At Trump’s $148 million meme coin dinner, ‘the food sucked’ and security was lax, attendee says
Crypto investor Nicholas Pinto attends President Donald Trump’s gala dinner for people who spent the most money on Trump’s meme coin, $TRUMP, in a contest, at Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, May 22, 2025.
Nicholas Pinto
The price of President Donald Trump‘s meme coin plunged 16% as of Friday morning, just hours after he hosted a black-tie gala at his Virginia golf club for its biggest buyers — an elite crowd that spent a combined $148 million on the token for the chance to be there.
It was billed as “the most exclusive invitation in the world.”
Among the 220 attendees were crypto influencers, industry executives such as Sandy Carter of Unstoppable Domains, and former NBA star Lamar Odom, who used the occasion to praise Trump as “the greatest president” and promote his own token, $ODOM.
The top 25 wallets were promised a private reception and guided tour. Others, such as 25-year-old Nicholas Pinto — whose dad drove him to the event in his Lamborghini — left underwhelmed and still hungry.
“The food sucked,” Pinto said. “Wasn’t given any drinks other than water or Trump’s wine. I don’t drink, so I had water. My glass was only filled once.”
Trump made only a brief appearance, Pinto said. “He didn’t talk to any of the 220 guests — maybe the top 25,” he said.
All in, the president was there for 23 minutes, Pinto said. Trump delivered a brief address rehashing old crypto talking points then left on a helicopter before taking any questions or pictures with his meme coin contest winners, he said.
Phones weren’t locked in RFID pouches, and security was lax, according to Pinto.
“Once Trump left, they didn’t really worry about anything else,” Pinto added.
Contest winners who spent the most on $TRUMP meme coins added their signatures to a poster-sized printout of the leaderboard at a gala dinner at Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, May 22, 2025.
Nicholas Pinto
The crowd’s opulence was on full display.
“Richard Mille watches weren’t even rare,” Pinto said. “I saw at least 16 people wearing them. I never see that unless I’m at a high-end restaurant in Miami or Dubai.”
But the vibe was more muted than expected, he said: “Lots of people didn’t even hold the coin anymore. They were checking their phones during dinner to see if the price moved.”
CNBC has reached out to Trump representatives for comment on the dinner and attendees.
Protests
For lawmakers and regulators, the dinner set off alarm bells.
The #1 token holder was Chinese-born crypto mogul Justin Sun, who is currently facing Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges that were recently paused, with the agency citing “the public interest.”
Sun holds over $22 million in the $TRUMP token and another $75 million in World Liberty Financial’s native token.
“As the top holder of $TRUMP and proud supporter of President Trump, it was an honor to attend the Trump Gala Dinner,” Sun posted on Friday. “Thank you @POTUS for your unwavering support of our industry!”
Outside the gates of Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, about a hundred protesters gathered, according to NBC News. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., joined them, backing a new End Crypto Corruption Act with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Signs read “Crypto Corruption” and “Trump is a traitor.”
Crypto on Capitol Hill
“The Trump family activity in the memecoin space makes my work in Congress more complicated,” Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., told CNBC on Friday.
Hill, who’s leading negotiations on a bipartisan stablecoin regulation bill known as the GENIUS Act, called the gala “a distraction from the good work we need to do.”
Now, the GENIUS Act is at risk.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., recently added a controversial rider to the bill that would cap credit card late fees — what’s seen as a poison pill that could alienate banking allies and stall final approval.
President Donald Trump speaks at a dinner for meme coin contest winners at Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, May 22, 2025.
Nicholas Pinto
On Thursday night as the meme coin contest dinner was underway, a bloc of Senate Democrats announced they’d be pushing for a new provision that would ban presidents and senior officials from profiting off crypto ventures while in office — a direct challenge to the Trump-linked stablecoin USD1 that launched in the spring.
In Washington, there’s growing concern that political infighting over Trump’s crypto ventures could derail the stablecoin bill altogether. That poses an even bigger risk.
According to The Wall Street Journal, major banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are in early talks to issue a unified digital dollar to compete with Tether, the foreign-controlled stablecoin that now commands over 60% of global market share.
Those plans hinge on legal clarity.
If the GENIUS Act stalls, the U.S. could lose its window to regain ground in the global race for digital payments.
The White House has tried to draw a line between Trump the president and Trump the private businessman.
“The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters when pressed on attendee transparency.
