Coinbase CEO Faced Massive Backlash For Banning Politics. A Year Later, Here’s What He Discovered  

What a difference a year makes.

In October 2020, Brian Armstrong, CEO and founder of the cryptocurrency brokerage Coinbase, was facing a barrage of bad press.

The New York Times accused him of “tokenizing” black employees. CNN claimed he feared a “reckoning around racial and social justice.” And his highest-profile colleagues made public statements not-so-subtly implying he was blinkered by white privilege at best and an outright racist at worst.

All because Armstrong decided the workplace, or, at least, his workplace, was not the appropriate venue for political debates or pushing social agendas.

The firestorm started during the summer madness of the 2020 race riots, when mayors were inviting left-wing activists to burn down their cities and every blue-chip on the NASDAQ from Apple to Pepsi was rushing to post Black Lives Matter boilerplate to their corporate social media accounts.

All except Coinbase.

While Armstrong did send an email to employees expressing support for those who were “hurting” over the death of George Floyd, he stopped short of voicing support for BLM. This sparked a spiral of internal Slack carping that led Armstrong to call an all-hands meeting where he encouraged the disgruntled to “ask [him] anything.”

Mostly what they asked was why he couldn’t just make a public proclamation of allegiance that included those three little social justice buzzwords: Black Lives Matter.

Armstrong demurred, insisting that while he did care about black lives, he worried that making a statement explicitly tied to a political movement would be bad for the company. Furious, a group of employees organized a walkout, much to the delight of the establishment press, which covered their protest in breathless terms. Later that day, presumably in a bid to stop the bleeding and avoid throwing any further grist to the media mill, Armstrong did, at last, post a generic BLM-branded message to Twitter, saying “police brutality, and unequal justice are unequivocally wrong, and we need to all work to eliminate them from society.”

But upon a few weeks’ reflection, he appeared to think better of his capitulation. He deleted the tepid BLM tweets and instead issued a thought-out, deeply considered new plan. In a company-wide memo that was published on Medium for the world to evaluate, he officially declared Coinbase a no-politics zone.

While the 38-year-old billionaire acknowledged that “it has become common for Silicon Valley companies to engage in a wide variety of social activism,” he said he didn’t want his team preoccupied with “broader

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