It could be known as the Great Colossus of Prometheus.
The $420 million, 450-foot statue – honoring the Greek mythological determine who rebelled in opposition to the gods and gave hearth to humanity – would rise over San Francisco Bay with a gas-powered, flaming torch in hand.
The house for this colossus? Alcatraz Island — web site of the crumbling, long-shuttered federal penitentiary — now one of America’s main vacationer locations, attracting about 1.2 million folks yearly. Below this imaginative and prescient, an island which as soon as housed notorious gangsters Al Capone and Whitey Bulger would as a substitute appeal to guests with lush gardens and a museum of breakthrough applied sciences, starting from the telescope to gene-editing and AI.
And it could all be a present, of kinds, to the American folks from a crypto entrepreneur, simply in time for President Donald Trump’s much-hyped celebrations of 250 years of American independence, the newest reminder of how Silicon Valley has more and more blended with the MAGA world.
That’s, if all goes in accordance with the (very bold) plan.
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And there’s the small matter of convincing the Trump administration at hand over a federally-controlled vacationer gem that earns about $60 million a yr in income.
The person behind this outlandish mission is Ross Calvin, founder of crypto mining agency Parhelion Digital. Calvin, who lives in Denver, is a comparatively obscure determine within the monetary world, with a portfolio starting from working natural-gas powered Bitcoin mining rigs within the autonomous area of Kurdistan to working on a fragrance line.
His politics are simply as everywhere in the map. From one angle, they’re very right-wing. He shares with Trump a love of bombastic monuments, an animosity in the direction of identification politics and Black Lives Matter, a conspiratorial approach of considering, and a way that many types of immigration are an existential menace.
Then once more, he’s additionally anti-authoritarian and has received constructive issues to say about American-style multiculturalism, the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, and the techniques of freedom fighters starting from first-wave feminists to Nat Turner, who led a well-known slave revolt within the early 1800s.
Calvin first started dreaming of the monument in 2018 throughout a go to to San Francisco. As he drove throughout the Bay Bridge, he was struck by the splendor of the bay and its aesthetic potential. Identical to the 305ft Statue of Liberty on the alternative coast, a monument on the mouth of this nice ocean might trumpet American values to the broader world, he thought.
“This might be a very powerful scene of the ennoblement of man, and of our nation, to place one thing triumphant and delightful and redeeming there on Alcatraz,” he informed The Impartial. “How poetic to make it rhyme with the Statue of Liberty.”
The Prometheus statue is only a proposal for now, however Calvin thinks he can get the plans fast-tracked for a gathering with White Home officers throughout the subsequent six months.
Mates of buddies have connections within the administration, he stated, and Calvin hopes Trump might flip the island, half of the Nationwide Park Service’s Golden Gate Nationwide Recreation Space, right into a protected Nationwide Monument to facilitate the statue. (Calvin can also be working on a personal, for-profit fund to assist the mission, composed of actual property and crypto property, which he says is already getting curiosity from large identify buyers, together with within the Center East.)
Calvin says he received a letter to the president instantly by means of a buddy at Mar-a-Lago final December. Quickly after, Trump posted on Reality Social: “America goes to begin constructing monuments to our nice heroes and heroines once more!!!”
The Impartial has contacted the White Home and Division of the Inside, which oversees the Nationwide Park Service, for remark.
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The president’s historical past as a developer of high-end lodges and luxurious rental buildings earlier than taking the White Home might also assist. “The president occurs to be an actual property man,” Calvin stated. “He understands this type of factor.”
Actually so.
Trump has demolished the White House’s East Wing to build a $300 million gilded ballroom, a lot of it funded by donations from big names in tech and crypto. He’s contemplating plans to erect an Arc de Triomphe-style monument on the Nationwide Mall, whereas allotting thousands and thousands to construct a sculpture-filled “National Garden of American Heroes.”