The administration declined to release a guest list. But blockchain data — and a patchwork of guest photos — tell part of the story.
A Bloomberg News analysis found that all but six of the top 25 wallets used foreign exchanges, ostensibly off-limits to U.S. users. More than half of the top 220 wallets were linked to similar offshore platforms.
One Nasdaq-listed penny stock, Freight Technologies, disclosed in an SEC filing that it spent $2 million on Trump’s token to push U.S.-Mexico trade policy. It didn’t make the cut for the dinner — finishing 250th.
Since its January debut, the $TRUMP coin has generated more than $324 million in trading fees. Roughly 80% of the $TRUMP token supply is controlled by the Trump Organization and affiliates, according to the project’s website.
WLFI, the Trump’s parallel token, has sold $550 million in two token sales.
Still, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks remained bullish on “significant bipartisan support” for stablecoin legislation.
“We already have over $200 billion in stablecoins — it’s just unregulated,” Sacks told CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” on Wednesday. “If we provide the legal clarity and legal framework for this, I think we could create trillions of dollars of demand for our Treasurys practically overnight, very quickly.”
“We have every expectation now that it’s going to pass,” added Sacks, though he didn’t answer a question about concerns from Democrats that there aren’t sufficient safeguards in place to keep the president and his family from profiting from legislation.
While Sacks sold $200 million in crypto-related holdings before taking his White House job, according to a disclosure filing, Trump and his family have been leaning into building a crypto empire.
The Trumps are financial backers of World Liberty Financial, which is behind the USD1 stablecoin that is backed by Treasurys and dollar deposits.
Abu Dhabi’s MGX investment fund recently pledged $2 billion in USD1 to Binance, the world’s largest digital assets exchange. It’s the company’s largest-ever investment made in crypto.
Drive Electric Month kicks off this week with nearly 200 online and in-person events celebrating electric vehicles over the course of the next month. Events will be held for the next several weekends all across the US, plus a few in Canada and one in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Drive Electric Month is an annual event organized by Plug In America, the Electric Vehicle Association, EVHybridNoire, Drive Electric USA, and the Sierra Club. This is the event’s 15th year. It started in the US as National Drive Electric Week, but for the last few years, some events have been hosted in other countries as well, and now the event has expanded to cover most of the month of September, with a few events in October as well.
These events are an opportunity for prospective EV buyers to talk directly with EV owners about the experience of owning an electric car, and EV owners to network with each other and share tips. The dealership experience is not ideal for many EV shoppers, so unfiltered conversations with EV owners can be a great way to learn.
Each event is organized by local EV advocates, and they range in size from small parking lot meetups and local EV parades to large festivals with lots of booths from nearby car dealers and green businesses. Many events have live music, family-friendly activities, food trucks and the like.
Drive Electric Month has a map and list of events happening over the course of the month. Most events are in-person, but there are some webinar-style online events that you can attend to hear about various topics related to electric vehicles if you can’t get to any local evels. You can also search for events near you.
Be sure to click through to each individual event’s page to see what your local events will look like, what types of EVs might be in attendance, and register your interest.
Here’s a sample of some of the events happening over the course of the month:
- Oregon Electric Vehicle Association (OEVA) Test Drive & Information Expo in Portland, Oregon on September 13, 10am-4pm: Along with the standard test drives and car displays, this event will have a number of gas to electric conversions and antique EVs on display. It’s happening at the Daimler Truck North America headquarters, and some of the space will be used for seminars and presentations.
- Drive Electric Month Oahu in Aiea, Hawaii on September 13, 10am-2pm: The largest Hawaiian event is just outside of Honolulu, but there are events on four Hawaiian islands this year, with the others in Lihue on Kauai on Sep13, Hilo on the Big Island on Sep27, and Kahului on Maui on Oct11.
- Mesa EV Ride & Drive in Mesa, Arizona on September 20, 8am-12pm: A veteran group of organizers is bringing the EV experience to Mesa Community College on Saturday, Sept. 20. People can test drive a variety of models, talk to real owners and learn how and where to charge.
- Jimmy Buffett Son of a Sailor Festival in Mobile, Alabama on September 20, 2pm-7pm: There will be EV displays at this festival which celebrates Jimmy Buffett and Gulf Coast culture. The free festival features live music, local restaurants, parrot-head costume contests and EV drivers who can answer all your questions about driving electric.
