Taylor Mathis is back in the news. In August, Audacy host Lucy Burdge went after Mathis for Mathis’ DraftKings-sponsored “walking bets” videos, which Burdge called “straight robbery from me” based on her history of doing those. Now, Mathis is being accused of manipulating the $TAYLOR cryptocurrency created around her. And amidst blowback over that, she’s locked her X account and removed references to DraftKings from her bio there.
What exactly happened here? Well, Andrew O’Malley has a useful rundown at VegasSlotsOnline. Essentially, fans of Mathis made the $TAYLOR token based off her likeness, and she agreed to promote it in exchange for 20 million tokens, two percent of its total supply. She started promoting it on her X account (which has more than 200,000 followers) last week, leading to it reaching a $6 million market cap Saturday (which would have her stake worth an estimated $120,000).
On Sunday, Mathis responded to accusations she would “pump and dump” (promote it overall and then sell her own stake, which is a form of securities fraud) the currency with “I know what pump and dump is and that literally can’t happen”:
But the value of the coin quickly dropped after Saturday, as this tracking chart from Coinstats shows, bringing its current market cap to just over $200,000.
Amidst that, Mathis sold her stake for 95 SOL (another cryptocurrency, with 95 tokens currently worth just over $16,000). She then sent messages saying she didn’t want to be involved in $TAYLOR any more. She posted on X that crypto wasn’t for her and that she would donate the money to charity. But her account then bought 34 million $TAYLOR tokens at a new low price of $9,000 (giving her almost 1.5 times her initial stake and a $7,000 profit), and she promoted that she was back in on the coin. That led to yet more people questioning if she was illegally manipulating the market, and to them tagging DraftKings, and to her locking down her account and removing DraftKings references from it.
It’s unclear what consequences there may be for Mathis from this. Awful Announcing reached out to DraftKings for comment, but did not hear back by publication time; we’ll update this post if that changes.
But for the moment, her X account remains private, and that’s certainly going to impact her ability to make her usual betting content. And while this is in some ways even sillier than the “walking bets” controversy, there are far more governmental rules on market actions and insider information than there are on making similar betting videos. So this could potentially wind up being a big problem for Mathis.