Ben Delo: Oxford Crypto King Behind Reform UK’s £36m Boost

For years, Ben Delo cut an unusually low-key figure for a billionaire: dressed in simple Uniqlo basics, living until recently in the same cramped rented Hong Kong flat he had occupied for more than a decade, and carrying a backstory that included being thrown out of three primary schools before Oxford classmates later tipped him as the student most likely to become a millionaire.

Now the 42-year-old British crypto entrepreneur and free speech philanthropist has secured a far more public place in the record books after handing Reform UK an extraordinary £36million — the biggest political donation ever made in Britain.

The sum is four times larger than the previous record for a single contribution from a living donor: the £9million given to Reform UK by fellow cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne, which itself surpassed Lord David Sainsbury’s £8million donation to the Liberal Democrats in 2019.

Delo returned to Britain earlier this year so he could continue funding Reform after ministers introduced limits on donations from expatriates. He accused Sir Keir Starmer’s government of “stacking the political deck against the most popular opposition party.”

At the time, he vowed to pour “millions more” into Reform UK and help create a sizeable election “war chest” for Nigel Farage ahead of the next national vote.

His latest contribution is designed to boost Reform’s finances by the equivalent of £1million a month until the latest possible date for a General Election, with the money delivered in one upfront payment amid expectations that political donation rules could change.

Delo, a gifted mathematician from Oxford, had a turbulent start to school life. One of his three primary school expulsions reportedly followed an incident in which he vandalised teachers’ toilets.

After he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, Delo received specialist support that helped identify and develop his exceptional ability in maths. By 16, he had already set out his future in a school project with striking clarity: “computer programmer. Internet entrepreneur. Millionaire.”

That ambition carried him to Worcester College, Oxford, an institution with a roll call of prominent alumni including Rupert Murdoch, Harry Potter actress Emma Watson and the Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles.

Even there, controversy was never far away. Delo narrowly avoided being expelled from Oxford over internet piracy, an episode that reportedly prompted fellow students to label him “the second most likely to go to jail.”

After graduating with a double first in maths and computer science in 2005, he worked for global tech and consulting firm IBM and then alongside the legendary Russian-born mathematics genius Alex Gerko, one of Britain’s richest men, at trading and investment experts GSA Capital.

Delo soon became involved with the early days of Bitcoin after moving to Hong Kong to work for JP Morgan and becoming fascinated by the technology, regularly, he has said, meeting other ‘geeks in a pub’ to discuss it.

In 2014, he resigned to co found the Hong Kong-based crypto exchange platform BitMEX, which now trades billions in cryptocurrency futures every day, with two American expats, Arthur Hayes and Samuel Reed.

His meteoric success saw him become the UK’s youngest self-made – and Bitcoin – billionaire by 2018, the same year he married his wife, entrepreneur Pan Pan Wong.

By 2019, BitMEX’s annual trading volume had reached $1tn with Delo owning a 30pc stake in the company, which was valued at $3.6bn.

But controversy followed when in 2020, along with his fellow founders, he was charged by the US government with failing to introduce anti-money laundering controls.

They accused the company of targeting American users even though they were based off-shore.

And although at the time Delo pleaded guilty and paid a $10m (£7.5m) fine two years later as part of a settlement, he has vehemently defended his behaviour.

He claims that early crypto pioneers were unfairly targeted and prosecuted with what was a ‘non crime’ while his detractors say the conviction is a further sign that Reform’s funding is coming from ‘dodgy sources’.

Pro-crypto Trump revoked Delo’s and others’ convictions last year as part of a loosening of regulations which its founders believed unfairly stifled the industry.

Delo welcomed the pardon and said he was ‘grateful to Trump’, but he expressed his frustration that it had detracted from his ‘actual achievements and actions’ and called it ‘some spurious blip running a start-up’.

Others in the industry have also heavily criticised what they saw as unjustified US crackdowns.

‘We were pioneers – and I think as pioneers we took the brunt of regulators who didn’t understand,’ he said.

‘We ran our business very straight. I built BitMEX to be mathematically perfect. I took immense care to build a system that never, ever lost a single penny.’

Hand in hand with his stunning financial success and burgeoning wealth came a fervour for defending free speech which he says was triggered by his belief that Paul Chambers, a man who was prosecuted for a 2010 tongue in cheek tweet that he would blow up an airport if his plane was cancelled, should never have been pursued.

Since the landmark case, he has spoken out against the arrest of thousands of people who have been arrested for social media posts calling it ‘authoritarianism’ and has vowed to help prevent the truth being threatened by political correctness.

He has already used his wealth to help fund free speech movements in the UK to combat this including Lord Toby Young’s Free Speech Union and the Committee for Academic Freedom, which campaigns against speech restrictions in universities.

A friend of renowned free speech proponent and academic Jordan Peterson, he has passionately defended free speech and spoken out about ‘an absence of common sense’.

He has previously explained he felt driven to defend something which should be a ‘constitutional principle’, becoming a ‘reluctant philanthropist’ in the process.

‘The Government should be defending this, not attacking it,’ he said. ‘It unfortunately comes down to individual philanthropists to help defend it.’

‘I’d always just taken for granted that as a British citizen, we had rights … freedom to enquire, freedom to think, freedom to speak.’

‘I very much hope that these issues are resolved via a democratic process and we move away from this kind of authoritarianism and policing of opinions and policing of thought. Then I can focus my resources on other, more needy, areas.’

Despite his professed philanthropic reluctance, Delo has in fact already donated more than £100m to fund research and education in maths and science, to support autistic children and of course to champion free speech.

He has funded a series of mathematics initiatives, from the advanced London Institute for Mathematical Sciences to Numberphile, the hugely popular YouTube channel.

He has also passionately criticised Labour’s cuts to advanced maths programmes as ‘short-sighted’.

Speaking to the Telegraph earlier this year, he said he was ‘still more of a maths geek than a business tycoon’.

‘I enjoy the challenge of building things but getting rich has never been my driving motivation. I always knew that however much money I made, I would give the bulk of it away.’

After their high profile UK return, workaholic Delo is also still promising his wife a much overdue honeymoon, having previously dubbed her a ‘BitMEX widow’.

That time may come soon as BitMEX will close down permanently at the end of this month following a strategic review.

For now, he has defended the UK as a ‘great country’ and says people need to ‘believe in Britain’.

And while the focus is on his vast donation to Reform UK which he hopes will indeed lead to greater things for the country, one other recent donation may also say just as much about Delo.

He has apparently donated funds to renovate the staff lavatories at the primary school in Oxford which he once vandalised.