Four years ago, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was treated as a heretic when he insisted on leaving politics out of work. Now he looks prophetic.

In September 2020, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase, did something unthinkable in Silicon Valley: he said there would be no politics at his company.

This was right after the summer of George Floyd and Covid lockdowns and microaggressions in the workplace—when companies as conventional as Nordstrom and IBM were all of a sudden issuing official statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and established financia