The administration has additionally restored historic statues and paintings of figures from the Confederacy, which have been eliminated, and generally torn down, throughout the Black Lives Matter motion.
Even Trump’s slogans have a decorative taste nowadays, with the president continuously suggesting we live by means of a new “Golden Age.”
Trump, nevertheless, has his personal concepts about Alcatraz. The president has known as for the federal government to reopen the decaying tourist attraction as a prison, going as far as to ship Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to examine the island in July.
Rebuilding the crumbling jail on Alcatraz Island, which ceased to accommodate inmates in 1963, could take years of time and heaps of cash. Trump’s jail proposal could cost $2 billion, an administration supply informed Axios in July.
A seismic transforming mission on the Essential Jail Constructing, aimed merely at shoring up the property’s present use as a historic web site, is about to value $63.6 million for work lasting by means of 2027.
‘It’s a message for everyone’
Calvin isn’t the one tech-world determine impressed by Prometheus. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a new AI start-up known as Mission Prometheus whereas Meta additionally plans to call one of its massive new AI data centers after the determine. The parable is clearly having a second.
The crypto entrepreneur sees Prometheus — who steals hearth from Zeus after the zealous king of the gods hides it from people in anger — as an embodiment of the American excellent of the “pursuit of happiness.”
“It’s a really lovely fable,” he stated, calling Prometheus “the primary freedom fighter” and a “regime-busting, no-kings man.”
“It has all of this superb that means for an industrious, inventive, artistic folks like we pleasure ourselves on being,” he added.
The tech guys would possibly love Prometheus, however many see the story as one concerning the risks of hubris. His treachery leads Zeus to unleash distress on the human race, and Prometheus is left chained to a mountain the place an eagle devours his liver.
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Nonetheless, Calvin feels that the story of Prometheus, who in some tellings teaches people the humanities and sciences, has “a message for everyone.”
Properly, maybe not everyone. America wants this monument within the first place, Calvin informed The Impartial throughout prolonged interviews, as a result of a unfastened and at occasions unwitting community of elite monetary pursuits, bought-off bureaucrats, nonprofits, the military-industrial-espionage advanced, and activists teams have conspired to suppress the progress of the lots.
Some of these views are encapsulated on a weblog, titled “American Colossus Basis” – which serves as a manifesto for the Prometheus mission – and has contributions from Calvin and different writers.
Calvin outlined an ideology behind the Prometheus mission that was equal elements anti-woke, anti-authoritarian, and extra than a bit of conspiratorial. He feels actions like trendy feminism and Black Lives Matter have devolved into empty “wrestle periods” and “guilting” that don’t create change, whereas he claims shadowy forces are encouraging mass immigration that usually ends in folks arriving from what he calls “extremely incompatible cultures to what we worth within the West with pluralism and tolerance.”
The entrepreneur insists, nevertheless, neither he nor his monument plans are racist, misogynist, or anti-immigrant. He has lived everywhere in the world and sees the monument’s residence turf of California as proof constructive of the advantages of immigration, he informed The Impartial.
His argument with Black Lives Matter activists will not be over the motion’s aim of ending inequality, however slightly the riots and statue tear-downs that generally accompanied its protests.
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Relatively, he says the general aim of the Great Colossus of Prometheus is to get folks to look past a lot up to date identification politics, which he feels have didn’t served deprived teams.
“It’s the anti-authoritarian factor that I need to provoke,” he stated. “I need to provoke that dialog. I feel that the authoritarian pressure, which is in opposition to all of us, doesn’t care about your race. It should use it to focus on you. It causes extra division amongst us than we ever know naturally.”
Calvin’s anti-authoritarian streak contains doubts about Trump, the person who might make or break this proposal, regardless that the mission has additionally described its work as “MAGAing Alcatraz.” Calvin thinks the president’s penchant to speak about working for a 3rd time period, or calling himself a king, is simply trolling, however he sees deeper causes for concern.
