This article comes from: The New York Times
Compiled | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina); Translator | Moni
Editor's note: From early radical bets on Bitcoin to founding the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange; from Binance's compliance turmoil and U.S. judicial trials to settling in the United Arab Emirates after being released from prison, dealing with politics, business and crypto capital, CZ's life trajectory almost condenses the dramatic changes in the crypto industry over the past decade.
This article isn’t just about telling the story of one crypto billionaire’s fortune. CZ has repeatedly emphasized that he is an "ordinary person" and a "rule-abiding person", but his experience has constantly created tension with this self-description: Binance's early radical exploration of KYC and regulatory boundaries, the life-and-death battle with FTX, the special treatment he received in the UAE, and the subsequent business intersection with the Trump family and the UAE dignitaries all point to the same question - when the crypto industry gradually moves from the fringe to the mainstream, where is the boundary between capital, regulation and political power?
On a June morning, cryptocurrency tycoon CZ arrived at the St. Regis Abu Dhabi hotel in a white Nissan SUV. CZ, the richest man in the crypto industry with an estimated net worth of $114 billion, lives in a villa near the St. Regis Hotel in Abu Dhabi with nine bedrooms, four bodyguards, a chef, and a yacht called "Da Moon," but he also likes to portray himself as a "normal person" - a term he often uses to describe himself.
Outside the St. Regis Hotel, CZ sat in the driver's seat of his Nissan, iPhone propped up on the windshield, looking like the world's richest Uber driver.
However, CZ is not an ordinary person.
Not long ago, the United States filed criminal charges against him for managing Binance. U.S. court documents describe Binance as a safe haven for Russian money launderers, Iranian sanctions evaders and Islamic State terrorists. CZ pleaded guilty but kept his wealth. After serving four months in prison, he returned to Abu Dhabi and remains Binance’s largest shareholder and the most influential figure in the industry.
Today, CZ, 49, acts like a head of state, crisscrossing Asia on his private jet to advise governments on cryptocurrency regulation, and his trips to Islamabad or Manila are often followed by reports of new regulatory breakthroughs at Binance. At home, one of his two dogs is a Taigan, an elegant Central Asian breed often compared to an antelope that was a gift from the president of Kyrgyzstan, with whom CZ went skiing in February with the crypto-interested president.
“He actually wanted to give me a tent, a full-size tent,” CZ said. “I said I didn’t want a tent, but then he insisted on giving me the dog.”
Among CZ’s most influential allies are the family that rules the United Arab Emirates, which hopes to use CZ’s power to build a tech powerhouse in the desert, and the Trump family.
Last year, Binance established a commercial relationship with World Liberty Financial, the crypto startup founded by President Trump and his three sons. Last year, World Liberty brought in $799 million for Trump — his most profitable single asset, more profitable than either his real estate portfolio or his social media business.
Trump pardoned CZ, known as "CZ" in the industry, in October last year and typically shuns reporters, but he has given multiple interviews this year in an effort to cast a more kind light on his career at Binance.
CZ, tall and thin with short hair, differs from the college fraternity-like flamboyance of many of his peers in the crypto industry. He comes across as polite and attentive, but his range of interests is almost comically narrow. This year, he self-published a memoir, "Freedom of Money," in which he recounted a private after-closing tour of the Louvre that left him disenchanted. He wrote that the tour guide's explanation was like "playing the piano to a cow." For years, CZ’s real mission has been what academics call “jurisdictional arbitrage”—constantly moving from one country to another in search of a legal framework flexible enough to accommodate his risk appetite and growth ambitions. In Abu Dhabi, he may have found an ideal base of operations.
CZ chatted easily as he drove into downtown Abu Dhabi, occasionally stopping to ask his bodyguard for directions, past a string of stately mansions toward the presidential palace, whose striking white dome looks a lot like the Taj Mahal.
CZ started to get excited.
