Author: David Yaffe-Bellany
Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow
Original link: https://www.techflowpost.com/article/34366
Disclaimer: This article is reprinted content. Readers can obtain more information through the original link. If the author has any objections to the reprinted form, please contact us and we will make modifications according to the author's requirements. Reprinting is only for information sharing and does not constitute any investment advice and does not represent Wu Shuo’s views and positions.
In October last year, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, who had served four months in prison in the United States for Binance’s anti-money laundering dereliction of duty. After the richest man in crypto returned to Abu Dhabi, while promoting regulatory solutions to Asian countries, he tied the same $2 billion USD1 transaction with the UAE royal family and World Liberty founded by Trump and his son. A New York Times reporter traveled with him across the city this summer, and what he wrote about was not a comeback, but a life of power with extremely high efficiency and extremely soft boundaries.
Changpeng Zhao, who was imprisoned in the United States for financial crimes and pardoned by President Trump, is now living a gilded life in the United Arab Emirates.
1. The king kneels beside him
One morning in June, cryptocurrency magnate Changpeng Zhao drove a white Nissan SUV outside the St. Regis hotel in Abu Dhabi. Changpeng Zhao is the richest person in the crypto industry, with an estimated net worth of $114 billion. He lives in a nearby villa with nine bedrooms, four bodyguards, a chef and a yacht called Da Moon. But he also likes to play a "normal person" - as he often calls himself. That day, he offered to show me around the city himself. Outside the St. Regis Hotel, Zhao Changpeng was sitting in the driver's seat of his Nissan, with his iPhone in front of the windshield, like the richest Uber driver in the world. When I got in the car, he joked, "My Lamborghini."
Let me be clear first: Zhao Changpeng is not an ordinary person. Not long ago, U.S. authorities filed criminal charges against him over his leadership of Binance. Court documents paint the crypto exchange as a haven for Russian money launderers, Iranian sanctions evaders and Islamic State terrorists. Zhao Changpeng pleaded guilty, but his wealth remained intact. After serving his four-month sentence, he returned to Abu Dhabi, still a majority shareholder in Binance and still the most powerful man in the industry.
Today, 49-year-old Zhao Changpeng walks around the world like a head of state. He flies across Asia on a private jet to advise governments on crypto regulation; often after a stop in Islamabad or Manila, Binance will announce a new regulatory breakthrough. One of the two dogs in the family is Taigan, an elegant Central Asian dog breed that has been compared to a gazelle. This was a gift from the president of Kyrgyzstan who is very interested in cryptocurrency. In February this year, Zhao Changpeng even went skiing with him. "He actually wanted to give me a tent, a full-size tent," Zhao Changpeng said. "I refused the tent, so he insisted on giving this dog."
Zhao Changpeng's most influential allies are two powerful ruling families. One is the clan that rules the United Arab Emirates. They want his help to create a technological powerhouse in the desert. The other is the Trump family. Last year, Binance established a commercial relationship with World Liberty Financial. The crypto startup was founded by President Trump and his three sons. Last year, World Liberty brought Trump $799 million — his single most profitable asset, more profitable than his real estate portfolio and more than his social media business. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao last October. The move was widely criticized as a quid pro quo.
The industry calls him "CZ." Changpeng Zhao often avoids reporters, but he met with me several times this year, eager to put a friendlier spin on his career at Binance. Binance has not stopped the inflow of dirty money so far. He is tall and thin, with short dark hair and a Binance tattoo on his forearm, and lacks the frat-house swagger of many of his crypto peers. He comes across as polite and attentive, but with interests that are almost comically narrow. This year, he self-published his memoir, Freedom of Money. The book writes that someone took him to visit the Louvre after closing time. The experience left him feeling nothing. He wrote that the tour guide was like "playing the piano to an ox".
For years, his real passion was what academics call “jurisdictional arbitrage”—moving from country to country in search of a legal framework flexible enough to accommodate his appetite for risk and growth. In Abu Dhabi, he may have found the ideal base of operations. As we drove into the city, Zhao Changpeng chatted cordially, stopping midway to ask his bodyguard for help with directions. (“Yes, boss, keep to the right.”) We pass a series of imposing compounds and drive toward Qasr Al Watan, the presidential palace. The striking white dome looks like the Taj Mahal.
