# Mike Novogratz Founder and CEO of [[Galaxy Digital]], the ex-[[Goldman Sachs]] macro trader and Fortress hedge-fund principal who reinvented himself as crypto's most quotable Wall Street evangelist — and then, by 2026, quietly pivoted the firm from Bitcoin mining into leasing data-center power to the AI labs. He sits at the exact hinge this vault tracks: a crypto principal who donated to the [[2025 Trump Inaugural Fund]], profited from the industry's regulatory capture, and now publicly warns that the AI business model is "commoditizing humans" — a rare on-the-record indictment of the sector from someone deeply long it. ## Background - Born November 26, 1964, in Alexandria, Virginia; third of seven children. - Princeton University; captain of the wrestling team. Served in the National Guard and trained as a helicopter pilot. - Eleven years at [[Goldman Sachs]] trading macro; elected partner in 1998. - Partner and President of Fortress Investment Group, where he ran a multi-billion-dollar macro hedge fund. His fund's losses and his 2015 exit from Fortress preceded the crypto pivot. - Forbes valued him at roughly **$6 billion** in July 2026 — more than double his worth when Galaxy listed on Nasdaq in May 2025. Nearly all of it is held in Galaxy stock and crypto, so the figure swings daily. ## Galaxy Digital Novogratz shelved a planned crypto hedge fund in late 2017 when the market turned frothy, then launched [[Galaxy Digital]] in 2018 as a diversified merchant bank for digital assets. The firm's defining corporate move came in **May 2025**, when it redomiciled from the Cayman Islands to Delaware and listed on **Nasdaq under GLXY**; it completed its delisting from the Toronto Stock Exchange in early 2026. Galaxy's second act is the more consequential one for the current moment: under Novogratz the company has been converting its Helios (Texas) Bitcoin-mining campus into AI data-center capacity, signing power-and-hosting deals that Bloomberg described as turning Galaxy into an **"AI landlord."** Forbes framed the underlying trade as one that could net him **$20 billion**. The crypto-to-AI-infrastructure morph is the throughline of his 2026 public profile. ## The AI "human commoditization" warning In **July 2026**, speaking on the SALT podcast, Novogratz endorsed [[Alex Karp]]'s combative CNBC interview as "probably among the most honest things that I've seen on television in a very long time." He read Karp's remarks as "basically an indictment of the AI business model that they're basically absorbing information from all of us, absorbing information from all the companies, and the result of which will lead to some sort of human commoditization." He added that the pace of AI adoption was outrunning regulators' ability to respond. The context: Karp had attacked the token-based pricing model used by AI labs including [[OpenAI]] and [[Anthropic]], accusing them of overcharging enterprise customers while extracting proprietary data that could later be used to compete against those same customers. Novogratz — himself now leasing power to the AI buildout — amplifying that critique is the notable part: a sector insider naming the extraction dynamic out loud. See [[Mike Novogratz - AI commoditizing humans]] for the receipt. He has paired this with market-top warnings, telling audiences that the coming **SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic** mega-IPOs could mark the top of the bull market — even as he stays long Bitcoin. ## Political and vault significance - **[[Galaxy Digital]] gave $1M to the [[2025 Trump Inaugural Fund]]** while carrying an "active settlement track" with the SEC — the same donate-into-a-pending-enforcement-matter pattern documented across the crypto donor cluster (see [[Paul Atkins]], [[Crypto-Political Machine]]). - Novogratz is a **crypto-political principal**, not a MAGA ideologue: a Democratic-leaning donor historically, whose firm nonetheless participated in the industry's purchase of a friendly regulatory regime. He belongs in the vault as a node in the [[Cryptocurrency Sector]] money map, not as a movement figure. - His AI-commoditization line is a useful **counter-receipt**: an industry beneficiary conceding the critique that the vault's [[Alex Karp]] and defense-tech coverage documents from the other direction. ## Cross-references - Company: [[Galaxy Digital]] - Fellow crypto principals: [[Brian Armstrong]] - AI-model critique: [[Alex Karp]], [[OpenAI]], [[Anthropic]] - Political money: [[2025 Trump Inaugural Fund]], [[Crypto-Political Machine]], [[Cryptocurrency Sector]] - Quote: [[Mike Novogratz - AI commoditizing humans]]