Anthony Pompliano built his reputation as a laser-eyed crypto evangelist. These days, he’s more interested in your brokerage account.
Pompliano, who spent years proselytizing digital assets, told Semafor’s Compound Interest show that he now sees most of the crypto market as a lost cause. “There are a couple of assets or trends in the crypto industry going to the big show,” he said, naming Bitcoin, stablecoins, and tokenization as survivors. “Everything else — good luck.”
Pompliano is a creature of the bubble of the past 10 years, leaning hard into crypto during its hype cycle and now, as one does, pivoting to AI.
But his bigger bet isn’t really on any asset class. It’s on a type of person. He calls them the “independent investor” — digitally native, higher-income, deeply skeptical of gatekeepers, and convinced they can beat traditional wealth managers with the help of AI. This cohort is vastly underestimated by Wall Street: smarter than the industry gives them credit for, and wealthier too.
“If you were a Google engineer, do you think you’re smarter than the average financial advisor? 100%” he said. “If you are an intelligent person who takes the time to actually go and focus on this, you can drastically outperform the advice coming from somebody whose job is to not get fired.”
It’s also the customer he’s building for. Since launching publicly in May 2025, his AI-powered platform Silvia — which is more portfolio analyzer than manager and isn’t licensed to touch customers’ money — has attracted $40 billion in assets loaded onto it by users worth, on average, $2.5 million. Pompliano said regular users have grown their net worth by between 16 to 40% in six months (a period that tracked with one of the strongest equity market runs in recent history).
The pitch is a direct challenge to the wealth management industry, some of whom “hate me. They hate Silvia. They think we’re trying to put them out of business,” he said. But he argues the future belongs to people who want to manage their own money.
It’s the latest shift for Pompliano, a financial influencer who bristles at the term: “Warren Buffett was the original finance influencer, right? He had a newsletter, which he used as his annual letter. He had a conference.”
He also sparred with Liz over whether a good financial advisor is sometimes supposed to talk you out of what you want to do, and offered a more circumspect take on the Trump family’s meme coin than his usual boosterism might suggest, drawing a straight line from presidential merch to digital memorabilia, while acknowledging that politics makes everyone’s brain break.