During a visit to Abu Dhabi last year, Trump called Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan "a very powerful man" and "one of the few true visionaries." Zach Witkoff, the son of a senior Trump adviser, put it even more bluntly at a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai last May:
"We really need to learn from His Highness and the UAE, who are an amazing example of how to lead a country through innovation while maintaining family values."
CZ is already living in the future these people long for - in an elite circle where monarchs and billionaires coexist harmoniously. He left Qasr Watan to attend a private meeting at the nearby Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Emirates Palace. Attendees included business figures including hedge fund founder Ray Dalio and Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son.
CZ was sitting in the audience when he noticed someone bend down to speak to him. It was Sheikh Mohammed who wanted to know how CZ was doing and if he could be of any help.
"This is the king," CZ said. "He's right next to you."
CZ’s life in Abu Dhabi, early years, rise of Binance and compliance controversy
One day early this year, CZ was working in bed — he often lay on his back to discuss business due to chronic pain issues — when his windows began to shake, and he said he got up, walked to the balcony, and saw a trail of smoke in the sky.
CZ lives on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, an enclave in the Persian Gulf across from Iran. At the time, Iran had just launched a missile into the United Arab Emirates, the beginning of a geopolitical crisis that would destabilize the region, but CZ wasn't particularly worried and went back to bed to get back to work.
"More people die from traffic accidents than from missiles," he said. "It's very well protected here."
Before settling in the UAE, CZ was born in China and moved to Canada with his family when he was 12 years old. After attending McGill University, he worked in various technology industry jobs and moved between New York, China and Japan. In July 2013, during a poker game in Shanghai, a colleague suggested that he learn about "a new thing called Bitcoin." This borderless technology perfectly fits CZ's borderless lifestyle.
After months of research, CZ made an aggressive bet. He sold his family’s house—a three-bedroom apartment in Shanghai where he and his wife had lived while raising their two children—and invested all of the $900,000 proceeds in Bitcoin. It was a high-risk move, but CZ wasn’t worried. He believed that even if Bitcoin plummeted, he could easily find a high-paying job in the traditional financial industry.
The crypto industry was growing rapidly in the 2010s, with hundreds of new tokens emerging, but the trading platforms for these tokens were cluttered and vulnerable to hackers. In July 2017, CZ founded Binance. Within a few months, Binance became the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
Binance’s success is built on two key insights—
The first insight is this: Crypto investors as a group are borderline addicted to risk and will never be satisfied with simply exchanging dollars or yen for the equivalent value of cryptocurrency. Binance has operated margin trading for years: traders can borrow money to make high-risk, high-reward bets on the price of Bitcoin and other popular coins.
The second insight was simpler but had a more profound impact. Many crypto investors did not want to reveal their identities, and Binance did not require them to do so.
In its first four years, Binance allowed customers to open accounts without even providing the most basic of KYC — the “know your customer” information that traditional businesses require from customers to prevent financial crime. Binance is not the only exchange offering such high-risk services, but CZ’s execution capabilities outperform all competitors.
“There was a lot of MySpace in the exchange world, and he built Facebook,” said Austin Campbell, founder of a crypto consulting firm.
What resulted, however, was an extremely profitable and disorderly market: a platform where uncensored investment products were made available to uncensored traders. As the market boomed, Binance took a cut of every transaction, and according to the book Freedom of Money, the company soon made $1 billion in profits.
CZ also became a celebrity in the crypto industry, but even as he joined a small group of ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs with astonishing political clout, he was never widely understood outside the industry. Whenever he recalls the most controversial moments, CZ describes himself as a bystander—a crypto geek overwhelmed by success, a naive outsider who somehow became a supervillain in a Bond movie.
Sitting in his kitchen one day in late June, CZ said in an interview that during Binance’s early years of explosive growth, he never really thought about breaking the law. At the time, the company's lax controls allowed waves of criminals to launder money. "It's just because I lack experience in that area," he said. "I'm a technical person."
