The Polarizing Crypto Executive Who Wooed His Way Into Trump’s Orbit
Alexander Osipovich, Vicky Ge Huang and Amrith Ramkumar
6 min read
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, which holds more than $100 billion worth of cryptocurrency XRP. - Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News
Many executives have made pilgrimages to Washington and Florida to woo President Trump. Few have been as successful as Brad Garlinghouse.
Just a few years ago, the chief executive of cryptocurrency firm Ripple was fighting a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission that threatened to crush its business. Now, as the White House prepares to host its first-ever crypto summit Friday, Garlinghouse is emerging as one of the biggest winners from Trump’s plan to consolidate the U.S. government’s crypto holdings. He has also become one of the most divisive figures in the tribal cryptocurrency industry.
When Trump courted the crypto industry last summer, he vowed to create a strategic reserve of bitcoin, the oldest and largest cryptocurrency. But last weekend, the president sent crypto markets into a frenzy when he said the reserve should include several smaller digital tokens, including XRP. Ripple holds more than $100 billion worth of XRP, and Garlinghouse has long promoted the token.
Trump on Thursday evening signed an executive order officially creating a strategic bitcoin reserve and a separate stockpile for digital assets other than bitcoin. In a post on X announcing the order, White House crypto czar David Sacks didn’t mention XRP. Sacks said the stockpile would only amass crypto seized by law enforcement, rather than buying it outright—a less radical plan than some crypto investors had hoped for.
The president’s plugging of XRP came after months of efforts by Ripple to reshape policy on digital currencies—and get close to the president. In January, Garlinghouse tweeted a picture of himself, Trump and Ripple’s chief legal officer after a dinner of beef bourguignon at Mar-a-Lago. “Strong start to 2025!” the Ripple CEO posted.
Ripple’s critics—including some rival crypto executives—question the utility of XRP and say it is unclear why the government should amass XRP and other digital tokens whose ownership is concentrated in small groups of founders, executives or early investors.
Before the election, Ripple contributed $48 million to Fairshake, a group seeking to elect crypto-friendly candidates to Congress, and it has given tens of millions more since then. Ripple also donated $5 million worth of XRP to Trump’s inaugural committee.
Around Inauguration Day, Ripple plastered the Washington Metro with ads featuring the MAGA-aligned slogan “Ripple: American leadership in crypto.” The firm has hired lobbyists close to the Trump administration, and Garlinghouse has met legislators whose committees will craft bills outlining regulations for crypto.
Ripple’s campaign is an effort to win favorable treatment and persuade the White House to include XRP in the reserve, said Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow at Duke University and critic of the cryptocurrency industry. “This is a gift to one specific company,” he said.
The planned digital-asset stockpile won’t require the use of taxpayer money to buy XRP, but XRP’s inclusion in the reserve would still benefit Ripple by lending prestige to the token. The price of XRP has surged roughly fivefold since the election. It slipped slightly after Sacks’s post.
In an interview, Garlinghouse said he was caught by surprise by the weekend Truth Social post in which the president endorsed putting XRP in the reserve. He argued that it didn’t make sense for the government to hold bitcoin alone.
“If the U.S. is going to create a strategic reserve around crypto, it should be a level playing field,” Garlinghouse said, speaking before details of the plan emerged. Including U.S.-developed tokens in the reserve would also align with Trump’s America-first agenda, the Ripple CEO added.
Compared with bitcoin, XRP’s ownership is highly concentrated. All 100 billion XRP tokens in existence were created in 2012 by three engineers who later co-founded the company that became Ripple. The company held about 43% of all XRP tokens as of Dec. 31, making it by far the largest holder of the token.
President Trump signed an executive order shortly after taking office aimed at boosting cryptocurrencies. - kevin lamarque/Reuters
Proponents of bitcoin say its status as “digital gold” makes it a logical candidate for Trump’s reserve, while including XRP would simply enrich Ripple.
Garlinghouse declined to disclose his own personal XRP holdings. In 2020, the SEC said in its lawsuit that he made about $150 million by selling the token between 2017 and 2019.
The 54-year-old Garlinghouse worked for Silicon Valley heavyweights such as AOL and Yahoo before pivoting to crypto. He joined Ripple in 2015 and became its CEO in 2017. The company spent years developing blockchain technology for cross-border payments before more recently expanding into other crypto-related businesses.
Garlinghouse won praise from the crypto industry by waging a costly legal battle against the SEC’s lawsuit. The agency alleged that Ripple, Garlinghouse and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen violated investor-protection laws by selling XRP to the public without registering it as a security. In the end, a federal judge dealt the SEC a huge setback by ruling that Ripple’s XRP sales on crypto exchanges weren’t a securities offering, and the SEC dropped its claims against Garlinghouse and Larsen.
“The whole industry owes him a debt of gratitude,” said Trevor Traina, who was ambassador to Austria during the first Trump administration and is now a crypto entrepreneur.
Ripple’s critics argue that the company has largely failed to produce a real-world use case for its technology or for XRP. To the extent that crypto is used for payments, the winners have been stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether, whose coins are pegged to the U.S. dollar. Ripple only launched its own stablecoin last year, and its market share is tiny.
“XRP has no real-use case anymore. It’s a volatile asset born in a pre-stablecoin era that is now an inferior good,” said Ryan Selkis, former CEO of crypto data firm Messari.
Ripple says that its technology has hundreds of customers, including major banks, and that it has handled more than $70 billion worth of transactions. Garlinghouse called XRP a top-five cryptocurrency with an established history.
“I don’t even get it,” he said. “Why is the bitcoin community so upset? The only logical answer I can come up with is they had a privileged position, and now there’s going to be a level playing field, and they’re upset about that.”
