How crypto bros pulled The Big Short on $TRUMP to attend dinner

The Verge’s Tina Nguyen has all of the juicy details from inside the dinner

There’s nothing I love more than stories about scammers getting scammed or grifters getting fleeced. So when The Verge’s Tina Nguyen reported that crypto bros pulled The Big Short on $TRUMP to win a seat at President Trump’s private dinner last week, I was ROFL.

She spoke to an anonymous attendee who mapped out how he managed to short the coin to win a seat at the gala at Trump’s National Golf Course in Virginia last week. And he wasn’t the only one.

“Anyone who attended the dinner had some way to make money off of this thing,” Nguyen told me on The Tara Palmeri Show, which you can listen to on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

“In fact, the source I talked to who shorted the stock in order to enter the contest … decided to take a giant pool of money he had, use half of it to buy Trump coin and then use the other half in a separate wallet or to short Trump coin, AKA bet that Trump coins price would fall.”

The topic over surf and turf (aside from how bad it was), was how everyone bet against the coin, knowing that the value would drop after the dinner. And they weren’t wrong. It dropped 16 percent the next day.

“When he got there, apparently a ton of people were like, yeah, we did the same hedge trade too, including one of the guys won the $100,000 watch.”

It all feels very rich. President Trump set up this joke coin $TRUMP just three days before the inauguration, of which two Trump-affiliated organizations own 80 percent. In five months, he’s made more than $350 million in crypto sales and transaction fees, according to the Washington Post. A considerable percentage of his wealth.

He has millions, if not billions at stake with this coin, so after seeing the price tumble by 88 percent last month, the coin’s organizers decided to host a competition that would drive up the price. The top 220 investors in the coin were invited to a private dinner with the President of the United States. At one point, Trump offered White House tours to the highest investors, but someone smartly pointed out that may have been