But this image did not fit with the evidence collected by U.S. prosecutors during their investigation into Binance. In court, prosecutors quoted CZ’s admonishment to his subordinates: “It is better to do it first and then ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission first.” According to legal documents, CZ privately discussed how to conceal the fact that Binance served U.S. users even though Binance was not licensed to operate in the United States. In Abu Dhabi, CZ describes himself as a “rule-abiding person.”
What is clear, however, is that at a crucial time—when the habits of a new generation of investors were forming and the rules themselves were quite loose—he made strategic choices to try to push the legal boundaries to their limits.
Binance moves to UAE, CZ’s rivalry with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, and the FTX collapse
In 2021, after many years of traveling around Asia, CZ came to the United Arab Emirates. He had previously briefly stayed in Japan but failed; Singapore also failed to become a stopover because it was difficult to obtain a work visa there. Then CZ’s friend Gabriel Abed came up with a suggestion: visit Dubai. Abed was a businessman who had served as Barbados' ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, and CZ quickly saw how the rich and powerful were treated by the Emiratis.
CZ arrived in Dubai on a Saturday morning in October. Within hours, he was visited by a government figure, Omar Sultan Al Olama, who offered CZ a so-called "golden visa" that would grant the holder 10 years of residency without red tape. A doctor was then called in to perform a blood test that all visa holders are required to undergo. An application that would normally take weeks to complete was approved in less than 12 hours, and CZ was impressed by the friendly reception.
“On my fourth day in Dubai, I looked at two properties,” he told me. “I bought the second one.”
At the end of that year, Binance signed a memorandum of understanding with the local government to jointly formulate cryptocurrency operating rules and sent three employees to help build a regulatory framework. A draft was completed in January 2022 and signed into law a few weeks later.
"When you are the captain of a ship sailing due north, the UAE wants you to join their ranks," Abed said. "They have rallied around the CZ from day one."
But not everyone gets such generous treatment in the UAE, but for CZ, it's the beginning of a comfortable new life.
CZ’s eldest child is in college in the United States, while he and He Yi are raising a young family together in the UAE. He Yi is CZ’s partner and she became one of two co-CEOs to succeed CZ after he was forced out of running the company.
As CZ grew into an elite world of billionaire social networks, he befriended a group of Emirati leaders with an interest in technology—he calls them “crypto sheikhs.” Eventually, he met Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Sheikh Mohammed's brother. The latter is a jujitsu enthusiast who often receives political and business dignitaries in his palace.
In royal dinner circles, CZ is considered a guest of honor. “We would think, ‘How are the seats arranged?’” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you sit wherever you want.”
During these early contacts, the sheikhs continued to promote the UAE to CZ and asked how they could help him. Soon, CZ began promoting the country’s virtues to a wider circle of billionaires. He has encouraged artificial intelligence tycoon and OpenAI founder Sam Altman to set up a corporate entity in the UAE, warning him that other countries would be unfriendly to him. “You’re going to have a lot of regulatory issues,” CZ once told Altman over coffee.
CZ is no stranger to the dangers of emerging industries.
When he arrived in the UAE, he was in fierce competition with a young entrepreneur. This person is SBF, the founder of rival exchange FTX. SBF’s parents are professors at Stanford Law School. In many ways, he is the opposite of CZ: SBF is more like a complete system insider. Personal relationships and proximity to the American political elite paved the way for him to reach the top of the industry.
“He had some tricks that I didn’t have.” CZ wrote in his memoir that SBF would poach Binance employees and pay them 3 to 5 times higher salaries. CZ also heard that the SBF was spreading negative rhetoric against him in Washington.
In November 2022, a report from crypto media CoinDesk raised questions about FTX’s financial stability. CZ was in Dubai, about to have a drink with Abed, when he decided to weigh in on Twitter, issuing a brief but ruthless statement: He was selling his $500 million worth of FTT.
