Here’s a Video of Billionaire Tim Draper Singing About Bitcoin

Lots of strange things happen at cryptocurrency conferences, but billionaire Tim Draper just put on one of the most bizarre performances in some time at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam on Friday.

The first indications that something odd went down at Draper’s talk came when Bloomberg reported that the billionaire investor—who has famously bought up thousands of bitcoins and is a constant booster of the technology—performed what Bloomberg described as a “rap” in the story’s headline. The site’s description of the performance admitted it involved some singing, but stated that Draper had “dropped some rhymes” about Bitcoin. The article did not contain audio or video of the performance.

After viewing video of the performance posted to Twitter, however, I am convinced that this bizarre display is not a rap. It’s barely singing. Really, it is just totally, completely strange.

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To my ear, it lies somewhere between a schoolteacher reading a book to children very slowly, slam poetry, and frankly just very bad singing. To see if my assessment was on the mark, I asked Noisey Canada editor Jabbari Weekes if this qualified as rap in any way. “I would say this is bad spoken poetry at best, dad karaoke at its very worst,” he answered, so there you go.

For all its awkward hoky-ness, though, there is a dark undercurrent here. Draper sings (again, sort of) “We want a neeeew woooooorld ordeeeer” while some in the audience actually join in, which is incredibly weird and just a little scary when you consider that this guy is a billionaire and much of the cryptocurrency industry is a digital casino.

Anyway, uh, what the hell?

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