“I really feel very drained with the entire affair,” he stated. “I really feel drained of speaking concerning the Trump household after which the Bush household after which the Clinton household and all these things. He is perhaps the tip of the gerontocracy, which is admittedly what I’m hoping for. All of these cats are so previous.”
Membership Crypto
Calvin’s confidence his mission will get a very good listening to in Washington isn’t just a bit Promethean self-confidence, although, or a matter of shared vibes spreading all through the right-leaning corners of the tech house.
The crypto business is discovering a lot of doorways open in Washington nowadays.
The sector was the largest corporate campaign donor throughout the 2024 elections, with the lion’s share going to Republicans. Top crypto entrepreneurs, just like the Winklevoss twins, are Trump supporters, and the Republican received a 2024 endorsement from the influential venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose agency, a16z, has quite a few crypto holdings.
And the Trumps love crypto proper again. The president has promoted the concept of a national Bitcoin reserve, and his sons have launched a string of opaque, ethically-questionable crypto ventures that earned the Trump Group no less than $802 million up to now this yr, dwarfing the corporate’s different income sources, according to Reuters.
Final month, the president pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a crypto govt who pleaded responsible to enabling cash laundering and has previous enterprise ties to the Trumps. Binance, which Zhao co-founded, constructed the know-how that supports the Trump-affiliated World Liberty Financial crypto venture. In Might, an Abu Dhabi-based funding agency introduced a $2 billion funding into Binance utilizing World Liberty’s stablecoin.
The tech world can also be within the midst of a surge in macho classicism. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has taken to sporting shirts with Latin slogans about Caesar and building a Roman-style statue of his wife. High enterprise capital corporations are backing Atlas, a mission named after a unique Greek titan to assemble an autonomous defense-tech hub to “defend the west.”
A ‘deranged publicity stunt’
Whereas the Trump world and the tech scene have converged, some Bay Space critics don’t need to see Alcatraz Island grow to be a monumental half of this motion.
Adrian Covert, a historian and senior vice chairman of public coverage on the Bay Space Council, a coverage nonprofit, has proposed a unique type of monument for Alcatraz, erecting a statue of Girl Justice as a substitute of Prometheus.
“America’s founding excellent is liberty and justice for all,” Covert informed The Impartial. “It’s half of the American ethos.”
“Prometheus is an odd alternative,” he added. “It is a character from Greek mythology. The parable itself is a warning in opposition to hubris. Making a monument out of hubris is an attention-grabbing thought.”
Gil Duran, a Bay Space journalist who covers what he dubs the tech world’s right-wing “Nerd Reich,” was extra scathing.
“It is an ideal combine of phallicism and fascism, and a terrific metaphor for the state of tech in 2025—burning ungodly quantities of cash on a hype mission designed to mission godlike energy and grandiosity,” Duran wrote in an e mail. “This deranged publicity stunt, which has no likelihood of being constructed, is a superb image of Silicon Valley’s failed creativeness.”
“Ozymandias could be a extra becoming identify,” he added, a reference to the ironic Percy Bysshe Shelley poem a couple of long-abandoned monument to a pharaoh’s everlasting greatness.
Even and not using a Prometheus monument, Alcatraz Island already holds a monumental place in U.S. historical past, from its many years housing notorious criminals, to the legacy of Native American protesters who occupied the site in the late Sixties amid the Civil Rights Period, serving to kick off the Pink Energy motion.
Very like Girl Liberty in New York Harbor, Alcatraz stands on the entrance to a port metropolis by means of which thousands and thousands of folks have immigrated to the U.S. Extra than half of the businesses created in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005, for instance, had no less than one foreign-born founder.
Covert stated he’d like to get his Girl Justice thought off the bottom, however being from the non-profit sector, he described elevating cash to construct it as “11 out of 10” on the problem scale.
Or, as he joked: “Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, to maintain with the Greek mythology.”
