Not All Nepo Babies Are Trumps

DSCC Chair’s 22-year-old son strikes it big in pursuit of further gamifying finance

This article was originally published in The American Prospect. Read it here.

Last month, Fortune reported that Theodore Gillibrand, son of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), had received a $30 million dollar round of investment for his company, American Perpetual Exchange Commission (APEC). The funding round valued APEC at $300 million and was led by Lux Capital, a venture capital firm whose other investments include the Peter Thiel-backed Anduril Industries and Erebor Bank.

If all you took from that was lots of money going to a leading Senate Democrat’s kid who’s too young to be trusted with a rental car… bear with us as we explain the “economics” of his nascent business.

According to a presentation filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, APEC plans to apply for a license from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to list perpetual futures contracts. Traditional futures contracts are agreements to buy or sell a particular commodity—anything from corn to oil—at a future date at a set price. They’re the basis for the CFTCs formation in 1974 and have long been used by both purchasers and producers of commodities (particularly agricultural commodities like grain) to hedge against market fluctuations. Futures are also commonly used to trade other financial assets like equities or currencies.  

Perpetual futures contracts—often called ‘perps’ for short—have no end date. As a result, they never require one side to hand over the commodity in question; instead, money is made by correctly betting on whether the price of the commodity will increase or decrease. Since 2016, when they were first introduced on the scandal-ridden BitMEX crypto exchange, perps have become one of the primary ways that traders extract profit out of the crypto industry. They eliminate the need to actually own crypto, so anyone can indulge in the get-rich-quick culture of digital assets. They also offer 24/7 trading cycles, allowing users to constantly monitor the prices of their ever-so-volatile assets. As a result, global daily trading volume of crypto perps is in the billions of dollars, often far exceeding the amount of actual cryptocurrency that changes hands. Until recently, perpetual futures existed in legal limbo on offshore exchanges, but Trump’s CFTC has been working to change that. 

Theodore Gillibrand’s APEC has a slightly different use in mind for perpetual futures. The New York senator’s son wants to bring crypto’s most dangerous product to equity markets. Rather than betting on the price of crypto going up or down, perps traded on APEC will allow users to speculate over the value of a stock increasing or decreasing without ever taking ownership. As Cantrell Dumas, a derivatives policy expert at Better Markets, has argued, the high leverage that users are allowed to take out on perps compounded by round-the-clock trading drives “casino-like speculation.” 

It’s also worth considering what equity markets are supposed to do in the first place: facilitate investment by offering returns on capital provided to businesses and projects. If there is no ownership stake, these instruments merely add a layer of gambling on top of what is supposedly critical economic infrastructure.

Who’s Paying Perps’ Pipers?

A 22-year-old graduate receiving a massive valuation to run a company dedicated to “casino-like” financial instruments is quite a feat. Moreover, his ties to both congressional financial regulation and the crypto industry raise a fundamental question about the appraised value of his business: how much nepotism is priced into APEC’s $300 million valuation? 

Kirsten Gillibrand has received hundreds of thousands in lifetime contributions from the crypto industry, an investment that’s led to a fruitful partnership. She has been an integral part of the broader Democratic acceptance of crypto. Particularly, she co-authored the GENIUS Act, crypto’s biggest legislative victory to date, and is one of the few Senate Democrats negotiating in closed-door meetings with the White House over the Clarity Act, the next big deregulatory package. She’s also drawn attention from ethics watchdogs for the suspiciously close timing of crypto fundraisers and the introduction of industry-friendly legislation with her cross-aisle collaborator, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY).

Since their explosive entry into the campaign finance world during the 2022 midterms, crypto companies have spent gobs of money seeding their arguments on Capitol Hill, including nearly $200 million so far in 2026. The result is that crypto-friendly Democrats like Gillibrand have adopted a standard set of industry talking points: new financial technologies are inevitable, some regulation is better than none, and while there are a few bad apples in the industry, “regulatory clarity” would allow the honest ones to shine. 

APEC’s presentation repackages those arguments: “The absence of a regulated U.S. venue does not eliminate demand for equity perpetual futures.” In short, the company asserts that making more of the economy look like a casino would provide more, rather than less, stability. With an industry-captured CFTC apparently approving anything and everything desired by the nexus of crypto-prediction market boosters, APEC’s route forward seems easy. 

According to his LinkedIn, Theodore completed two internships at MAGA’s favorite venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, one in government affairs and one in crypto investing. He also completed a stint as a “Fellow” at Paradigm, another crypto VC with multi-million-dollar congressional spending bona fides. Paradigm’s VP of regulatory affairs, Justin Slaughter, is a former Senate staffer who has served as an advisor at both the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lux Capital, the firm that led the first round of funding for APEC, also has strong ties to the crypto world. In May 2025, Theodore even wrote an article for the Stanford Review—the university’s own on-campus Breitbart clone founded by Peter Thiel—urging Congress to pass the GENIUS Act to create a “U.S.-centric framework” for stablecoins. 

Perpetual Conflicts of Interest

In a recent poll, the Brennan Center found that 62 percent of voters believe that corruption is a “very big problem” in American politics—a claim the Trump administration has bent over backward to vindicate. 

One of the most blatant and visible examples of Trump’s corruption bears resemblance to Sen. Gillibrand’s own situation: Eric and Donald Jr.’s involvement in World Liberty Financial (WLF). In both cases, the parent holds no official involvement in the companies of their adult children. Gillibrand claimed as much when asked about APEC, saying, “I have no involvement in it whatsoever.” But the reality is trickier; there’s no way of knowing whether Trump gives in-person advice to or makes connections for his sons about how to run WLF, just like there’s no way of confirming whether or not Gillibrand offers her son advice or contacts on how to navigate the regulatory framework that she’s operated within for years. And Theodore’s backers surely know that they’re helping the son of a prominent senator; the perception of corruption may be the entire point. Gillibrand is no Democratic backbencher–she’s the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The Senate ethics handbook generally limits conflicts of interest to cases where an individual would themselves benefit, but the spirit of the rules is substantially broader. In describing the body’s ethics standard, Rule 37, the ethics committee observed that the public’s “representation is carried out with the understanding that the votes cast by the Senators and Congressmen are predicated on their perceptions of the public interest and the public good,” and not individual interests. A perception of nepotistic motivations similarly undermines democratic representation, even in cases where the actions in question are legal.

Gillibrand stating that her son is an adult capable of making his own decisions may be true, but it does little to put to rest the question of whether her immediate family is “cashing in” on her stature. Moreover, failure to make strong promises about recusal in matters relevant to APEC also raises awkward questions about Gillibrand’s public support for banning members of Congress from trading stocks and profiting off of insider information on prediction markets. 

According to a February 2026 Marist poll, Sen. Gillibrand earned her lowest approval rating in 15 years. One way to regain public goodwill is to take the issues surrounding her son’s company seriously. After all, relying on the same tools used by Donald Trump to deflect accusations of corruption seems like a re-election vulnerability in a state which is showing its inclination to support progressive challengers against Establishment Democrats.