Zhao Changpeng gradually became excited. “Democracy has been held up like the Holy Grail over the past few hundred years, but it’s not efficient,” he said as he approached the palace. “If you have a benevolent dictator, it’s actually very efficient. There’s almost no debate. You’re not wasting your time on a lot of unnecessary things.”
Recently, this top-down model of business and politics—both medieval and ultramodern—has gained momentum in the United States. During a visit to Abu Dhabi last year, Trump called the country's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, "a very strong man" and "a visionary like few others." Zach Witkoff is the son of a senior Trump adviser, and he is like a little prince in the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) camp. He put it more bluntly last May at a crypto conference in Dubai. "We should really take a page from His Highness and the UAE," Witkoff said. "They are a perfect example of someone who can lead through innovation while also adhering to family values."
Changpeng Zhao is already living in the future these people long for, settled in an elite enclave where monarchs and billionaires work seamlessly together. As we drove away from the National Palace, he told me that he had attended a private meeting at the nearby Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental hotel, where executives included hedge fund founder Ray Dalio and Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son. He was sitting in the audience and noticed someone leaning down to talk to him. That was Sheikh Mohammed. The chief wanted to know how Zhao Changpeng was doing and how he could help.
"This is the king," Zhao Changpeng told me, "kneeling next to you."
2. Ask for forgiveness after doing it
One day earlier this year, as Changpeng Zhao was working from his bed—he often lay on his back to discuss business after a long battle with chronic pain—the windows began to vibrate. He told me that he got up and went out to the balcony and saw a trail of smoke in the sky. Zhao Changpeng lives on Saadiyat Island, an enclave in Abu Dhabi across the Persian Gulf from Iran. Iran just launched a missile towards the United Arab Emirates.
This is the beginning of a geopolitical crisis that will shake up the region, but Zhao Changpeng is not particularly worried. He went back to bed and continued working. “More people died in traffic accidents than in missiles,” he later said. “This place is very well protected.”
Before settling in the United Arab Emirates, Zhao Changpeng was a man without a country. He was born in China and moved to Canada with his family when he was 12 years old. After graduating from McGill University, he held a string of technical jobs, bouncing between New York, China and Japan. In July 2013, during a poker game in Shanghai, a colleague suggested that he check out “this new thing called Bitcoin.”
This is a borderless technology, which just goes well with his borderless life. After several months of research, Zhao Changpeng made a radical bet. He sold his family’s home — a three-bedroom apartment in Shanghai where he and his wife raised their two children — and put the $900,000 proceeds into Bitcoin. This step is risky, but Zhao Changpeng is not worried. He calculated that even if Bitcoin plummeted, he could easily find another high-paying job in the traditional financial industry.
Since then, Changpeng Zhao has worked at a string of crypto startups in Asia. In the 2010s, the industry expanded rapidly, with hundreds of new tokens, and the platforms that traded them were poorly run and vulnerable to hackers. In July 2017, Changpeng Zhao founded Binance. Within a few months, it became the largest exchange in the world. This title was never given up again.
Binance’s success relies on two key judgments. First, crypto investors are a species drunk on risk and will never be satisfied with just exchanging dollars or yen for the equivalent amount of cryptocurrency. For years, Binance has operated as a margin exchange: traders could borrow money to make high-risk, high-reward bets on the price of Bitcoin and other popular tokens.
The second judgment is simpler and more about consequences. Many crypto investors don’t want to identify themselves, and Binance doesn’t require them to do so. For the first four years of its existence, the company allowed customers to open accounts without even the most basic KYC—the “know your customer” information that traditional companies require to prevent financial crime.
Binance is not alone in providing such high-risk services, but Changpeng Zhao executes it better than any competitor. “The exchange world was a lot of MySpace, he built Facebook,” said Austin Campbell, founder of a crypto consulting firm. The result is an extremely profitable free-for-all: uncensored investment products, sold to uncensored traders. When the market soared, Binance took a cut of every transaction; according to "The Freedom of Money," the company quickly reached $1 billion in profits.
Changpeng Zhao suddenly became a crypto celebrity. But even though he has joined a small group of ultra-wealthy executives with incredible political influence, people outside the industry have never really understood him. When it comes to the most controversial moments, Changpeng Zhao describes himself as a kind of passenger—a crypto nerd silenced by success, a naïve outsider who somehow stumbled into the role of Bond villain.
