Kraken CEO Jesse Powell Is One of the Richest People in Crypto

Employees at cryptocurrency exchange Kraken reportedly have until Monday, June 20 to agree with the company’s “libertarian philosophical values” and commit to “diversity of thought” or resign. Kraken CEO Jesse Powell issued the ultimatum during a June 1 meeting, The New York Times reports. Powell has a net worth estimated at $500 million.

Powell presented Kraken employees with a 31-page culture document outlining the company’s values and told them that if they disagreed, they could quit, the Times reported on June 15 after receiving internal documents from the company. Employees who opted to quit would receive four months' pay as long as they agreed to never work for Kraken again, the Times reports.

According to the Times, Powell has ignited a culture war among employees and made “hurtful” comments regarding women, gender identity, and personal pronouns.

In a June 15 Twitter thread Powell wrote in response to the Times article, he states that the culture document, titled "Kraken Culture Explained," came about after some employees started focusing on “minor slights” and “first world problems.”

“I think we've developed some really thoughtful policies that might not appease woke activists but work for the other 99 percent of the world,” Powell wrote on Twitter.

Powell said on Twitter that only 20 of Kraken’s 3,200 employees aren’t on board with the cultural policies. “...20 unhappy people can sap the productivity out of another 400 with little effort,” Powell tweeted.

At a time when cryptocurrencies have tanked, and many crypto companies are laying off employees, Kraken is hiring. A recent blog post said the company has 500 roles it’s looking to fill. The ideal “Krakenite” is “thick-skinned and well-intentioned,” the blog post states.

“If nobody is ever offended, we either don’t have enough diversity of thought or we don’t have enough transparency in communication. We recognize that hurt feelings are inevitable in a global organization that is optimizing for team outcomes above individual sentiment,” the blog post says.

Kraken is one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, second only to Coinbase. Powell co-founded the company with Thanh Luu in 2011. At the time, Powell was working on security issues for the now-defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox. He started working on Kraken as a possible replacement for Mt. Gox if it shut down, which it did in 2014.

Kraken officially launched in 2013 and offers Bitcoin, litecoin, and euro trades. Powell is seen as a Bitcoin pioneer, proponent of cryptocurrencies, and opponent of government regulation of the crypto market. In 2021, Entrepreneur named him one of the 50 Richest People in Crypto.