those who have
been living under a rock for the past year, tell
us what World Liberty Financial is. It is a decentralized
finance or DeFi protocol that was launched and
heavily promoted by the Trump family. Family
itself. Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and the
president himself have promoted it at rallies
and on social media. OK, so let me get this straight.
You have the president of the United States or
at least his immediate family. launching a branded
crypto business. And the back end infrastructure,
the engine for that business, is being run by
the company founded by the guy who is currently
sitting in federal prison for financial crimes.
That is the reported connection. It's a deeply
symbiotic relationship. The Trump project needed
liquidity, a global reach and reliable infrastructure,
the kind of HFT engine that only CZ had built.
And Binance, well, Binance needed political cover.
They needed a friend in the White House. It's
so transactional. It's almost too obvious to
be a conspiracy. It's transactional politics
at its finest. And that business relationship
leads to access. CZ's chief lobbyist, a man named
Chess McDowell, was introduced to Donald Trump
Jr. That introduction, according to reports,
led to a meeting with President Trump. And this
all culminated on October 23, 2025. President
Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon
for Changpeng Zhao. Now, when a president pardons
someone, they usually have to give a reason,
a rationale. What was the White House's explanation
for pardoning a guy who had just pleaded guilty
to massive money laundering violations? The statement
from the White House spokesperson, Caroline Leavitt,
was absolutely fascinating. It didn't focus on
remorse or rehabilitation. It framed the entire
pardon as a correction of a political injustice.
How so? She said, and I'm paraphrasing here,
that CZ was a victim of the Biden administration's
war on cryptocurrency. A war on crypto. So they
turned him from a felon into a political martyr.
Exactly. The narrative they spun was there were
no identifiable victims. No customer funds were
lost. This wasn't fraud. The Biden DOJ wanted
to put him away to kill a rising industry that
threatens the establishment. Therefore, this
prosecution was political and we are fixing a
political wrong. It's a complete rewriting of
the narrative. It's no longer he broke the law.
It's he was persecuted by the other team. And
remember that crucial distinction we made earlier
between the valet who commits fraud and the toll
road operator who has BSA violations. That distinction
is the only reason this narrative holds even
a drop of water. If CZ had stolen money like
SBS, Trump could never have pardoned him without
a massive bipartisan backlash. But because it
was a process crime, they could successfully
spin it as government overregulation. Democrats
obviously must have lost their minds over this.
They called it brazen corruption. They pointed
to the business dealings between Binance and
the Trump family and said, this is pay to play
clear as day. But in the political climate of
2025, with crypto prices soaring and the economy
doing well, the public outrage just didn't stick.
But then, then we have to talk about the mystery.
The 60 Minutes interview, this happened on Halloween
2025. Very spooky timing. It was bizarre. Absolutely
bizarre. A week after signing this major controversial
pardon, Trump sits down with 60 Minutes. He's
asked directly about pardoning Changpeng Zhao.
And he says, quote, I have no idea who he is.
What? You just pardoned the guy. Your family
is actively doing business with this company.
How can you possibly say you don't know who he
is? He then added, I know he got a four month
sentence or something like that. And I heard
it was a Biden wish hunt. A terrible thing. I
heard. It's the classic Trump shrug. Total deniability.
It's tactical, plausible deniability. By saying,
I don't know him, he distances himself personally
from the individual, just in case more dirt comes
out later, while still endorsing the action of
the pardon as a political statement against the
previous administration. So it signals to the
entire crypto industry, I am your protector,
without technically embracing CZ the man. Precisely.
It's baffling, but politically, it was effective.
CZ is free. His criminal record is pardoned.
And he is richer than ever. $88 billion richer.
So where does that leave us today? We're in early
2026. The war is over. You could say crypto won.
CZ is free. Let's look at Section 5, the aftermath.
Because even with a presidential pardon, you
can't just wipe away everything. No, you can't.
The criminal side is cleared, but the civil side.
The ghosts of the past are still there. Specifically,
the ghost of FTX. They're still suing him, even
from the grave. Yes. In November 2024, the bankruptcy
estate of FTX filed a massive lawsuit against
Binance and CZ personally. They're trying to
claw back $1 .8 billion. Wait, I thought FTX
collapsed years ago. Why are they suing now?
What's the basis for this? This goes back to
a deal in 2021, before FTX imploded. Binance
was an early investor in FTX. In 2021, CZ sold
his stake in FTX back to Sam Bankman -Fried.
FTX paid him $1 .8 billion for it. Now, the lawyers
for the bankrupt FTX estate are arguing, hey,
FTX was actually insolvent when they paid you
that money. That was a fraudulent transfer of
funds out of a failing company. You have to give
it back to the estate so we can pay back the
victims of SBS fraud. Wow. So even when you win,
you're still fighting armies of lawyers. But
for a guy worth $88 billion, a $1 .8 billion
lawsuit, it's manageable. It's a 2 % hit. It's
a nuisance, not a death blow. And he's not just
sitting around fighting lawsuits. He's taken
on this new role, this global advisor persona.
