If Ross Calvin, a crypto investor and the founder of Parhelion Digital, gets his way, the U.S. will soon have a new monument. The tech leader is currently working to get permission to build a massive statue of the Greek god Prometheus on Alcatraz Island, Bloomberg reports.
Getting the green light won't be easy. It will involve convincing President Donald Trump to reclassify Alcatraz as a national monument and will require raising at least $450 million to complete the build. Still, Calvin is confident he can get it done.
"Luckily, my business allows me to have some extra access [to Trump]," he told Bloomberg.
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Calvin is proposing the construction of a 450-foot futurist statue of Prometheus, who, according to legend, gave fire to humans. For Calvin, statues like this will extol the Western values of "patriotism and excellence and strength and transcendence and power."
He isn't the only member of the tech elite looking to construct some new American monuments, either.
Elad Gil, a Silicon Valley investor, said in a post on X last year that he wants to "bring back large-scale inspiring monuments." Mo Mahmood launched a cryptocurrency, the $GEORGE coin, to fund a 500-foot statue of George Washington that is "meant to last for thousands of years." And Joe Lonsdale, a defense tech investor, is a prominent backer of the National Monuments Foundation, an organization focused on creating "beautiful self-sustaining destination landmarks."
There is a long history in this country of the ultra-wealthy financially sponsoring the construction of public works, like statues and fountains. Often, those monuments are meant to commemorate the donors themselves, like the Cornelius Vanderbilt statue that stands atop Grand Central Station in New York City.
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However, for these new monuments men, it appears to be more about highlighting what they see as the West's best traits rather than enshrining themselves in the annals of history.
"Prometheus is kind of the patron saint of what it means to be American," Calvin told Bloomberg. "The West is the thing where original things happen, and that's a very rare mineral in human history, and we have to preserve the social structures that make it possible."
Erica Doss, a professor of art history and American studies at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Texas at Dallas and author of "Memorial Mania," says the tech elite's interest in celebrating what they perceive as the country's "wins" is typical of America's relationship with public monuments.
"We can't have monuments about shame," she told Bloomberg. "We need to be surrounded by triumph."
Many of the public monuments erected in the U.S. in recent years haven't met this standard, focusing on the more difficult parts of our history instead. Take the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, for example. Built in 2018, it remembers Black victims of lynching.
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The memorial is a "stunning project," Doss told Bloomberg. "It's not negative, it's critically engaged. It rejects the American exceptionalism narrative in favor of one that leans into what still needs to be done."
Still, it doesn't exactly make a viewer feel good. This could help to explain why the tech giants involved in these new monument proposals are so focused on building public works that make people feel warm, fuzzy, and inspired.
"When you look at my statue, you'll be able to tell it's George Washington, and I think that's important," Mahmood told Bloomberg. "When they look at it, I want people to feel a sense of hope and optimism."
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