Soon, the post triggered a panic in the market, and anxious investors rushed to withdraw funds from FTX, but FTX simply did not have enough money. SBF had embezzled $8 billion from customers. He had no choice but to seek a bailout, and at that time, only one person in the entire crypto industry had the resources to save him. CZ announced the acquisition of FTX two days after posting, but backed out of the deal a day later, pushing FTX further into crisis.
The whole thing looks like a masterful piece of corporate warfare—one observer called it a “blood sport.”
Within six weeks, SBF was arrested at his apartment in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States, where he was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud.
CZ said he never wanted to destroy FTX.
CZ explained that he originally hoped to gradually sell off his FTT over a few months. "I had no intention of letting them collapse," CZ said. "We lost $500 million."
SBF sees it differently. “CZ tricked me,” SBF said at the time, “and beautifully.”
CZ chooses UAE as safe haven, survives U.S. judicial investigation, plea deal, and 4 months in prison
After several years in Dubai, CZ moved to Abu Dhabi, a country that has no personal income tax and is considered very safe — especially as crypto investors in Europe and the United States began to be targeted for kidnapping. But for CZ, who had just seen his old enemies hunted across borders, the UAE also had an important advantage: it had no extradition treaty with the United States.
CZ recalled that around late 2022 or early 2023, a member of the Emirati royal family asked him over dinner if he wanted Emirati citizenship, so he submitted some documents and waited. A few months later, a government emissary arrived at his home with a box containing the passports of CZ and his family.
“The UAE will never extradite its citizens,” CZ told me. “That’s very important.”
CZ does have reason to be wary, the noose around Binance is tightening, and U.S. prosecutors are gathering evidence that Binance’s lax protocols enable scammers, hackers, and sanctions evaders to move funds. According to obtained private chat transcripts, Binance employees spoke with a shocking level of candor about the exchange’s shady customers.
CZ hired a team of lawyers to negotiate with the U.S. Department of Justice, and CZ's new passport gave him considerable negotiating leverage. After living in Dubai for several years, he moved south to Abu Dhabi, closer to the country's center of political power. While negotiations were ongoing, CZ seriously considered living his life as a fugitive, who would have to limit his travels but, at least in theory, be safe in the UAE.
Ultimately, CZ's legal team reached an agreement with the U.S. government. CZ will plead guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act — an anti-money laundering regulation — and resign as CEO, with Binance paying a $4.3 billion fine.
Despite the generous terms, CZ was frustrated with his lawyers and felt he didn't deserve to be jailed at all.
“I went to jail because we ran a platform without proper KYC,” CZ said. “You could even vote for the president of the United States without an ID. I don’t know how the system came to be. I thought, given everything I’ve been through, someone should be in jail for this issue.”
Still, this is an excellent result for Binance.
At his sentencing hearing in spring 2024, CZ issued a statement of contrition: "I deeply regret my failure and I'm sorry."
Ultimately, the judge sentenced CZ to four months in prison, describing him as a family man and a giving person. As the verdict was read in court, CZ's son, who is in college, quietly clenched his fists in celebration. As a rare criminal with nearly unlimited resources, CZ's situation allowed him to minimize his suffering, and he was booked into the Lompoc II low-security prison in California, the same prison complex where SBF would later be incarcerated. Before entering prison, CZ assembled a team of counselors dedicated to teaching him the subtle rules of prison life.
One of them, Michael Santos, corresponded with other inmates and asked them to help CZ familiarize himself with the prison's interior.
"CZ, you are a person who understands people and has managed thousands of employees." Santos told him, "You will not lose these abilities just because you walked in here."
When CZ arrived in Lompoc on the morning of May 30, 2024, he quickly joined a so-called “car”—an informal social group, often divided along ethnic lines, of other Asian inmates who ate with CZ and exercised with him in the yard during breaks, excited to be in the company of a man worth billions of dollars.
"Everyone would make way for him," said Lompoc inmate Jadon Agong. "It would be like a king walking down the aisle."
CZ had a close relationship with a Vietnamese bank robber who had worked as an engineer in the past, and they discussed in detail bank robberies that were not as elaborate as one might imagine from the movie "Ocean's Eleven."
