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Ross Calvin wants to bring a towering Prometheus to San Francisco Bay - and he thinks the president is just the man to green light the project. Josh Marcus reports
Saturday 22 November 2025 13:19 GMTComments
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It would be called the Great Colossus of Prometheus.
The $420 million, 450-foot statue - honoring the Greek mythological figure who rebelled against the gods and gave fire to humanity - would rise over San Francisco Bay with a gas-powered, flaming torch in hand.
The home for this colossus? Alcatraz Island — site of the crumbling, long-shuttered federal penitentiary — now one of America’s leading tourist destinations, attracting about 1.2 million people annually. Under this vision, an island which once housed infamous gangsters Al Capone and Whitey Bulger would instead attract visitors with lush gardens and a museum of breakthrough technologies, ranging from the telescope to gene-editing and AI.
And it would all be a gift, of sorts, to the American people from a crypto entrepreneur, just in time for President Donald Trump’s much-hyped celebrations of 250 years of American independence, the latest reminder of how Silicon Valley has increasingly blended with the MAGA world.
That is, if all goes according to the (very ambitious) plan.
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open image in galleryAn artist’s rendering shows the Colossus of Prometheus, a proposal from crypto entrepreneur Ross Calvin to build a giant monument on Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay to the mythological figure who stole fire from the gods (Ross Calvin)And there’s the small matter of convincing the Trump administration to hand over a federally-controlled tourist gem that earns about $60 million a year in revenue.
The man behind this outlandish project is Ross Calvin, founder of crypto mining firm Parhelion Digital. Calvin, who lives in Denver, is a relatively obscure figure in the financial world, with a portfolio ranging from operating natural-gas powered Bitcoin mining rigs in the autonomous region of Kurdistan to working on a perfume line.
His politics are just as all over the map. From one angle, they’re very right-wing. He shares with Trump a love of bombastic monuments, an animosity towards identity politics and Black Lives Matter, a conspiratorial way of thinking, and a sense that many forms of immigration are an existential threat.
Then again, he’s also anti-authoritarian and has got positive things to say about American-style multiculturalism, the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, and the tactics of freedom fighters ranging from first-wave feminists to Nat Turner, who led a famous slave revolt in the early 1800s.
Calvin first began dreaming of the monument in 2018 during a visit to San Francisco. As he drove across the Bay Bridge, he was struck by the splendor of the bay and its aesthetic potential. Just like the 305ft Statue of Liberty on the opposite coast, a monument at the mouth of this great ocean could trumpet American values to the wider world, he thought.
open image in galleryCryptocurrency entrepreneur Ross Calvin sees Prometheus as a perfect figure for an inspiring American monument because the myth tells the story of ‘regime-busting, no-kings guy,’ as he puts it (Ross Calvin)“This would be the most important scene of the ennoblement of man, and of our country, to put something triumphant and beautiful and redeeming there on Alcatraz,” he told The Independent. “How poetic to make it rhyme with the Statue of Liberty.”
The Prometheus statue is just a proposal for now, but Calvin thinks he can get the plans fast-tracked for a meeting with White House officials within the next six months.
Friends of friends have connections in the administration, he said, and Calvin hopes Trump could turn the island, part of the National Park Service’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, into a protected National Monument to facilitate the statue. (Calvin is also working on a private, for-profit fund to support the project, composed of real estate and crypto assets, which he says is already getting interest from big name investors, including in the Middle East.)
Calvin says he got a letter to the president directly through a friend at Mar-a-Lago last December. Soon after, Trump posted on Truth Social: “America is going to start building monuments to our great heroes and heroines again!!!”
The Independent has contacted the White House and Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, for comment.
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open image in galleryConverting Alcatraz into a tribute to Prometheus might involve turning the island into a National Monument (Getty Images)The president’s history as a developer of high-end hotels and luxury condo buildings before taking the White House may also help. “The president happens to be a real estate guy,” Calvin said. “He understands this kind of thing.”
Truly so.
Trump has demolished the White House’s East Wing to build a $300 million gilded ballroom, much of it funded by donations from big names in tech and crypto. He is considering plans to erect an Arc de Triomphe-style monument on the National Mall, while allotting millions to build a sculpture-filled “National Garden of American Heroes."
