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After “civil war” and anti-immigration tweets, Messari leadership asked Ryan Selkis to calm down
Ryan Selkis, founder and CEO of crypto data platform Messari, rarely, if ever, holds back on social media, regularly hurling insults via X (formerly Twitter) at Gary Gensler’s Securities and Exchange Commission and others.
Still, his tirades this week after an assassin’s bullet grazed Donald Trump were remarkable, even for Selkis. And colleagues at Messari, who has the financial backing of major firms like Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital and hedge fund titan Brevan Howard, and has been as they say once valued at $300 million, has apparently asked him to calm down.
“I just had a fantastic ‘tough love’ session with the leadership at Messari, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the people who come to me in good faith and help me rein in my vision and heart,” he wrote Thursday. “I’ve been on a roll this week, and I’ll address that in more detail soon.”
So what is this about? It might have something to do with how much he fretted over X after the attempt on Trump’s life. (On Thursday, he had he made his tweets private. They remain visible to his approximately 354,000 followers.)
“Anyone who votes against Trump at this point can die in a fucking fire,” he wrote on X the afternoon of the shooting. “A real war.” (This post has since been deleted.) He added in another tweet: “The civil war for this country started today, and if you’re anti-Trump you’re anti-men who are willing to fight. Good luck.”
The next day, violence, at least in self-defense, was on his mind. “Bolshevism cannot be cured with votes. We must eradicate the metastatic cancer and evil of the left, by force if necessary. That is why the Second Amendment was and is so important. Don’t start the violence, but if it is brought to your door, end it with violence.”
Even war was. “Unfortunately, unity can sometimes only be achieved after a decisive victory. This is one of those moments. The three previous ones were in 1776, 1860, and 1942. Praying for peace. Preparing for war.”
Selkis echoed the anti-immigration rhetoric of the MAGA movement. He asked User X if he was “a citizen or just a green card holder?” The person responded that he is a green card holder in the process of applying for citizenship. Selkis’s response: “I hope we send you back. … You are not eligible for citizenship. I hope it stays that way.”
Selkis posted photos of a bloodied Trump shortly after he was shot. Underneath them was the famous photo of then-President Barack Obama and now-President Joe Biden in a conference room as Osama bin Laden was killed by Seal Team 6. Selkis wrote: “Too true.”
She directed another post to a well-known Washington cryptocurrency critic, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), posting side-by-side photos of herself and Trump’s potential assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. “Are you happy Trump is alive? Or disappointed that you failed in your attempt to remove a ‘dictator who will destroy democracy.’ Faces don’t lie…”
Use of the term physiognomy, a long-discredited practice to discern someone’s character from their appearance, was an apparent attempt to insinuate a physical resemblance between the two glasses.
He responded to a tweet from SEC Chairman Gensler: “We are so close to your inevitable prison sentence that I can almost taste it.”
Contacted by a CoinDesk reporter, Selkis declined to provide further details about his posts from last week.
This isn’t the kind of online behavior you’d normally associate with a CEO, especially one with serious venture capital backing, though brazenness isn’t uncommon among cryptocurrency users on social media (and X owner Elon Musk has also been known to push the envelope).
Messari, a platform that allows users to monitor and analyze data on digital assets, plays a major role in the cryptocurrency industry. Selkis has emerged as a key part of the industry’s attempt to regain influence in Washington after the disappearance of Sam Bankman-Fried’s outsized influence.
After the initial “tough love” tweet on Thursday, Selkis tweeted further. He hasn’t been much quieter.
“I have been aggressively tweeting from the rooftops about self-defense and taking the current political situation more seriously than the media does. You have been warned. I wish the haters would make the same effort to protect children, prevent war, and defend American values,” he said.
Also: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I got knocked down by a punch I didn’t plan on. Good. Less tweeting. More long form. More channeled anger, but same mentality: OFFENSE.”
Michelle Bloom contributed to this article.