The set doesn't always hold up. Sitting in his kitchen in late June, Changpeng Zhao told me that during the years of Binance’s explosive growth, the company’s lax controls allowed a long list of bad actors to launder money, and that he “never really wanted” to break the law. "It's just that I have no experience in that area," he said. "I'm in technology. I live in China."
This image is inconsistent with the evidence collected by U.S. prosecutors in their investigation of Binance. In court, they quoted a warning Changpeng Zhao gave to his subordinates: "Instead of asking for instructions first, it is better to ask for forgiveness after doing it." According to legal documents, in private, Changpeng Zhao discussed how to obscure one thing: Binance does not have a US license, but it is serving US users. “Don’t put anything into writing,” he told one of his subordinates.
In Abu Dhabi, Zhao Changpeng called himself a "rule-abiding person." However, it is obvious that he made a strategic choice to push the law to the side at a critical moment: the habits of a new generation of investors are taking shape, and the rules themselves are quite flexible.
I was reminded of this as he led me through the door. There are boxes of Binance peripherals piled at the door. He urged me to pick out a gift, maybe a Binance backpack or a yellow and black Binance sweater made to look like a varsity jacket.
I told him that journalists have rules about this sort of thing and that I had to decline any gift over $20. He laughed and said the price was "about $19."
3. Golden Visa and a Tweet
In 2021, after wandering in Asia for many years, Zhao Changpeng visited the United Arab Emirates. In 2017, he and his colleagues at Binance were forced to flee China in the middle of the night as the government prepared to announce a ban on crypto exchanges. The one in Japan didn't work either; the same didn't work in Singapore, where it was difficult to get a work visa. Later, Zhao Changpeng’s friend Gabriel Abed made a suggestion. Abed is a businessman and former Barbados ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. He asked Changpeng Zhao to visit Dubai.
Zhao Changpeng immediately saw how the UAE people treated rich and powerful people. He arrived in Dubai on a Saturday morning in October, and within hours he was visited by government minister Omar Sultan Al Olama. He gave Zhao Changpeng a so-called golden visa, which allows him to obtain ten years of worry-free residence. A doctor was called in to do a blood test that all visa holders are required to undergo. Applications often take several weeks to process. Changpeng Zhao was approved in less than 12 hours.
This kind of reception impressed Zhao Changpeng deeply. “On my fourth day in Dubai, I looked at two houses,” he told me, “and I bought the second one.” By the end of that year, Binance had signed a memorandum of understanding with local authorities to jointly develop rules for the crypto business; the company sent three employees to help put together a framework. The draft was completed in January 2022 and signed into law a few weeks later. "If you're the captain of a ship heading due north, the UAE wants to get you into their fold," Abed said. "That's what they did with CZ. From day one, they rallied around him."
Not everyone in the UAE is treated so generously. Over the years, the country's leaders have implemented mass surveillance, banned even the mildest dissent, and presided over a labor market where foreign workers were often exploited and abused.
But for Zhao Changpeng, this is the beginning of a new and comfortable life. Before founding Binance, he had separated from his wife, who moved to Tokyo with their children. He started a relationship with his colleague He Yi. He Yi is a marketing executive best known in China as the former host of the travel show "Beautiful Destinations." During the years when the older children were in college in the United States, Zhao Changpeng and He Yi raised a young family in the United Arab Emirates.
Zhao Changpeng was introduced to a rare social circle of billionaires. He befriended a group of tech-curious Emirati leaders — whom he calls “crypto sheikhs.” Eventually, he met Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Sheikh Mohammed's brother. Tahnun is an avid jujitsu and entertains high-ranking businessmen in his palace. In the circle of royal banquets, Zhao Changpeng was treated as a distinguished guest. "We would think about how to arrange the seats?" he said, "It doesn't matter if you sit wherever you want."
In these early contacts, the sheikhs promoted the UAE to Zhao Changpeng and asked what they could do to help him. Soon, Zhao was preaching the country's benefits to a wider group of billionaires. He encouraged artificial intelligence giant Sam Altman to set up a company in the UAE and warned that other countries would be hostile to him. “You’re going to run into a lot of regulatory issues,” Changpeng Zhao told him over coffee.
Zhao Changpeng is by no means familiar with the dangers of emerging industries. When he arrived in the UAE, he was engaged in a vicious fight with a young entrepreneur, Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried, the founder of rival exchange FTX, is the son of Stanford Law School professors. In many ways, he is the exact opposite of Zhao Changpeng: a complete insider, personal connections, and proximity to the American political elite have smoothed his path to the top of the industry. "He had means that I didn't have," Zhao Changpeng wrote in his memoirs. Bankman-Fried would offer people at Binance three to five times their salary. Changpeng Zhao also heard rumors that Bankman-Fried was speaking ill of him in Washington.