- Electric Avenue at the Downtown Car Show in Grand Junction, Colorado on September 20, 9am-3pm: At the 23rd annual downtown car show, EVs will have their own block. Spectators will visit with drivers and can participate in a friendly competition for great prizes.
- Knoxville Drive Electric Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee on September 27, 10am-3pm: This event bills itself as the largest NDEM event in the Southeast. Along with EV displays and ride-and-drive, the live music stage will be powered by a Ford F-150 Lightning using its vehicle-to-load capabilities.
- Plug In America Ride and Drive at Space Coast Pride Parade & Festival in Melbourne, Florida on September 27, 12pm-4pm: Plug In America itself is hosting a ride-and-drive at the Space Coast Pride Parade & Festival on Saturday, Sept. 27. The public can test drive EVs from different manufacturers, engage with local EV owners and ask questions of the organization’s EV experts.
- National Drive Electric Month Waterloo 2025 in Waterloo, Ontario on October 4 from 11am-3pm: This will once again be the largest event in Canada. There are 5 other Canadian events scheduled (all at different times), in Winnipeg (Sep13, today!), Courtenay (Sep14), Saskatoon (Sep21), Toronto (Sep27), and Regina (Sep27).
- ELECTRATON DEM’25 in Guadalajara on October 4 from 9am-5pm: This is once again the sole event in Mexico, hosted at Oscar Casillas Karting Track, where there will also be a 4th annual race of student-built electric karts alongside the EV exhibition and test drives. (Here are some photos from last year’s event, including the student kart races and a Cybertruck on track).
Not all the events are large or hosted in big cities. There are also smaller events happening in town centers, church parking lots, and so on, often with just a handful of EV owners who are typically happy to stand around and have a frank discussion with members of the public about what it’s like to own an EV, or to network with other local EV owners.
Many of these events are happening in conjunction with Sun Day, a global day of action calling for a sun-powered planet on September 21 this year. These events will focus on how solar has become a drastically cheaper form of energy, and highlight ways that everyone can benefit from more solar and by electrifying whatever uses energy in our lives – whether that be vehicles, appliances, etc.
On that front, one notable Drive Electric/Sun Day event will be in Whittier, CA on Sep. 20th (not the 21st) from 11am-3pm, with test drives, an electrified home tour, and an eco scavenger hunt. It’s being organized by one of the original founders of National Drive Electric Week, so expect to see some EV oldtimers at this one.
If you’d like to attend any of these events, either to show your vehicle, to volunteer to help run the event, or just to show up and look around, you can check out the list of events, then go to each event’s page to find more information. Remember to click the “RSVP” or “Volunteer” links near the top to register your interest (or register at the links mentioned in the event description).
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Tesla has discontinued the cheapest version of the Cybertruck just a few months after launching it.
No one wanted the gutted electric truck.
There’s no hiding it. The Cybertruck is a commercial flop.
Tesla claimed to have over 1 million reservations for the vehicle. It planned for a production capacity of up to 250,000 units per year, and CEO Elon Musk even said that he believes it could increase to 500,000 units per year.
Meanwhile, Tesla is currently selling the Cybertruck at a rate of roughly 20,000 units per year.
The primary reason for the significantly lower-than-anticipated sales is that Tesla launched the Cybertruck at a higher price and with worse specifications than initially announced.
To address this, Tesla introduced a more affordable version of the electric pickup truck, the Cybertruck rear-wheel-drive, in April 2025.
Instead of starting at $80,000, like the Cybertruck AWD, the Cybertruck RWD started at $70,000.
However, it was an even worse deal because Tesla had essentially stripped the vehicle of its most valuable features, including active air suspension, a motorized tonneau cover, and even the power outlets in the bed, in addition to removing a motor.
Less than 5 months after launching the new vehicle, Tesla has discontinued the Cybertruck RWD.
The automaker updated the Cybertruck’s online configurator to remove the option:
Tesla hasn’t replaced the variant with a new one. It just stopped taking orders.
Electrek’s Take
I don’t know of anyone who ordered this. It was such a bad deal. There’s already only a small pool of potential Cybertruck buyers, but none of them want to lose all those essential features for $10,000.
Where does the Cybertruck go from there? Does Tesla keep the vehicle program at just ~20,000 units per year?
I think they may try to do an upgrade next year to bring it closer to what they originally promised and see if there’s more demand as a result.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at a lodge for the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Oracle‘s historic stock surge this week marked the latest chapter in the story of a single private company that’s dominated the tech landscape for almost three years: OpenAI.
