It’s a bad headline, but I see where you were coming from.

The article does mention:

It follows news that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has already contributed $1 million to the fund. And Amazon has also promised a $1 million infusion into Trump’s inauguration coffers.

So it was name dropping, but it’s being done as a company, not the individual. Sam Altman is still mentioned as a single and not as a company again though.

I didn’t follow these donation news too closely, but from the headlines it always sounded like they do it personally!?

Really? I’ve never seen a single article that said that. Even this one points out that

Amazon, Meta, Uber, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Coinbase, Toyota, Ford, GM, AT&T, Black & Decker, and Charter Communications are also making donations to Trump’s inauguration fund.

None of these say Zuckerberg, or Bezos, etc… (except for Sam Altman). Seems that it’s companies that are the norm.

What I’m curious about is, according to the article, Tim Apple is donating from this own money and won’t be donating Apple’s money. Why make it a personal donation and not a corporate one?

While others are donating as companies (don’t agree with this either but different subject), none are doing it as a personal donation. As the face of Apple, he won’t get far claiming that it doesn’t reflect Apple as a company, so why not just m make it corporate? Unless it’s for tax reasons?

The issue isn’t that he bought low and sold high, but that he bought his own property from himself to give the illusion that it had value and demand that didn’t really exist. And if he hid the fact that he was the purchaser of his own coins, this would make it even more shady. He didn’t want it to be successful, just to artificially inflate its value long enough to make a good sum of money and then run.

Think like buying a junker car and pouring sawdust in the engine to hide the clanking noise so you can sell it for more than it’s worth. You have artificially made it more valuable in the short term to make money and left the fall to the next guy.

Is it illegal? As this is crypto, not technically due to lack of regulation.

From how it’s (badly phrased) it sounds like he made the coins and then “bought” 5% of all of them (from himself) to make it look like there were people buying it, then marketed it out for others to also buy.

Similar idea behind the whole GameStop stocks pump and dump happened. Put in some money to give the illusion that it’s hot and in demand, and then cash out when enough have joined.