This is the pivot to statesman. It's fascinating
to watch. Since his release, he's been appointed
as a strategic advisor to the Pakistan Crypto
Council. He's also advising the president of
Kyrgyzstan on digital assets. Why those countries
specifically? Why not, you know, France or Germany?
Because the West is still tricky for him, even
with the U .S. pardon. The reputational stain
is still there in places like London or Brussels.
But emerging markets, places like Pakistan or
Kyrgyzstan, are looking to leapfrog the traditional
banking system entirely. They want a shortcut.
They do. They don't care about the U .S. SEC's
opinion of him. They see CZ not as a convict,
but as the visionary who built the fastest, most
efficient financial engine in the world. They
want that expertise to modernize their entire
economies. So he's positioning himself almost
above national laws, or at least outside the
traditional Western financial system. He's positioning
himself as a sovereign level asset. If you are
a smaller nation and you want to opt out of the
dollar based system, who better to ask for advice
than the guy who built the biggest alternative
financial system in history? And personally.
What is he doing with all that money? Is he just
buying yachts? He claims he's giving it away.
He has stated publicly that he plans to donate
99 percent of his wealth following the Bill Gates
and Warren Buffett giving pledge model. Ninety
nine percent of eighty eight billion. That is.
That's a lot of schools or hospitals or whatever
he decides to fund. And that is the big question,
isn't it? When you have that kind of capital,
philanthropy is just another form of power. Is
he funding education? Or is he funding think
tanks that promote the kind of radical deregulation
that allowed him to get rich in the first place?
He also has this funny quote where he says he's
not a complete libertarian. Which is deeply ironic
coming from a man convicted for ignoring rules.
But he says civilization needs rules. He just
prefers to be the one writing them, perhaps.
And his personal portfolio, this is the part
that still scares me, even after all his success.
He calls it being crypto liquid. What does that
mean? As of the last public reports, he holds
nearly 100 % of his personal net worth in crypto.
Not in Binance stock, but in crypto assets themselves,
Bitcoin, BNB, etc. He doesn't own a diverse portfolio
of stocks and bonds and real estate like other
billionaires. He owns tokens. That is insane,
even for a true believer. That means if the crypto
market tanks 50 % tomorrow, his net worth gets
cut in half in an afternoon. It could. But you
have to remember the poker game. Remember him
selling his house and holding through that massive
crash in 2014? He is comfortable with the level
of volatility that would give a normal person
a series of heart attacks. He truly believes
that over a long enough timeline, the line only
goes up. So let's try to wrap this all up. Let's
look at the big picture here. We've gone from
Lianyuan to a McDonald's in Vancouver to a poker
table to the absolute top of the world down to
a prison cell and now to the president's pardon
list. It's not just his story. In a way, it is
the arc of the crypto industry itself. How so?
What do you mean? Think about it. Crypto started
on the fringes. It was rebels, cypherpunks, people
actively ignoring the rules. That's early CZ
building Binance without a headquarters. Okay.
Then it grew explosively, faster than regulators
could possibly catch up. Okay. There's Binance
from 2017 to 2021. Then came the crackdown, the
compliance era, the lawsuits, the arrests. That's
the prison sentence. And now. Where are we now?
Now we are in the era of institutional adoption
and political integration. The final stage. The
era where you don't fight the White House, you
get into business with them. Exactly. Crypto
isn't an outside force fighting the government
anymore. It's an inside force lobbying the government.
It's a major donor class. It's powering the president's
family business. See's personal journey mirrors
that perfectly from outlaw to establishment.
It really makes you think about the definition
of a criminal in the world of high finance. It
does. The line between a criminal and a visionary
is often just a matter of timing and who is sitting
in the Oval Office. If the 2024 election had
gone differently, CZ might still be a pariah,
maybe even still in prison. Instead, he's a pardoned
billionaire advising nations. That is a wild
thought. History is written by the victors, and
it seems like in 2026, crypto is the victor.
That is the reality on the ground. So here is
my final thought for you, the listener, and I
want you to really mull this over. If CZ is really
willing to donate 99 % of his wealth, and he
is now politically bulletproof, thanks to that
pardon, what is his next move? He's only 49 years
old. Yeah. He has, for all practical purposes,
Infinite capital, powerful friends across the
globe, and a clean slate from the U .S. government.
Exactly. Does a man who conquered finance, survived
prison, and beat the system just retire and sail
off into the sunset? Or does he aim for something
even bigger than money? That is the $88 billion
question. My bad. He's past building a company.
He attempts to build something that fundamentally
replaces the dollar system itself. A truly global,
neutral settlement layer. Now, that is a scary
thought. And while you are thinking about that,
do yourself a favor. Go look up World Liberty
Financial. See who's on the board. Dig into the
tokenomics. It might explain a lot more than
the news headlines do about who really runs the
world in 2026. Follow the money. Always. Thanks
for listening to The Deep Dive. We'll catch you
on the next one.