A dispute involving non-fungible tokens, a minor-league basketball operation, the rapper Ice Cube and President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Denmark appears to have been resolved.
U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Ken Howery exchanged six figures worth of NFTs for equity in rapper Ice Cube’s Big3 basketball league as part of a settlement reached earlier this year after the company was accused of deceptive marketing, according to previously unreported financial documents.
Howery, who served as the ambassador to Sweden in the first Trump administration, co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others and has continued to make sizable personal financial trades while in public service.
He is also a “premier” investor in Big3, the 3-on-3 basketball league founded in 2017 by Ice Cube and Jeff Kwatinetz, Cube’s longtime business partner, per an October presentation prepared for investors.
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In 2022, Big3 offered NFTs — a form of digital investment asset — tied to each of its teams in two tiers: “gold” and “fire.”
Fire-tier NFTs sold at $25,000 apiece. As advertised at the time, owners of those NFTs would have a say in the sale of the associated team and would share in 40% of the proceeds should their team be sold.
Howery owned between $100,001 and $250,000 worth of the fire-tier NFTs. The State Department and the Embassy of Denmark did not respond to requests for comment.
After four Big3 teams were sold, the company was accused of stiffing fire-tier NFT owners by renaming the teams and calling the originals “on hiatus” so it wouldn’t have to pay the NFT owners. A proposed class-action lawsuit from two owners of fire-tier NFTs accused the company of “deceptive, fraudulent, and illegal marketing.”
The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, told Front Office Sports at the time that the lawsuit was “a classic nuisance suit for an asset class that has lost all value, brought in an effort to extort the BIG3.”
The lawsuit was later replaced by individual arbitration. In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in October, the company said it had “entered into settlement agreements with two NFT purchasers” in 2025 and made two other settlements in the first six months of 2026.
Howery exchanged his fire-tier NFTs for units of Big3 HoldCo LLC as part of a “settlement” on Aug. 19, according to federal records maintained by the independent Office of Government Ethics.
Big3 is currently pursuing a merger with the company Graf Global, and the units are set to become stock of the combined company, Halfcourt Holdco, Inc.
Howery is among the wealthiest members of a Trump administration filled with wealthy individuals.
In August alone, Howery reported selling between $5 million and $25 million worth of Airbnb stock and between $1 million and $5 million worth of Object Dash, according to federal records reviewed by The Washington Sun. He also bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of The Boring Company, which was founded by Musk.
As part of his confirmation, Howery was forced to sell his shares of Berkshire Hathaway, Palantir, Planet Labs and Tesla. His sale of 2,138,627 shares of Palantir was likely worth upward of $340 million.
Howery was one of 10 donors who gave $1 million or more to pro-Trump political committees before Trump nominated them for an ambassadorship in 2025 or 2026.
When Howery came before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing in May 2025, he was introduced with praise from Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas. Howery had donated to both, along with eight other members of the committee.
The committee passed up its opportunity for in-person questioning of Howery.
“Ordinarily, what we do is we move to a round of questions at this point, but I’m told that everybody’s got other things going on, so you’re going to be spared that,” Chairman Jim Risch said.
In December, Denmark summoned Howery to Copenhagen after Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry was named Greenland envoy and said online that he sought “to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”
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