A Denver-based cryptocurrency entrepreneur wants to build a 450ft-tall statue of the Greek Titan Prometheus on Alcatraz Island. The plan proposed by Ross Calvin, the founder of the American Colossus Foundation and chief executive of the bitcoin-mining company Parhelion, would dramatically change the skyline of San Francisco Bay.
According to the foundation’s website, the proposed monument, The Great Colossus of Prometheus on Alcatraz, would be taller than the 305ft-high Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and serve as a “beacon of optimism”. The statue would be made of a nickel-bronze alloy and cost around $450m. Calvin hopes to present renderings and a formal proposal, including plans for an accompanying “technology museum”, to US president Donald Trump and his representatives by early next year.
Calvin says the inspiration for the monument came during a 2018 visit to San Francisco, when he watched the sunset over the Bay and felt that the skyline was missing a landmark akin to the Statue of Liberty. The project also connects to an idea from Calvin’s childhood, as he told Robert Stark during an episode of his The Stark Truth podcast: he was “sailing past Alcatraz in the Bay and I looked at it and I saw, well gosh, what a crazy thing to have this kind of bummed out, insignificant thing on this island. And it’s a perfect place for a symbol of triumph and beauty.” The statue, according to a post on the American Colossus Foundation’s Substack from last February, “will be built to lift up men’s spirits in triumph and heroism—that creative ingenuity is heroic and selfhood is sacrosanct”.
A rendering of The Great Colossus of Prometheus on Alcatraz in situ within the San Francisco Bay Courtesy the American Colossus Foundation, via X
Calvin sees the Greek god Prometheus—who gave humans technology against the will of his fellow Olympians and was consequently punished by Zeus to have his liver eaten every day by an eagle—as an ancient forebear of the American spirit. “Prometheus is kind of the patron saint of what it means to be American,” he told Bloomberg. “The West is the thing where original things happen, and that’s a very rare mineral in human history, and we have to preserve the social structures that make it possible.”
Alcatraz is a popular tourist destination, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and protected as a national park. To build there, the island would have to be reclassified as a national monument. This process requires federal approval and is likely to face opposition from environmental groups, heritage organisations and the public. President Trump has also claimed he would like to reopen Alcatraz as a prison, which would directly conflict with Calvin’s vision for the island.
At 450ft, the proposed Prometheus would rank among the tallest statues in the world, but well short of the Statue of Unity in India, which tops out at 597ft. The structure on Alcatraz would have to be built in compliance with the Bay Area’s stringent seismic building codes and be able to withstand the Bay’s harsh marine weather, making its construction technically complex and costly. Even if privately funded, the Prometheus project would likely face years of environmental review, legal challenges and public debate before construction could begin. The National Park Service has not commented on the project and there is no indication that the US Department of the Interior has received a formal proposal.
For now, The Great Colossus of Prometheus exists only as rhetoric and renderings—dozens of them, some seemingly generated by artificial intelligence, posted across the foundation’s social media pages, sometimes overlaid with phrases including “Manifest Destiny” and “Man Also Rises”.
