You sort of expect a huckster like Paris Hilton to jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. I’m sorry to say some names of celebrities who have done so are a surprise to me in this NYT article titled “All Those Celebrities Pushing Crypto Are Not So Vocal Now.”
So far, crypto’s celebrity boosters have been largely silent about whether they have any second thoughts about their promotions.
Crypto.com declined to make Mr. Embiid available to discuss his partnership with the company. Matt Damon, who compared the advent of virtual money to the development of aviation and spaceflight in a critically panned but widely seen Crypto.com ad last year, did not respond to requests to weigh in. No response either from the basketball star LeBron James, who was featured in the company’s Super Bowl commercial this year.
Reese Witherspoon, an Oscar winner who declared online in December that “crypto is here to stay,” did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Gwyneth Paltrow, another Oscar winner, who lent her name to a Bitcoin giveaway late last year.
Paris Hilton, who has nearly 17 million followers on Twitter who watch her coo over her lap dogs Crypto and Ether, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Neither did several other famous crypto pushers, such as Mila Kunis, Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady (although Mr. Brady’s and Mr. Rodgers’s profiles on Twitter still feature laser eyes, a popular symbol of Bitcoin bullishness). A representative for Naomi Osaka, the tennis star who became an ambassador for the crypto exchange FTX this year, wrote in an email that “she sadly is overseas and not available.”
In FTX’s Super Bowl commercial, the comedian Larry David denigrated important inventions such as the wheel and the light bulb before rejecting crypto. The ad winkingly urged viewers: “Don’t be like Larry.”
Jeff Schaffer, the director of that Super Bowl spot, said in an email that he and Mr. David did not have a comment on the market collapse.
“Unfortunately I don’t think we’d have anything to add as we have no idea how cryptocurrency works (even after having it explained to us repeatedly), don’t own it, and don’t follow its market,” he said. “We just set out to make a funny commercial!”
The article would make for great comedy if so many little people hadn’t lost so much money because they believed the hype put forth by these celebrities.
The entire crypto thing is such a horrible scam, but there is, as they say, a sucker born every minute.
Not that some people haven’t made gobs of money. But those are the people who, as with every Ponzi scheme, mostly got in early and got out early — leaving all of those who got in later to pump up the price and be left holding a mostly empty bag.