In November 2022, a report from crypto media CoinDesk raised questions about whether FTX’s finances were tenable. Changpeng Zhao was in Dubai at the time, on his way to have a drink with Abed, when he decided to intervene on Twitter, posting a short, but ruthless statement. He is selling $500 million worth of FTT, a digital token that acts as a proxy for FTX stock. The post sparked panic, with anxious investors scrambling to pull money out of FTX.
The money wasn't there - Bankman-Fried stole $8 billion from clients. He had no choice but to seek bailout, and only one person in the crypto industry had the resources to save him. Two days after the tweet, Changpeng Zhao announced that he would acquire FTX; the next day, he withdrew from the deal, pushing FTX into deeper crisis. It all seemed like a masterstroke of corporate warfare—one observer called it a “blood sport.” Within six weeks, Bankman-Fried was arrested at his apartment in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States. He was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud.
Changpeng Zhao told me that he never intended to destroy FTX. Slipping into his usual shrug of innocence, he explained that he had hoped to slowly sell off his FTT holdings over a few months. "I had no intention of knocking them out of business," he said. "We lost $500 million."
His defeated opponents didn't see it that way. "He played me," Bankman-Fried said at the time. "He played me well."
4. Twenty-six minutes
Billionaires rush to the UAE for their own reasons. The country has no income tax and is considered extremely safe—right now, crypto investors in Europe and the United States have been targeted by kidnappers. But for Zhao Changpeng, who had just seen his old enemy dragged across the border, the UAE had another important advantage: It did not have an extradition treaty with the United States.
He recalled that around late 2022 or early 2023, at a dinner, a member of the Emirati royal family asked him if he wanted citizenship. Zhao Changpeng handed over some documents and waited. A few months later, a government envoy came to his home holding a box containing the passports of Zhao Changpeng and his family. The Emiratis "will never extradite their own citizens," Zhao Changpeng told me. "This is very hard."
He has reason to be alarmed: The rope around Binance’s neck is tightening. U.S. prosecutors are gathering evidence that the exchange's lax procedures allowed scammers, hackers and sanctions evaders to move funds. In private messages obtained by the government, Binance employees spoke with surprising candor about shady customers. “Is it too difficult to launder drug money these days,” one employee wrote. “Come to Binance, we have cake for you.”
Zhao Changpeng hired a team of lawyers to negotiate an agreement with the Ministry of Justice. The new passport gave him considerable leverage. After living in Dubai for several years, he moved an hour and a half south to Abu Dhabi, closer to the country's center of political power. While the negotiations were ongoing, Zhao Changpeng seriously considered life as a fugitive; his travel would be restricted, but at least in theory, he would be safe in the UAE.
Eventually, his legal team made a deal with the U.S. government. Changpeng Zhao will plead guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act - an anti-money laundering regulation - and resign as CEO. (The company will pay a $4.3 billion fine.) Although the terms were lenient, he remained unhappy with his lawyers and believed he didn't deserve any jail time at all. “I went to jail because we had a platform that didn’t do proper KYC,” he told me. “You don’t have ID and you can vote for the president of the U.S. government. I don’t know where this system came from. From what I’ve experienced, I think someone should go to jail for this.”
Nonetheless, this is an excellent result for Binance. At the sentencing hearing in the spring of 2024, Zhao Changpeng said something remorseful: "I deeply regret my failure, and I am very sorry." The judge sentenced him to four months in prison, calling him "a dedicated family man and a person who is willing to give." When the sentence was read out in court, Zhao Changpeng's college-educated son quietly clenched his fist and shook it.
As a rare felon with almost unlimited resources, Zhao Changpeng is in the most suitable position to suffer the least. He was assigned to Lompoc II, a low-security facility in California, the same complex where Bankman-Fried was later held. Before reporting to jail, Zhao Changpeng formed a team of advisers to teach him the ins and outs of prison politics. One of them, Michael Santos, corresponded with other prisoners, who agreed to help Zhao Changpeng figure out the situation inside. "CZ, you are a person who understands people and has had thousands of employees under you," Santos told him. "You will not lose these skills when you walk in here."
