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President Biden's top tech antitrust advisor, Tim Wu, holds more than $1 million in bitcoin, according to a personal financial disclosure provided to POLITICO by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University.
Specifically, Wu owns between $1 million and $5 million of bitcoin and between $100,001 and $250,000 of filecoin, according to the disclosure. The antitrust advisor's bitcoin investment constitutes between 25% and 43% of his total assets, Politico reported.
Wu is the special assistant for technology and competition policy to the president at the National Economic Council. He joined the Biden administration in March after having served under President Obama.
The special assistant to the president is known for coining the term "net neutrality" and has been a prominent critic of big tech firms throughout his career.
One of Wu's most recent books, titled "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age," warns of the dangers of extreme corporate concentration and "calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trustbusting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas," according to a Columbia University teaser.
Wu hasn't always been an outright supporter of bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. In 2017, he penned an op-ed for the New York Times titled "The Bitcoin Boom: In Code We Trust." In the article, he describes how social trust may move away from human institutions to code-based systems like the blockchain, but also questions whether bitcoin would ever function as a means of payment.
Still, Wu wrote that bitcoin "might work fine as a store of value that you can sell," and now it seems he's used the digital asset as just that for his own personal fortune.
Since leaving the Obama administration, Wu has earned $1,550 per article as a contributor for the New York Times' opinion section and roughly $650 per piece doing the same for Medium. His other investments include condos in Washington D.C., and Buenos Aires and between $15,001 and $50,000 in gold bars.
Wu's bitcoin holdings have taken a hit over the past few months as bitcoin's price has cratered from over $63,000 per coin to around $33,000.
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