very exciting development / vector / trajectory
Q to Manus to incorporate into Thematic Narrative considerations: Call for trouble, especially in view of inevitable 2042 Demographic-flip ? Who can know but am feeling queasy bloomberg.com <<America’s Tech Right Is Obsessed With Building Giant Statues>> - seems to play right (pun) into the Asimovian Foundation / Empire 2042 end-game, or am I imagining ? Maybe justifies another PP watch ? to celebrate alongside ? Yeah, am looking for excuses to shop shop shop, and vindication be my witness to the Thematic Narrative roll.
America’s Tech Right Is Obsessed With Building Giant Statues
With proposals for a 450-foot statue of Prometheus and a 650-foot George Washington, a new class of monuments men are statue-maxxing.
By Sophie Alexander
October 17, 2025 at 6:00 PM GMT+8
While visiting friends in San Francisco in 2018, investor Ross Calvin watched golden hour shine across the Bay and found it was missing one thing: a Statue of Liberty.
Seven years later, Calvin is working to build his own West Coast colossus: a 450-foot (137-meter) statue of the Greek god Prometheus on Alcatraz island, tall enough for his head to poke above the Golden Gate Bridge. The monument to the Titan who defied the gods would dwarf Lady Liberty, a mere 305 feet by comparison. To Calvin, Prometheus exemplifies the “fundamental dynamism that defines the West” — never mind the myth’s lesson about hubris.
To get the statue built, Calvin first needs President Donald Trump to reclassify Alcatraz, already a national park, as a national monument. He put the project on the back burner while Joe Biden was in office but expects that Trump, who has long fixated on aesthetics, will be on his side.
“Luckily, my business allows me to have some extra access,” says Calvin, who lives in Denver and runs a Bitcoin mining business with operations in the Middle East. He’s planning to present Trump’s team with a pitch — renderings of the monument and a proposed technology museum, also on Alcatraz island — by the end of January. As envisioned, the project would cost $450 million and use a nickel-bronze alloy for Prometheus, which Calvin says will reflect light differently throughout the day. At 450 feet tall from the waterline, it would be visible from almost the entire Bay area.
For Calvin, the monument is a tool to assert Western values, or at least his version of them. And he isn’t alone. After the removal of dozens of Confederate memorials and other disfavored statues over the past several years, a new class of monuments men is keen to build something tangible to mark what they see as the current era of Western power. These visions are bigger than ever before — the 450-foot Prometheus, a 650-foot George Washington — and inspired by what Calvin calls “symbols of patriotism and excellence and strength and transcendence and power.” In the broader fight over America’s identity and political priorities, monuments have become a proxy for the directional shift of the Overton window.
Ross CalvinPhotographer: Lizzie Chen for Bloomberg
The most powerful figure pushing to build new statues is Trump himself. His administration’s tax and spending bill that became law in July allocated $40 million to build a National Garden of American Heroes — location TBD — depicting 250 luminaries in a neoclassical style, including George Washington, Billy Graham and Elvis Presley. In August, Trump signed an executive order to establish classical architecture as the preferred style for US civic buildings. He’s begun construction on a golden ballroom at the White House and talked about restoring Confederate monuments. Earlier this month, a reporter spotted plans at the White House for a triumphal arch, a pitch for America’s own Arc de Triomphe in Washington, across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial.
In addition to Trump and Calvin, the ranks of the right’s new monuments men are growing: There’s Palantir co-founder and defense-tech investor Joe Lonsdale, who has long promoted “classical aesthetics” through his philanthropy; Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Elad Gil, who wants to “bring back large-scale inspiring monuments”; and Mo Mahmood, a college dropout in Austin who’s attracting backers to build a mega–George Washington monument and plans to unveil a 50-foot version for America’s 250th birthday next year.
