With United States Election Day less than a week away and many voters already going to the polls, social media is rife with misinformation about candidates’ policies. MicroStrategy executive chair Michael Saylor seems to have fallen for a social media post containing misinformation about Donald Trump’s position on taxing crypto.
In an Oct. 30 X post to his more than 3.6 million followers, Saylor attributed a quote to Trump in which he said crypto shouldn’t be taxed and “Bitcoin is money.”
An investigation by Cointelegraph suggested that the fake quote originated from the X account Basedkarbon, who claimed in an Oct. 28 post that the Republican candidate made the remarks in “a recent interview.”
Source: Michael Saylor
Source: Basedkarbon
The false information contained in the X post then appeared to be picked up by Good Morning Crypto, which posted the quotes to its 26,000 followers on Oct. 29. Saylor followed on Oct. 30, leading to several high-profile X accounts, including Kraken and Bitcoin Archive, treating the information as though it were real.
“No taxes on crypto is a microcosm example of how information works,” said Basedkarbon in an Oct. 30 post, commenting on Saylor’s post. “The only reason things are true are because someone says something is true. The entire world is just people saying things and making them true.”
Cointelegraph reached out to Saylor and the Trump campaign for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
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Trump took part in two high-profile interviews in the last seven days with podcaster Joe Rogan and Sean Hannity on Fox News. Though the Republican candidate floated the idea of eliminating federal income tax on Rogan’s podcast, he avoided discussing digital assets.
Making a difference on Election Day?
Due to the nature of the US Electoral College, the outcome of the presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris could come down to a few thousand votes in crucial battleground states such as Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Both Harris and Trump have suggested that they will support the crypto industry if elected, but some voters could be swayed by either candidate promising more favorable policies.
“I think it’s certainly possible that you could have single-issue voters that are really focused on inflation, really focused on the state of the economy, seeing crypto as a solution to that and, therefore, having it influence their vote in the elections,” Grayscale chief legal officer Craig Salm told Cointelegraph on Oct. 28. “Given that crypto can serve as a hedge against inflation and as a store of value, I don’t think it’s surprising that a lot of these voters are looking to crypto now, given the two main problems that they’re seeing.”
During his time as US President, Trump referred to Bitcoin (BTC) as based on “thin air,” later calling the cryptocurrency a “scam.” During his 2024 campaign, he claimed to have changed his position on digital assets by speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference, launching a non-fungible token collection, and advocating for BTC miners.
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