Changpeng Zhao arrived in Lompoc on the morning of May 30, 2024. He quickly became involved in the so-called “cars”—small, informal groups often organized along ethnic lines. Other Asian prisoners ate with him and exercised together in the yard during their breaks. They were excited to be in the company of a man worth billions of dollars. "Everybody moved out of his way," said Jaton Aguon, a fellow inmate in Lompoc. "It was like a king walking down the aisle."
Zhao Changpeng got close to a Vietnamese bank robber who had worked as an engineer. They talk in detail about the robberies, which didn't involve the Ocean's Eleven-style preparation one might expect. Zhao Changpeng told me that this person was "very easy-going" and "a particularly relaxed guy." "He just walked in, asked for money and left. And he got it 11 times."
The robber was one of the few prisoners with an interest in the business world. He read Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, and asked Changpeng Zhao what happened to Elon Musk’s astronomical salary at Tesla. Other prisoners also have business problems, and one of them wants to understand the mysteries of the crypto market. "He just said, Bitcoin - why has it gone up?" Zhao Changpeng recalled, "I said, wow, I'm not sure." Zhao Changpeng organized a study group to track stock prices; there was a TV in the prison, tuned to CNBC.
Not every word he said found its way into other people's hearts. In Lompoc, it was difficult for Changpeng Zhao to explain what he firmly believed: There were essentially no victims in the Binance case. “There was no fraud, nothing.” As soon as he explained the details, his response was disdain. “They just said, yes, everyone says that,” Zhao Changpeng recalled.
In August 2024, Changpeng Zhao left Lompoc and went to a halfway house (a transitional residence after prison). But something went wrong with his immigration status, and he had to spend the last two weeks in a local jail, doing push-ups and sit-ups in his cell to pass the time. On the day of his release, a police officer walked him outside where his mother, sister and assistant were waiting. They drove to a nearby airport and put him on a private plane bound for Abu Dhabi.
Only 26 minutes passed from the time Zhao Changpeng left custody to the time the plane took off.
5. Two billion US dollars of stablecoins
Zhao Changpeng returns to a world that is tilting toward him. A crypto-friendly government is about to take power in Washington. Shortly before the election, Trump formed World Liberty in a joint venture with Steve Witkoff's family. Witkoff is a real estate magnate who is preparing to serve as the White House's special envoy to the Middle East. Soon, these newly powerful American diplomats, who relied on doing business, were spending a lot of time in the UAE.
He drove me around the city, stopping to point me to the ADNEC Center. In December 2024, this conference hall hosted a large gathering of encryption enthusiasts. “That’s where I met Eric Trump,” he said. He recalled that at the meeting, a Trump supporter named David Bailey introduced him to the president’s middle son, a director of World Liberty. It was a casual conversation with no formal agenda. “He just said he was looking at a real estate deal here,” Zhao Changpeng told me.
Their interests are about to align. The UAE has been transforming itself from a petrostate into an emerging technology powerhouse, an effort spearheaded by Sheikh Tahnoon, who oversees $1.5 trillion of the UAE's sovereign wealth. Before he was imprisoned, Changpeng Zhao had talked with Peng Xiao, one of the sheikh's top deputies, about selling a stake in Binance to the Emirates - the ultimate combination of his company and his political patron.
Chief Tahnoon is rarely seen without his sunglasses. He is chairman of the venture capital fund MGX, which specializes in artificial intelligence. Early last year, MGX agreed to invest $2 billion in Binance. The deal values the company at $75 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. MGX sees Binance as the perfect bridge between crypto and artificial intelligence—a high-tech money transfer service that could one day allow automated artificial intelligence “agents” to make payments on behalf of real people.
Changpeng Zhao told me that he originally wanted to use Bitcoin to settle the transaction. Emiratis worry that the sharp rise and fall in Bitcoin prices will complicate transactions. They prefer to pay in stablecoins. Stablecoins are a class of cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a price of $1.
What follows is highly controversial — and will likely be the subject of a congressional investigation if Democrats take Congress in November. According to MGX, the foundation evaluated several stablecoins before settling on USD1, a coin created by World Liberty, citing "business suitability." This choice is shocking because USD1 is completely untested and has no track record. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Binance specifically requested MGX to pay in USD1; Changpeng Zhao said that the decision was made by MGX. “As long as the stablecoin has a good reputation and doesn’t disappear overnight, I don’t care too much,” he told me. “I have no other considerations.”
