President Donald Trump's latest crypto dinner looks like a predatory scheme to steal money from investors, Russ Buettner of The New York Times told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Thursday.
It isn't the first round of shady crypto dealings, he noted, as the whole enterprise has made Trump and his family vastly wealthier.
"Overall, this past year of crypto wealth and Donald Trump's life, I think, has been more income, pure profit than anything else," said Buettner. "Probably the sum total of his entire life and business before ... absolutely more than his inheritance, and the money from 'The Apprentice' and his best business deals all combined."
The other notable aspect, he said, is that "they were so roundly criticized for the first go-round because they offered these coins as he was entering office; 58 people bought them. We can't tell who bought a lot of them and sold them immediately. The period when they owned it raised the price a lot. Those people made all more than $10 million each. Almost everybody else who bought it after that lost a ton of money, I think to the tune of $700 million."
"Which is just incredible when you think about it," said Cooper.
Buettner agreed.
These tokens, he added, are "essentially a baseball cardwhere you don't get the baseballcard. It's just a piece ofelectronic, ephemeral. Andit doesn't have any value unlesssomebody else wants to pay youmore for it. You can't use it,typically, to buy other things.And they were really roundlycriticized even by the cryptoindustry for doing what's calleda rug pull, which is theequivalent of, like, a pump-and-dump scheme."