Ben McKenzie came out swinging against cryptocurrency and Donald Trump’s meme coin while speaking to Bill Maher. “I mean, the insiders always win, and the general public always loses on average,” he told Maher.
McKenzie, the former “O.C.” star who wrote, directed, and produced the documentary “Everyone is Lying to You for Money,” was joined by historian Dan Jones and New York Times columnist David French on Friday Night’s episode of “Real Time” on HBO.
Maher and McKenzie were discussing the $TRUMP meme coin when the host brought up McKenzie’s assertion that very few people may actually be getting much from the deal.
“I mean, and you said it could be as little as 20 individuals who are really profiting from this. And everybody else, I means millions of people have lost their shirt. When … it’s an insider-trading scam,” he said.
“Absolutely. I mean, the insiders always win, and the general public always loses on average,” McKenzie answered.
“This is just that on steroids,” Maher replied, to which McKenzie agreed. “Yeah, exactly. And to give you an example, Trump coin, right, his meme coin, down 96%. Right? They had all the coins, his followers buy them, they dump on the followers. Now, some of them got something out of it. He hosted a dinner for the top investors. So the top investors got to have dinner with the President of the United States.”
“In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history,” McKenzie said in 2022 while testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. “In fact, by the time the dust settles, crypto may well represent a fraud at least 10 times bigger than Madoff.”
McKenzie, who has been outspoken about his concerns about cryptocurrency for years, also co-authored the book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.”
“I started warning people in October of last year [and] the market peaked in November, so just a month after Jacob Silverman, my colleague and I wrote our first piece warning celebrities about the dangers of endorsing these cryptocurrencies and NFTs and whatnot,” McKenzie told CNN. “Since then the market has lost approximately 70-75% of it’s value — and that’s just the value that’s on paper.”
