Why Was Jack Dorsey Wearing a “Satoshi” T-Shirt at the Super Bowl?

The 2024 Super Bowl featured many celebrity spectators, from Taylor Swift rooting for her Kansas City Chiefs tight end boyfriend Travis Kelce, to Paul Rudd, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé and Jay-Z with the power couple seated near the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter (now known as X) Jack Dorsey.

On the social media platform Dorsey co-founded, it was his T-shirt that soon became the subject of chatter. The tee in question featured the Nirvana smiley face logo with text that read “Satoshi.”

Dorsey’s shirt referenced Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous figure who claims to have created Bitcoin. (Incidentally, the entrepreneur wore a similar shirt to last year’s big game, as seen in the above photo, but it didn’t seem to create as much of a stir.) Dorsey has often championed the cryptocurrency. In 2021, Dorsey announced that his financial technology company Block, Inc. would incorporate a “hardware wallet” for bitcoin. At the time, he wrote on Twitter, “Bitcoin is for everyone. It’s important to us to build an inclusive product that brings a non-custodial solution to the global market.”

As reported by The Street, a November 2023 shareholder letter from Block mentioned that the company experienced a major increase in its bitcoin revenue during its third quarter through its payment service Cash App, which lets users buy and sell bitcoin.

“Cash App generated $45 million of bitcoin gross profit in the third quarter of 2023, up 22 percent year over year. The total sale amount of bitcoin sold to customers, which we recognize as bitcoin revenue, was $2.42 billion, up 37 percent year over year. The year-over-year increase in bitcoin revenue and gross profit was driven by an increase in both the average market price of bitcoin and the quantity of bitcoin sold to customers,” read the shareholder letter.

Dorsey and Jay-Z previously teamed up on the Bitcoin Academy, an educational initiative available to the residents of Marcy Houses, the New York City public housing complex where the rapper grew up.