The administration has also restored historic statues and paintings of figures from the Confederacy, which were removed, and sometimes torn down, during the Black Lives Matter movement.
Even Trump’s slogans have an ornamental flavor these days, with the president frequently suggesting we are living through a new “Golden Age.”
Trump, however, has his own ideas about Alcatraz. The president has called for the government to reopen the decaying tourist attraction as a prison, going so far as to send Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to inspect the island in July.
open image in galleryCalvin believes his vision will spark the interest of President Trump, who has made a concerted push to leave his aesthetic mark in Washington through projects like a new White House ballroom and a proposal for a neo-classical sculpture garden of American heroes (AFP/Getty)Rebuilding the crumbling prison on Alcatraz Island, which ceased to house inmates in 1963, could take years of time and heaps of money. Trump’s prison proposal could cost $2 billion, an administration source told Axios in July.
A seismic remodeling project on the Main Prison Building, aimed merely at shoring up the property’s existing use as a historic site, is set to cost $63.6 million for work lasting through 2027.
‘It’s a message for everybody’
Calvin isn’t the only tech-world figure inspired by Prometheus. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a new AI start-up called Project Prometheus while Meta also plans to name one of its massive new AI data centers after the figure. The myth is clearly having a moment.
The crypto entrepreneur sees Prometheus — who steals fire from Zeus after the zealous king of the gods hides it from humans in anger — as an embodiment of the American ideal of the “pursuit of happiness.”
“It’s a very beautiful myth,” he said, calling Prometheus “the first freedom fighter” and a “regime-busting, no-kings guy.”
“It has all of this amazing meaning for an industrious, artistic, creative people like we pride ourselves on being,” he added.
The tech guys might love Prometheus, but many see the tale as one about the dangers of hubris. His treachery leads Zeus to unleash misery on the human race, and Prometheus is left chained to a mountain where an eagle devours his liver.
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open image in galleryInterior Secretary Doug Burgum and Attorney General Pam Bondi visited Alcatraz this summer, after the president floated reopening the island and once again using it as a prison (X/@AGPamBondi)Nonetheless, Calvin feels that the story of Prometheus, who in some tellings teaches humans the arts and sciences, has “a message for everybody.”
Well, perhaps not everybody. America needs this monument in the first place, Calvin told The Independent across lengthy interviews, because a loose and at times unwitting network of elite financial interests, bought-off bureaucrats, nonprofits, the military-industrial-espionage complex, and activists groups have conspired to suppress the progress of the masses.
Some of these views are encapsulated on a blog, titled “American Colossus Foundation” - which serves as a manifesto for the Prometheus project - and has contributions from Calvin and other writers.
Calvin outlined an ideology behind the Prometheus project that was equal parts anti-woke, anti-authoritarian, and more than a little conspiratorial. He feels movements like modern feminism and Black Lives Matter have devolved into empty “struggle sessions” and “guilting” that don’t create change, while he claims shadowy forces are encouraging mass immigration that often results in people arriving from what he calls “incredibly incompatible cultures to what we value in the West with pluralism and tolerance.”
The entrepreneur insists, however, neither he nor his monument plans are racist, misogynist, or anti-immigrant. He has lived all over the world and sees the monument’s home turf of California as proof positive of the benefits of immigration, he told The Independent.
His argument with Black Lives Matter activists is not over the movement’s goal of ending inequality, but rather the riots and statue tear-downs that sometimes accompanied its protests.
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open image in galleryThe backers of the Prometheus project are working on a for-profit crypto fund to support the monument (Ross Calvin)Rather, he says the overall goal of the Great Colossus of Prometheus is to get people to look beyond much contemporary identity politics, which he feels have failed to served disadvantaged groups.
“It’s the anti-authoritarian thing that I want to provoke,” he said. “I want to provoke that conversation. I think that the authoritarian strain, which is against all of us, doesn’t care about your race. It will use it to target you. It causes more division among us than we ever know naturally.”
Calvin’s anti-authoritarian streak includes doubts about Trump, the man who could make or break this proposal, even though the project has also described its work as “MAGAing Alcatraz.” Calvin thinks the president’s penchant to talk about running for a third term, or calling himself a king, is just trolling, but he sees deeper reasons for concern.