"He was very gentle," CZ said. "He was a super calm guy, and he just walked in, asked people for money, and then left, and he did it 11 times."
The bank robber was one of the few inmates interested in the business world. He read Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal and asked CZ about Elon Musk's sky-high salary at Tesla. Other inmates also asked business questions, including one who wanted to figure out the mysteries of the crypto market.
“He would ask, ‘Well, why is Bitcoin going up?’” CZ recalled. “I said, wow, I’m not really sure.”
CZ organized a study group in prison to track stock prices, and a TV in the prison regularly played CNBC, but not all of his information was accepted by others. In Lompoc, CZ had difficulty getting other prisoners to understand one of his deep-rooted views: the Binance case was essentially a victimless case, "no fraud, nothing." When he explained the details, the response was lukewarm.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, everyone says that,’” CZ recalled.
In August 2024, CZ left Lompoc, but due to immigration status issues he had to spend the last two weeks in a local jail, doing push-ups and sit-ups every day to pass the time in his cell. On the day of his release, a prison guard escorted him outside, where his mother, sister and assistant were waiting. They drove to a nearby airport and put him on a private plane to Abu Dhabi.
Only 26 minutes passed between the time CZ was released from custody and the time his private jet took off.
CZ’s political and business relations after his release from prison, World Liberty Financial, US$200 million stablecoin transaction, Trump’s pardon controversy
After being released from prison, CZ returned to a world that was changing in his favor as a pro-cryptocurrency U.S. government was about to take power in Washington.
Shortly before the U.S. election, Trump co-founded World Liberty Financial with the family of real estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, who was preparing to serve as the White House's special envoy to the Middle East. Soon, America's newly powerful transactional diplomats began traveling frequently to the UAE.
While driving around the city, CZ stopped and pointed to the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center (ADNEC Center), which hosted a massive gathering of cryptocurrency enthusiasts in December 2024.
“That’s where I met Eric Trump.” CZ said that at the venue, a Trump supporter, David Bailey, introduced him to Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, a principal at World Liberty, in a casual conversation with no formal agenda.
“At the time Eric Trump just said he was looking at a real estate deal here,” CZ said, but their interests would soon intersect.
The UAE has been trying to transform itself from an oil nation into an emerging tech powerhouse, a project spearheaded by Sheikh Tahnoun, who oversees $1.5 trillion of the UAE's sovereign wealth.
Before being jailed, CZ was in talks with Peng Xiao, one of Tahnoun's top aides, about selling a stake in Binance to the UAE — which would achieve the ultimate marriage between his company and his political protector Sheikh Tahnoun, who almost always wears dark glasses and serves as chairman of the venture capital fund MGX, which focuses on artificial intelligence.
Early last year, MGX agreed to invest $2 billion in Binance. The deal values Binance at $75 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. MGX sees Binance as the perfect bridge between cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence — a high-tech money transfer service that may one day allow automated AI “agents” to make payments on behalf of real people, and CZ said he hopes to complete the transaction in Bitcoin.
However, the UAE is concerned that Bitcoin price fluctuations will complicate transactions and prefers to use stablecoins for payments. What happens next is widely disputed - and will likely be the subject of a congressional investigation if Democrats regain control of Congress in November. According to MGX, the fund evaluated multiple stablecoins and ultimately selected USD1, issued by World Liberty, citing its “business suitability.” This was a shocking choice as USD1 was completely unproven at the time and had no historical performance to draw from. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Binance had specifically asked MGX to use USD1 for payments, and CZ said this was a decision made by MGX itself.
“As long as the stablecoin is reputable and doesn’t disappear overnight, I don’t really care,” CZ said. “There are no other considerations.”
But all parties involved had reasons to bring World Liberty into the deal. Around the same time, the UAE was in talks with the White House to get a license to export advanced artificial intelligence chips, and Binance was also courting the Trump administration.