But all parties had incentives to bring World Liberty into the deal. In January 2025, just days before Trump was inaugurated, an investment firm with Emirati background took a 49% stake in the startup; Sheikh Tahnoun gained a seat on World Liberty’s board of directors. Around the same time, the Emiratis were talking to the White House about exports of those precious computer chips that power artificial intelligence. Binance also has its own issues with the Trump administration. After the legal troubles recede, the company wants to shed some of the restrictions imposed on it by the 2023 settlement.
In May 2025, Witkoff’s son Zach announced the deal, thanking Binance and MGX “for their trust in us.” Democrats in Congress denounced it as “stablecoin corruption.” Issuers like World Liberty make money by taking cash deposits from crypto traders, giving them stablecoins, and then investing the deposits to make profits. With the $2 billion from MGX and Binance, World Liberty immediately became one of the largest stablecoin companies in the world, benefiting both the Trump family and the Witkoff family. “This is so shamelessly flattering,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. He investigated Changpeng Zhao and Binance. "The scope and scale of corruption are unprecedented."
Zhao Changpeng insisted that nothing improper happened. He said that he no longer holds those USD1, but used them to invest in Bitcoin and other assets. “I assume that President Trump has very good lawyers and that it’s a perfectly legitimate arrangement for his sons to be in business and their father to be president,” he told me. He suggested that some of the anger might be a cultural difference. “In Kazakhstan, we can eat horse meat,” he explains. “In other countries, we’d be like, ‘Well, that’s crazy.’” The ruling families of the two governments have struck a deal—and couldn’t that be a good thing? Zhao Changpeng found a medieval metaphor. "If you marry the daughter of one country to the prince of another country," he said, "they can maintain peace for fifty years."
The $2 billion deal comes two weeks after the White House agreed to share access to the chips, overriding concerns from some U.S. national security officials. Last spring, Steve Witkopf visited Abu Dhabi with Trump and celebrated the deal with Emiratis at the National Palace.
Privately, Witkov also told an acquaintance that Zhao Changpeng deserved a pardon. This comes from someone familiar with the conversation. Zhao Changpeng has handed over relevant documents and is waiting for the president's ruling. The outcome has a lot at stake for Binance. After Changpeng Zhao's guilty plea, the exchange's dormant U.S. operations lost their state licenses. Pardons can help companies sell themselves to regulators. (A White House spokesman said Witkoff was not involved in the pardon process.)
Changpeng Zhao was careful when describing the process to me, calling it a "black box" watched over by a handful of lawyers who regularly relayed news from Washington. Occasionally, he said, unknown intermediaries would approach him at social events and offer to arrange for him to meet Trump - for the right price. "This is a small industry trying to make a profit," Zhao Changpeng said.
Zhao Changpeng ignored them. He told me that he only started seriously considering a pardon in March 2025, after other crypto executives were granted clemency and the Wall Street Journal reported that he was also seeking one. "I thought, since the newspaper thought I should ask for a pardon, maybe I should," he said.
In fact, as early as December 2024, Zhao Changpeng’s legal team was already working with well-known pardon lawyer Brett Tolman to explore the possibility of clemency. This comes from two people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The New York Times. Ultimately, Binance paid $2.1 million to a lobbying firm run by Ches McDowell, according to public filings. McDowell was close to the president's older sons, and his services included "executive relief." (A World Liberty spokesperson told me the company had “zero involvement in any pardon decision.”)
When the pardon was announced last October, Zhao Changpeng had just landed in Kyrgyzstan to meet President Sadyr Japarov. Zhaparov intends to create a digital currency anchored to the Kyrgyz national currency. Zhao Changpeng posted a brief thank you on social media as his hosts greeted him in the capital, Bishkek. That night, he and the president were in a restaurant, talking about stablecoins.
6. This is just a game
On a sweltering morning this summer, Changpeng Zhao pulled into the driveway of his $5 million home. He and He Yi hosted grandparents and siblings who took turns staying here. Two dogs met him at the door. In addition to Teigen, Zhao Changpeng also has a Belgian Malinois named Broccoli because he thought it sounded a bit like "blockchain".
With the photographer following behind, Zhao Changpeng jumped from room to room, pointing at photos of his young family members. A stately, cream-colored piano sat in the center of the children's playroom, surrounded by toys—a neglected sight that displeased the tuner who came to maintain it. It was a Steinway, "the more expensive one," Zhao Changpeng told me, "but I don't know how to play it." In the gym at home, he stopped to do a few bench presses.