“I feel very tired with the whole affair,” he said. “I feel tired of talking about the Trump family and then the Bush family and then the Clinton family and all this stuff. He might be the end of the gerontocracy, which is really what I’m hoping for. All of these cats are so old.”
Club Crypto
Calvin’s confidence his project will get a good hearing in Washington isn’t just a little Promethean self-confidence, though, or a matter of shared vibes spreading throughout the right-leaning corners of the tech space.
The crypto industry is finding plenty of doors open in Washington these days.
The sector was the largest corporate campaign donor during the 2024 elections, with the lion’s share going to Republicans. Top crypto entrepreneurs, like the Winklevoss twins, are Trump supporters, and the Republican got a 2024 endorsement from the influential venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose firm, a16z, has numerous crypto holdings.
open image in galleryHigh-profile figures in the tech and crypto industries are helping fund a White House plan to build a new $300 million ballroom, the latest signs of the close ties between the president and these sectors, which donated heavily to his re-election and inauguration (Reuters)And the Trumps love crypto right back. The president has promoted the idea of a national Bitcoin reserve, and his sons have launched a string of opaque, ethically-questionable crypto ventures that earned the Trump Organization at least $802 million so far this year, dwarfing the company’s other revenue sources, according to Reuters.
Last month, the president pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a crypto executive who pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering and has past business ties to the Trumps. Binance, which Zhao co-founded, built the technology that supports the Trump-affiliated World Liberty Financial crypto venture. In May, an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm announced a $2 billion investment into Binance using World Liberty’s stablecoin.
The tech world is also in the midst of a surge in macho classicism. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has taken to wearing shirts with Latin slogans about Caesar and building a Roman-style statue of his wife. Top venture capital firms are backing Atlas, a project named after a different Greek titan to construct an autonomous defense-tech hub to “defend the west.”
A ‘deranged publicity stunt’
While the Trump world and the tech scene have converged, some Bay Area critics don’t want to see Alcatraz Island become a monumental part of this movement.
Adrian Covert, a historian and senior vice president of public policy at the Bay Area Council, a policy nonprofit, has proposed a different kind of monument for Alcatraz, erecting a statue of Lady Justice instead of Prometheus.
“America's founding ideal is liberty and justice for all,” Covert told The Independent. “It’s part of the American ethos.”
open image in galleryLeading figures in the crypto world, including the Winklevoss twins, have thrown their support behind Trump (Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)“Prometheus is an odd choice,” he added. “It's a character from Greek mythology. The myth itself is a warning against hubris. Making a monument out of hubris is an interesting idea.”
Gil Duran, a Bay Area journalist who covers what he dubs the tech world’s right-wing “Nerd Reich,” was more scathing.
“It's a perfect mix of phallicism and fascism, and a great metaphor for the state of tech in 2025—burning ungodly amounts of money on a hype project designed to project godlike power and grandiosity,” Duran wrote in an email. “This deranged publicity stunt, which has no chance of being built, is a great symbol of Silicon Valley's failed imagination.”
“Ozymandias would be a more fitting name,” he added, a reference to the ironic Percy Bysshe Shelley poem about a long-abandoned monument to a pharaoh’s eternal greatness.
open image in galleryThe proposal, shown here in an artist’s rendering, has inspired criticism that Prometheus, often held up as a sign of hubris, is a poor fit for a national monument and more a reflection of Big Tech’s ego (Ross Calvin)Even without a Prometheus monument, Alcatraz Island already holds a monumental place in U.S. history, from its decades housing infamous criminals, to the legacy of Native American protesters who occupied the site in the late Sixties amid the Civil Rights Era, helping kick off the Red Power movement.
Much like Lady Liberty in New York Harbor, Alcatraz stands at the entrance to a port city through which millions of people have immigrated to the U.S. More than half of the companies created in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005, for example, had at least one foreign-born founder.
Covert said he’d love to get his Lady Justice idea off the ground, but being from the non-profit sector, he described raising money to build it as “11 out of 10” on the difficulty scale.
Or, as he joked: “Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, to keep with the Greek mythology.”
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