Rumors

A partner in the San Antonio Spurs is working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the unofficial agency that is spearheading mass layoffs of federal employees and deep spending cuts for the Trump administration. Joe Gebbia is the billionaire co-founder of Airbnb and is described as a close friend of Musk’s. He is a board member of Tesla Inc., where Musk is CEO.

San Antonio Express-News

Then November came. The United States elected a president who shills his own NFTs. He tapped Musk to co-lead the controversial Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Since then, the crypto, NFT, meme, and collectible markets are surging like it’s 2021. Dogecoin more than doubled. Bitcoin kissed $100,000 for the first time. CryptoPunks and Bored Apes are rallying. GameStop—yes—has climbed about 50 percent, then fallen, spiked, and so on. Society once again seems eager to spend ironically, speculatively, boldly. And once again, Dapper Labs is on the scene. Gharegozlou has been lobbying Congress to introduce a bill protecting against “future overreach to define all Web3 products as securities,” according to a Dapper Labs spokesperson, who notes that the bill’s chances have “gone up significantly due to the election results.”  Perhaps the stage is set for a Top Shot renaissance. This time around, Dapper Labs boasts not only a tested infrastructure but also tested users—long gone are the fair-weather traders. Consider one Andrew Seo, a graduate student in Chicago. “I’m still a big blockchain believer and I think fundamentally Top Shot is a good product—it’s a pioneer,” Seo says. As prices rose in early ’21, he held most of his Moments, waiting for prices to tumble so the game could begin in earnest. “Now the platform is way better than it was back then,” he says, “but people don’t know that.”

The Ringer