Changpeng Zhao wants to make it clear that he is not living the life of an ordinary billionaire. Forbes estimates his wealth at more than $100 billion, but he insists the real number is much lower, somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion. He said a tiny fraction of it would be enough for him to live comfortably — just $10 million.
In the crypto podcast community, when people occasionally ask about his house, he often mentions a leak upstairs that has never been repaired. Sure enough, in the living room, he pointed to a water stain on the floor and gestured to the ceiling. "That's right there," he said. "I wonder if you can tell the difference in color."
Yes, Changpeng Zhao's villa is modest by billionaire standards; he told me that a nearby house is on the market for $150 million. But it's hard to square his feigned humility with the world of power and privilege in which he lives. One time when everyone was having a meal, Zhao Changpeng listened to Altman talking about an emerging field in biotechnology. “They could take sperm and eggs from the same person,” Zhao Changpeng recalled. “Basically, you could have a child with yourself.” Zhao Changpeng himself had the idea of defying biology; he invested in a start-up company that made artificial wombs.
Since his release from prison, Changpeng Zhao has divided his time between a range of things, including his technology investments and traveling as a kind of crypto diplomat, helping to promote the industry in countries that often treat him like royalty. “They always send one person, two cars, and drive directly to the plane,” he told me. “There’s a girl bringing local food, like you should try a piece.”
Changpeng Zhao downplayed his role at Binance; the company's plea agreement prohibited him from "operating or managing" the business. He specifically expressed his dissatisfaction with Binance’s recent decision to sue the Wall Street Journal. He called the case a "huge waste of time" after the newspaper reported the turnover in the compliance department. Even if Binance wins, “they won’t get much,” he told me. (The company withdrew its lawsuit last month.)
It’s clear that Binance is still a big part of his life. One of the two co-chief executives appointed to succeed him is He Yi, the mother of his three young children. Two years ago, in a gesture toward traditional governance, Binance established a board of directors with three supposedly independent trustees. One of them is also the chairman of the board - Gabe Abed, the friend who originally introduced Changpeng Zhao to the UAE. They rode jet skis together. Abed gave Zhao Changpeng a pair of orange high-top sneakers with "TRUMP CRYPTO PRESIDENT" printed on them.
Recently, Binance has encountered new accusations of misconduct. Last year, the company fired or suspended four compliance officers after they reported that nearly $2 billion flowed from customer accounts to a group of Iran-linked entities — a possible repeat of the sanctions evasion that was the subject of a 2023 U.S. criminal case. The company disputes the employees' findings and denies that anyone was disciplined for raising concerns. The Justice Department later said two Chinese companies used Binance to launder proceeds from Iranian oil sales, although it did not bring any charges against the exchange.
The relationship between Binance and the UAE has also cracked several cracks. In December, the company received a license to operate in Abu Dhabi, a city soon to be hit by a round of Iranian missiles; the exchange's new regulator called it a beacon of "regulatory progress." By the summer, however, two Binance employees were briefly detained in the United Arab Emirates. The local police are investigating possible financial crimes on the platform, and this step is extremely tough for them.
The detentions alarmed Binance’s local employees. Changpeng Zhao told me that he messaged a contact in the UAE police and also contacted Sheikh Tahnoun’s deputies. “I just said, ‘Look, let’s find a way to not let this happen,’” Changpeng Zhao recalled. “It doesn’t look good for the country, and it doesn’t look good for us.” He insisted that the UAE remains a friendly home for Binance. "No one is in danger," he said.
Changpeng Zhao has a sense of confidence: He has slipped away from trouble time and time again, and in an era that often rewards flagrant rule-breaking, he is an outright winner. In his memoir, he devoted a page and a half to writing about his belief in "simulation theory," which is that we may all be living in a reality imagined by others. He encountered the idea early in his crypto career and now believes it is mathematically inevitable. “Twenty years from now we should be able to stick a rod into our head and do a complete simulation like in The Matrix,” he wrote. “Billions of people will do it. There will be billions of simulations.”
This belief allows Zhao Changpeng to detach himself from the pressure of daily life. He writes that we might be some version of Super Mario, running around in artificial landscapes. He tried to live by a simple mantra: "It's just a game."