In May 2025, Witkov’s son Zach announced the deal and thanked Binance and MGX for “their trust in us,” while U.S. congressional Democrats condemned the deal as “stablecoin corruption.”
Issuers like World Liberty make money by accepting cash deposits from crypto traders, providing them with stablecoins, and then investing those deposits to earn yield. With the entry of $2 billion in funds from MGX and Binance, World Liberty instantly became one of the largest stablecoin companies in the world, which is a big plus for the Trump and Witkov families.
“This is clearly an act of blatant ingratiation,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who has investigated CZ and Binance and said “the scope and scale of this corruption is unprecedented.”
CZ insists there is no wrongdoing and says he no longer holds USD1 and uses it to invest in Bitcoin and other assets. "I assume President Trump has very good lawyers and that this arrangement of his son running the business and him being president is completely legal," CZ added.
CZ also suggested that some of the anger may stem from cultural differences. "In Kazakhstan, we can eat horse meat," he explained. "In some other countries, we'd be like, 'What? This is crazy.'"
The ruling families of two countries strike a business deal - couldn't that be a good thing? CZ uses another medieval metaphor. "If you marry the daughter of one country to the prince of another country," he said, "they can maintain peace for 50 years."
The $2 billion deal comes two weeks after the White House allayed concerns among some U.S. national security officials by agreeing to share chip supply channels, and Steve Witkoff accompanied Trump on a visit to Abu Dhabi last spring to celebrate the deal with the UAE in Qasr Watan. Vitkov also privately told an acquaintance that CZ should be pardoned, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Binance's dormant U.S. operations lost their state operating licenses following CZ's guilty plea, which if granted a pardon could help the company sell itself to regulators. However, a White House spokeswoman said Witkoff was not involved in the pardon process.
CZ was very cautious in describing the process, calling it a "black box" run by several lawyers who regularly reported progress to him from Washington. CZ also revealed that sometimes at social events, some suspicious middlemen would approach him and claim that they could arrange for him to meet Trump for the right price, but CZ ignored them.
“It’s become a small industry and there are people trying to make a buck out of it,” CZ said.
CZ began seriously considering a pardon in March 2025, after other crypto industry executives were granted clemency and The Wall Street Journal reported that he was also seeking a pardon.
"I thought, if the newspapers think I should apply for a pardon, then maybe I should," he said.
But in fact, as early as December 2024, CZ’s legal team had been working with prominent pardon lawyer Brett Tolman to explore the possibility of obtaining clemency. Ultimately, Binance paid $2.1 million to a lobbying firm run by Ches McDowell, who has close ties to Trump’s sons. According to public filings, the services included “administrative relief,” but World Liberty A spokesman for the company said the company had "no involvement at all in any pardon decision."
When the pardon was announced last October, Zhao had just arrived in Kyrgyzstan to meet with President Sadr Zhaparov, who is interested in creating a digital currency pegged to the Kyrgyz national currency. CZ posted a brief message of thanks on social media as he was received by local authorities in the capital, Bishkek.
CZ Abu Dhabi luxury life, wealth outlook, current situation of Binance, changes in relations with the UAE, and views on the "Simulated Universe Theory"
On a sweltering morning this summer, CZ pulled into the driveway of his $5 million home, where he and He Yi were hosting a rotating cast of grandparents and siblings. Two dogs greeted him at the door.
In addition to the Taigan, CZ also has a Belgian Malinois he named Broccoli because he thought the name sounded a bit like "blockchain." CZ walked from room to room, pointing to photos of young family members. A stately beige piano sat in the center of the children's playroom, surrounded by toys—a state of neglect that surprised the master who came to tune it.
It was a Steinway piano. “It’s the more expensive kind,” CZ said, “but I don’t know how to use it.” In the gym at home, he stopped to do bench presses.
CZ doesn’t live like a regular billionaire.
