Ben Delo is a 42 year old billionaire and co-founder of the BitMex cryptocurrency trading platform.
He is autistic and has managed to flourish academically after he found educational support as a child in the British education system.
He has donated to many charities and science research endeavours. He has made a £25 million donation to the Sheila Coates Foundation, a charity he founded in 2020 to support young people with autism.
In 2019, he signed the Giving Pledge created by Bill Gates, his then-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett, which has led to hundreds of the world’s wealthiest people promising to give away at least half of their fortunes during their lifetimes.
Trump pardoned him in 2025, when he had been accused of money laundering in the US:
The co-founders, Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed previously pled guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, for failing to maintain anti-money laundering and know-your-customer programs, as did former business development chief Gregory Dwyer.
Prosecutors accused the men of effectively operating BitMEX as a “money laundering platform” and that its purported withdrawal from the U.S. market was “a sham.”
Once someone has been pardoned by Trump they seem to return the favour by encouraging social change which seems to fit with extremist Project 25 type ambitions to break democracies, in this case the British democracy.
This recent article in The Guardian drew my attention:
Revealed: a crypto billionaire’s political base hosting ‘anti-woke’ and rightwing activists in Westminster
Pardoned by Trump after violating US banking law, Ben Delo provides funding, networking, and podcasting space for a range of groups, including those with hardline views on migration and abortion
A British billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate money-laundering controls on his cryptocurrency business is funding a political base in the heart of Westminster used by “anti-woke” and rightwing activists.
Ben Delo, 42, who was pardoned by Donald Trump last year, has given support in kind to Rupert Lowe, the anti-migration MP challenging Nigel Farage from the right – while also connecting with mainstream figures including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and former cabinet minister Michael Gove.
Delo, an Oxford graduate who moved to Hong Kong in 2012 and appears to still be based there, says he is a champion of “free speech” and has vowed to tackle the “nuisance” of political correctness. He supports more than 50 organisations ranging across the political spectrum and public life, as well as non-affiliated groups and individuals.
Now a joint investigation by the Guardian and Hope Not Hate reveals some of the people and projects that have benefited from Delo’s largesse.
Among them are those who have expressed hardline positions on immigration, nationalism and abortion.
Delo, who says he has poured more than £100m into philanthropy, is providing funding, networking opportunities and help in kind via a suite of rooms in a building overlooking Westminster Abbey, known as the Sanctuary. Those given access can use the facility free of charge for events, office space and podcasting.
Restore Britain, the party founded by Lowe, a former Reform UK MP who now sits as an independent, launched its campaign for the mass deportation of millions of migrants from a room at the Sanctuary last year.
The pardon marks the latest example of the abrupt U-turn Washington has taken on digital assets since Trump’s inauguration.
President Donald Trump has granted a pardon to Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the White House confirmed Thursday. | Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images
By Declan Harty10/23/2025 12:20 PM EDTUpdated: 10/23/2025 01:34 PM EDT
Zhao’s case was a major victory for the Biden administration, coming just weeks after a jury found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy in connection with the collapse of his company, FTX, a onetime rival to Binance. (Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in a federal prison, is also angling for a pardon, according to the New York Times.)
At that time, prosecutors and financial regulators had an icy stance toward crypto that the industry has long painted as hostile — a fact that helped galvanize crypto advocates to support Trump, who embraced them (and their very wealthy donors) during his re-election campaign.
Trump, once a skeptic of digital assets, is now a full-fledged crypto mogul. Having amassed more than $5 billion in paper gains through his own and his family’s various crypto projects, Trump’s digital asset portfolio now eclipses his real estate holdings.
But Trump’s success in crypto is thanks in no small part to connections he and his eldest sons have forged with industry bigwigs, including Zhao, whose own net worth is estimated at more than $85 billion.
The Trump family’s crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, is hosted by Binance, and the exchange has been a key driver in the growth of World Liberty’s dollar-pegged token, USD1. Earlier this year, as Zhao was activelyh seeking a pardon, Binance accepted a $2 billion investment from an Emirati-backed investment firm using USD1 — a boon for World Liberty Financial, which effectively received a $2 billion bank deposit
And charges dropped against Justin Sun, crypto billionaire:
Sun, who was born in China but now a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis, is facing civil charges in the United States for fraud and market manipulation, but his SEC lawsuit was paused earlier this year when the Trump administration dropped virtually all of its lawsuits and investigations against alleged crypto violators.
Elon Musk, the enigmatic billionaire and tech mogul behind Tesla and SpaceX, has always been a subject of fascination, controversy, and endless speculation. Whether he’s launching rockets into space, shaking up social media with provocative posts, or casually revealing personal details about himself, Musk keeps people talking.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
borderslynn 
You must be logged in to post a comment.