If former President Donald Trump wins reelection, he will have power to set policies that affect the values of crypto, oil, and venture capital. His vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, has financial interests in all three.
Vance got a featured spot at the convention Wednesday evening. In 39-year-old Vance, Trump picked a young populist with connections to Silicon Valley rather than a traditional big-business conservative.
Vance’s most recent personal financial disclosures contain a portfolio of venture capital investments in businesses including mobile app developers, gene therapy companies, and virtual-reality firms. He also held an investment in
Bitcoin
,
which is the subject of both legislative and regulatory pushes.
“Vance wants to be at the vanguard of associating the Republican party and the crypto industry,” says Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a nonprofit that examines corporate influence in politics. The crypto industry “wants to build on recent political momentum to keep valuations rising.”
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and Vance’s Senate office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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Vance grew up in poverty before joining the Marines, graduating from Yale Law School and writing the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. But it was his relatively short-lived stint as a venture capitalist that brought him wealth and earned the connections to Silicon Valley’s elite that propelled his nascent political career.
As senator, Vance must regularly disclose his assets and income and those of his spouse. The value of the assets are reported in a wide range and with a significant time lag—Vance’s most recent disclosure is from 2022—but as a whole, they give a profile of a wealthy venture capitalist whose investments could be affected by government policy.
In total, Vance reported assets worth between about $4.3 million and $10.7 million, according to his amended 2022 disclosure form, which was filed in October last year. That year, which was before he took office, he also reported making about $110,000 in salary from a VC firm he founded and $121,000 in royalties from HarperCollins.
Since the date of the report, Vance filed two other forms disclosing the sale of his interest in the funds’ management company—valued at between $1 million and $5 million—and a sale of $50,000 to $100,000 in
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stock last October.
Of Vance’s personal investments, one of the most striking is his substantial holdings of Bitcoin, which in 2022 he valued at between $100,000 and $250,000.
Since taking office, Vance has become one of the staunchest proponents of the crypto industry in the Senate. This June, he circulated a draft crypto bill that would result in industry-friendly regulation, according to Politico. Trump has also lately embraced cryptocurrency, taking donations in Bitcoin, gathering millions in industry donations, and planning to speak at a large Bitcoin conference in late July.
Investor Mark Cuban on Wednesday posted on X that he believed Silicon Valley’s Trump support ultimately amounts to “a Bitcoin play,” since lower taxes, inflation, and geopolitical uncertainty are all factors that drive prices higher.
Vance’s biggest publicly traded holdings were in index funds, like
($500,001 to $1 million),
SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF
($500,001 to $1 million), and the
($500,001 to $1 million). He also owned funds that tracked
and
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gold
.
Vance also holds dozens of small investments through funds managed by Narya Capital, the venture-capital firm he co-founded. Some of Narya’s initial investors included prominent investors Marc Andreessen, who recently announced he would help fund Trump’s presidential run, as well as Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s earliest backers in his 2016 campaign. The Cincinnati, Ohio-based fund focused on companies based outside typical founders’ hubs like Silicon Valley and New York.
As of the most recent disclosure, Vance’s most valuable interests in the funds included $250,001 to $500,000 worth of stock in photo-sharing app maker Memoir Inc. and $100,001 to $250,000 worth of
Rumble
,
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a video platform favored by conservatives. He said he owned interests in gene therapy companies Kriya Therapies and AmplifyBio.
Unlike publicly held companies, start-ups often live or die based on small changes in policy or winning a government contract, Hauser said. Investors also have less insight into what’s driving their fortune.
“We have no insight into how they are making money,” Hauser said. “They’re lottery tickets and a small change can pay out at an enormous multiple.”
Write to Joe Light at joe.light@barrons.com