While Forbes estimates his wealth at more than $100 billion, CZ insists the real number is much lower, somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion, saying he could live comfortably on a fraction of that — as little as $10 million. On the Cryptocurrency Podcast, people occasionally ask about CZ’s house, and he often mentions a leak upstairs that he has never been able to fix. Sure enough, in the living room, he pointed to a damp-damaged patch on the floor, then to the ceiling.
"That's right there," CZ said. "I wonder if you can see the difference in color."
True, CZ's villa is modest by billionaire standards, and a nearby house is on the market for $150 million, but it's hard to square his deliberate display of humility with the world of power and privilege in which he already finds himself.
CZ also had the ambition to challenge the laws of biology. Once, at a private dinner, CZ heard Altman talk about an emerging field of biotechnology research. He had invested in a start-up company studying artificial wombs.
“They could take a sperm and an egg out of a person,” CZ recalled. “Basically, you could have a baby yourself.”
Since his release from prison, CZ has been traveling between multiple projects, including tech investments, as well as traveling between countries as a “crypto diplomat” of sorts, helping to promote the crypto industry. In these countries he was often treated like royalty.
“They always send a guy with two cars, all the way to the plane to pick you up,” CZ said. “There’s also a girl holding a local delicacy, like you have to try it.”
CZ downplayed his relationship with Binance, and the company's plea agreement prohibited him from "operating or managing" the business. He specifically expressed dissatisfaction with Binance's recent decision to sue the Wall Street Journal after the Wall Street Journal reported on turnover issues in Binance's compliance department, but CZ called the lawsuit "a huge waste of time, and even if Binance wins, it won't get much." It is reported that Binance withdrew the lawsuit last month.
Still, it's clear that Binance is still a big part of his life, and one of the two co-CEOs who succeeded him is He Yi, a mother of three young children. Two years ago, as part of a move toward a traditional governance structure, Binance established a board of directors and appointed three supposedly independent trustees, one of whom also serves as chairman — none other than Gabe Abed, the friend who originally invited CZ to the United Arab Emirates. The two had jet skied together, and Abed gave CZ a pair of orange high-top sneakers emblazoned with “TRUMP CRYPTO PRESIDENT.”
Recently, Binance has faced new allegations of misconduct.
Last year, Binance fired or suspended four compliance officers after they reported that nearly $2 billion in customer accounts had flowed to a group of Iran-linked entities — a possible return to sanctions circumvention issues that led to the U.S. government filing criminal charges against Binance in 2023. Binance denied the employees’ findings and denied that anyone was disciplined for raising concerns.
However, the U.S. Department of Justice did not bring new charges, and there have been some cracks in Binance’s relationship with the UAE, where it was granted a license to operate in Abu Dhabi in December. Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi soon came under a slew of Iranian missile attacks, with Binance’s new regulatory head calling the company a model of “regulatory progress” at the time. However, by the summer, two Binance employees were briefly detained in the UAE, an unusually strong move by local police as they investigated possible financial crimes on the platform. The detentions unsettled Binance’s employees there.
CZ said he sent the message to an Emirati police contact and also contacted several of Sheikh Tahnoun's subordinates. “I just said, ‘Listen, let’s find a way not to let this happen.’” CZ recalled. “It’s not good for the country, and it’s not good for us.” He insisted that the UAE remains a Binance-friendly home. "No one is in danger," CZ said.
Possessing the confidence of a man who has repeatedly emerged from adversity, CZ is a winner through and through in an era that often rewards bold rule-breaking.
In CZ’s memoir, he devotes an entire page and a half to talking about his belief in “simulation theory”—the idea that we might all be living in a reality imagined by some other being, a concept he encountered early in his crypto career and now believes is mathematically certain.
“In 20 years, we should be able to stick a stick into our head and run a complete simulation like in The Matrix,” CZ writes. “Billions of people will do it. There will be billions of simulated worlds.” This belief allows CZ to maintain a certain detachment from the pressures of daily life. He writes: We could all be Super Marios, just running around in an artificially constructed landscape.
He tries to live by a simple motto: "It's just a game."