In Oracle’s blowout earnings report, OpenAI was a key catalyst due to a massive amount of money the artificial intelligence startup expects to spend on cloud computing technology in the coming years.
It’s becoming a familiar theme.
A week earlier, Broadcom shares popped almost 10% after the chipmaker and software vendor said it forged a $10 billion deal to build custom processors for a customer that analysts said was OpenAI.
Among tech’s megacaps, Microsoft has the closest link to OpenAI, having invested more than $13 billion in the company and serving as its key cloud partner for six years. Nvidia’s march to becoming the world’s most valuable company is intimately tied to OpenAI, as its graphics processing units (GPUs) sit at the heart of large language model development and are essential for running big AI workloads.
Those four companies alone — Oracle, Broadcom, Microsoft and Nvidia — have seen their combined market caps swell by over $4.5 trillion since OpenAI burst into public view with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. And those gains are a big reason why the Nasdaq and S&P 500 have sustained sharp rallies, with both benchmarks closing at a record on Friday.
OpenAI’s outsized influence has some market experts understandably concerned. It remains a cash-burning startup that’s governed by a nonprofit parent.
The company’s $500 billion valuation is supported by a small number of investors betting that OpenAI will prevail in the face of hefty competition from the likes of Meta and Google as well as other highly-valued newcomers like Anthropic and any number of players out of China.
“While we love ChatGPT, OpenAI is still a not for profit limited in its ability to raise capital,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, in an interview with CNBC.
Luria, who recommends holding Oracle shares, dug into the company’s numbers as the stock was in the midst of a 36% jump on Wednesday, its biggest gain since 1992.
In its quarterly earnings report late Tuesday, Oracle said it signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers during the period. One of those was with OpenAI, which said previously that it agreed to develop 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity with Oracle.
Investors knew, based on a filing with the SEC in June, that Oracle signed a $30 billion cloud contract with an unnamed company that’s set to begin in two years. CNBC confirmed a Wall Street Journal report from Wednesday that OpenAI has agreed to spend $300 billion in computing power over about five years, starting in 2027.
In the two trading days after its historic pop, Oracle’s stock retreated, dropping more than 6% on Thursday and another 5% on Friday, as other investors began sharing Luria’s concerns.
The new revelations about OpenAI’s massive cloud commitment provided a clearer sense of Oracle’s expanding backlog. Oracle said its performance obligations, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, surged 359% from a year earlier to to $455 billion.
Luria said the concentration of Oracle’s backlog with a single customer “significantly reduces” enthusiasm, particularly if “more than 90% came from OpenAI.”
Oracle didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Altman’s open wallet
OpenAI has made big commitments to several other cloud providers, including CoreWeave and Google, and reportedly plans to put $19 billion toward Stargate, a project President Donald Trump announced in January to bolster AI infrastructure investments in the U.S. Stargate is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, which is separately leading a planned $40 billion investment in OpenAI.
Luria said the takeaway is that “Sam Altman has the gumption to sign very large checks without needing to worry about whether those can ever be cashed.”
OpenAI declined to comment.
While OpenAI will be losing money for the foreseeable future, the company is expecting revenue growth to continue at a breakneck pace. After hitting $10 billion in annual recurring revenue in June, OpenAI is on pace for that number to reach $125 billion by 2029, CNBC confirmed.
And on Thursday, OpenAI got a step closer to formalizing its transition to a for-profit entity. The company said its nonprofit parent will continue to have oversight over the business and will own an equity stake of more than $100 billion as the commercial entity becomes a public benefit corporation.
OpenAI needs the restructuring to take place by year-end in order to secure the entirety of the $40 billion from its latest financing round.
For Oracle, the massive increase in OpenAI spending has landed the company within shouting distance of the trillion-dollar club, which currently includes eight tech peers. Oracle’s market cap climbed to about $930 billion on Wednesday before retreating to $830 billion to close the week.
Byron Deeter, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, told CNBC’s “Money Movers” that he’s still skeptical of Oracle’s prospects in AI. The company has spent years trying to play catchup in cloud infrastructure, where it trails Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Deeter said Oracle remains a “B-level hyperscaler” without meaningful positions in AI software or chips.
“Two days ago, we all thought Oracle was essentially nowhere in AI,” Deeter said, following the earnings report. “They announce this mega-deal, people think they’re the next great hyperscaler – and I don’t buy that part.”
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