Monuments to Western Civ
Traditionally home to libertarian-leaning Democrats, Silicon Valley — and the tech universe more broadly — made a turn to the right during the pandemic, reacting to what many viewed as attacks on personal liberties and the villainization of Big Tech. They found open arms in the MAGA movement, and the two cultures have since braided together. Born from that merger is a hypercapitalistic, hyperpatriotic mashup of Mar-a-Lago regulars and Bay area defectors. Gil, Lonsdale and Calvin are all in industries — AI, defense tech and cryptocurrency, respectively — that are political priorities in Trump’s second term. All three men want to build monuments or advocate classicism to celebrate the current moment, as inspiration for the future or an assertion of Western supremacy.
In December, Calvin worked on a letter with classical architect Richard Cameron that was hand-delivered to Trump at Mar-a-Lago by a mutual friend, neoclassical designer and advocate Rodney Mims Cook Jr. After receiving the letter, which Calvin says discussed the “renewal and beautification and ennobling of our country,” Trump posted on Truth Social, “America is going to start building monuments to our great heroes and heroines again!!!”
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Calvin, who doesn’t actually prefer the classical style and has enlisted a futurist sculptor for Prometheus, sees the Greek god who gave man technology against the will of the Olympians — and was punished by Zeus to have his liver devoured daily by an eagle — as an embodiment of the West’s greatest traits. “Prometheus is kind of the patron saint of what it means to be American,” Calvin says. “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.”
A rendering of Calvin’s Prometheus statue.Source: American Colossus Foundation
In private contexts, it’s common for the ultrarich to commission statues. Mark Zuckerberg had a 7-foot-tall statue of his wife, Priscilla Chan, made, saying he was “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.” Lonsdale commissioned a sculpture by Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart representing the three Greek goddesses known as the Three Graces in honor of his daughters, says Cook, also a friend of his. Lonsdale also commissioned a neoclassical bust of Bari Weiss, the conservative media executive recently named editor-in-chief at CBS News, for the University of Austin, which Weiss and Lonsdale co-founded with British historian Niall Ferguson.
There’s also a long history of wealthy people financially sponsoring the creation of public works, including parks, museums and university buildings. With monuments, though, the benefactors often choose who gets to be memorialized — at least for a time.About a century ago, wealthy investor Paul Goodloe McIntire financed four statues for public display in Virginia to commemorate Confederate soldiers and men who aided in the displacement of Indigenous Americans. In 2017 local officials moved to take down two of the statues, including a bronze of Confederate general Robert E. Lee on horseback in Charlottesville, prompting the Unite the Right rally that was organized by a neo-Nazi, and a separate Klu Klux Klan rally. In 2021, amid the national reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement, all of McIntire’s statues were removed.
‘A Modernist Never’
Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir and the defense technology investment company 8VC, became interested in Trump’s preferred neoclassical style many years ago, when Cook came to speak at a seasteading convention that he and Peter Thiel attended. According to Cook, a former Trump appointee to the US Commission of Fine Arts, initial plans for the floating sovereign community included futuristic-looking structures, which he told the group were “cheap” and “anti-human.” After the talk, Lonsdale approached Cook and asked him to have lunch.
Ever since, Lonsdale has been a financial supporter of Cook’s National Monuments Foundation and an advocate for “ classical aesthetics,” which Cook says are “unequivocally the most beautiful.” Cook started his organization two decades ago to protect existing monuments and build new ones in the classical style, saying, “We were losing something of vast importance to the Western world.” He describes Lonsdale as “a classicist first, traditionalist second and a modernist never.”
A representative of Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute didn’t respond to requests for an interview or comments.
That Trump, Lonsdale and Cook favor the classical style is telling, says Erika Doss, whose book Memorial Mania examines memorials in the context of emotional response. The affinity for classical design calls back to the Roman and Greek empires, she says, societies that adherents perceive to be masculine and triumphant. “It’s right out of the fascist playbook,” Doss says. “Name an autocracy that doesn’t have a neoclassical obsession.”
“I suppose some fascists and authoritarians have good taste in architecture,” Cook says. “Nothing I can do about that.”
Doss, who’s also distinguished chair at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and a professor emerita of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, says Trump’s and others’ interest in celebrating wins is typical of Americans’ relationships with monuments: “We can’t have monuments about shame,” she says. “We need to be surrounded by triumph.”
Triumph is precisely the focus for Gil, the Silicon Valley investor who’s looking for a long-term partner to start an organization he’s calling Monumental. On the podcast My First Million last year, Gil said he wanted to invest in projects such as a large monument near the Golden Gate Bridge as “an ode to the future.” (It’s unclear whether Gil is aware of Calvin’s project. Calvin says he’s reached out to Gil about Prometheus.) Over email, Gil said he’s less taken with Western values and more interested in “universal human truths and forms of beauty,” mentioning as examples Aztec and Mayan temples, the Sphinx of Giza and the Great Wall of China.
“If you look at every society at its peak, they would build large-scale monuments towards progress,” Gil says on the podcast. “There’s a flex side of it, and there’s an inspiration side of it. Where are the large-scale, inspiring pieces of beauty and art in society anymore?”
The US has produced several impressive, large-scale monuments in recent history, Doss says; they just don’t meet Gil’s idea of celebrating progress. She points to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama — a 2018 memorial to Black victims of lynching composed of more than 800 hanging steel rectangles — and calls it a “stunning project.”
Doss adds, “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.”
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.Photographer: Andi Rice/Bloomberg
Tech, Religion, Pyramids
Many monuments built in the US in recent decades encourage viewers to reflect on America’s less triumphant narratives, while others celebrate civil rights heroes. In 1982, Maya Lin’s abstract Vietnam Veterans Memorial challenged what a monument can be, shifting the focus from figurative sculpture to experiential landscape. Earlier this year, Thomas J. Price’s statue of an anonymous Black woman in Times Square forced observers to consider why seeing someone, anyone, depicted monumentally can stir up so many emotions.
But no matter who or what or how something is being memorialized, you can be sure someone is going to be unhappy. Doss says she’d like to see more temporary monuments that rotate in and out of designated spaces, such as the empty Fourth Plinth pedestal in London’s Trafalgar Square. Cook, by contrast, would consign all monuments to immortality.
“You never tear down,” he says. “You add. This is where we were. This is where we are. Never forget any of it.”
Mo Mahmood, founder of More Monuments, the startup behind the giant George Washington statue, says he wants to focus on celebrating America and building monuments that make people feel good. He doesn’t like abstract memorials, like the one in Montgomery. “When you look at my statue, you’ll be able to tell it’s George Washington, and I think that’s important,” Mahmood says, speaking from France where his lead sculptor lives. “When they look at it, I want people to feel a sense of hope and optimism.”
Mahmood conceived his monuments project after dropping out of the University of Delaware during the pandemic. He wanted to create something of lasting importance, he says, and came up with a list of three things that stand the test of time: technology, religion and the Pyramids of Giza. In December, More Monuments completed its first project — a 54-foot statue of an oil derrick, now the largest monument around Austin, Texas. The roughly $40,000 build was funded by 125 people, including industrial venture capitalist Rayyan Islam.
“This statue is a symbol of what happens when the brightest, boldest, most risk-taking amongst us toil away to unleash industrial progress,” Islam wrote in a LinkedIn post about the statue. “Industrial progress itself, as its own pursuit, should always be celebrated.”
The Washington statue still has some outstanding questions: Mahmood hasn’t determined where he’ll put it (he’s eyeing the Southwest), what it will be made of (he’s considering a stainless steel finish), how much the final version will cost (at least tens of millions of dollars) or how long it will take (probably a while for something “designed to endure for centuries”). But he’s already raised $175,000 and had his team build a series of plasters. The most recent was 11 feet tall, Mahmood says; the next one, to be unveiled next July 4, will be 50 feet, with the final result closer to 650, including a 150-foot-tall pedestal.
Why so large? “I like large things,” he says. |
