New Jersey mayor's feud with Jon Bon Jovi giving rocker's charitable efforts for unhoused a bad name
A New Jersey mayor lashed out Friday at Jon Bon Jovi's charitable, "pay it forward" restaurant, claiming the eatery is attracting a problematic number of unhoused people to the town of Toms River.
Mayor Dan Rodrick claims that Bon Jovi's popup restaurant, JBJ Soul Kitchen which operates out of an Ocean County library, is nothing more than a "soup kitchen" that's within walking distance of a school.
"We appreciate that Bon Jovi wants to feed people that are needy," Rodrick told NBC News. "But the public library down a block from a school is not the appropriate place to bus homeless in from all over the state of New Jersey and other states."
Through the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, the "Livin' on a Prayer" singer and wife Dorothea run JBJ Soul Kitchen, a nonprofit community restaurant where patrons pay a "suggested donation."
"There are no prices on our menu," according to the restaurant's website. "Instead, we offer a suggested donation to our paying customers and we ask that you Pay it Forward to cover the cost of those who are unable to pay for their meals."
It has permanent locations in Red Bank, Toms River, Newark and Jersey City and this recently opened pop-up Toms River location.
That temporary spot opened doors in February on Washington Street.
"It is not a restaurant," Rodrick said. "It is a soup kitchen that they put there for the homeless that they're bussing in."
A rep for the famed Garden State rocker could not be immediately reached for comment on Friday.
An attorney representing the Ocean County Library Commission said the JBJ pop-up has a lease that goes to May 23. But the lawyer didn't immediately address the mayor's assertion that unhoused people coming to that location are taxing town resources.
"They're (patrons at the pop-up) not from Toms River and Toms River should not have to bear the brunt of homelessness for the entire county of Ocean, especially when not a single one of these folks are from Toms River," Rodrick said.
While the town has no immediate options to have the eatery shuttered, Rodrick said his legal team is weighing lawsuits that could eventually lead to its closure.
The Ocean County community of about 99,000 residents has a median household income of a little less than $95,000 and is probably best known for its youth baseball.
The Toms River East American team, featuring future MLB player Todd Frazier, won the 1998 Little League World Series.
Free agent pioneer Andy Messersmith and longtime big league pitcher and MLB analyst Al Leiter were both born in Toms River.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had their turns on the main stage ("I truly believe we're just at the beginning. Opportunity abounds," said Trump Jr.), as did the White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks, the Trump advisor and campaign cochair Chris LaCivita, and the White House crypto advisor Bo Hines. On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, a former venture capitalist, gave the day's opening keynote to a full crowd that began assembling at 5:30 a.m. "Thanks in particular for what you did for me and the president," said Vance, explaining that the crypto industry's support was "part of the reason I'm standing here." He added: "With President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House." "The innovators in this room are making people's lives better. You deserve respect and support from your government, not bureaucrats trying to tear you down," said Vance, to vigorous applause. Bitcoin-themed Trump apparel was everywhere. Vendors sold Trump 2028 hats and posters of a hardened-looking Trump covered in bitcoin iconography. With crypto having just come in from the political cold, there was an undertone of subversion to it all. Someone wore a T-shirt that read "Everything I love to do is illegal." Another wore an ivory white suit decorated with the word TEXIT, in support of a Texas secession movement. A company called BitcoinOS was offering a lottery to win a foreign passport — probably from Portugal, though it wasn't yet decided. A number of accountants and financial advisors on the conference floor peddled tax-mitigation strategies, with the sign from Tax Network USA offering the brazen solicitation: "Ask Us About Tax Avoidance." As Trump opened his second administration by pardoning convicted fraudsters while several SEC cases were put on hold, some crypto billionaires found it safe to visit the United States. The Bitcoin 2025 conference featured an appearance by one of those crypto entrepreneurs who had recently benefited from the SEC declining to pursue a multibillion-dollar fraud case it had prepared against him. Tron's founder, Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto billionaire, became the biggest investor in Trump's World Liberty Financial and the largest purchaser of the $Trump meme coin, which earned him a gold watch at Trump's recent gala for the top 220 owners of his token. A peripatetic executive who lives in Hong Kong and claims citizenship from St. Kitts & Nevis (he's also the prime minister of an unrecognized country called Liberland), Sun hadn't been seen in the US in years. But there he was at Bitcoin 2025, where he was applauded on the main stage and photographed with industry figures. Equally feted was Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether, the world's largest stablecoin company, which operated in Hong Kong and the Caribbean for years before recently moving its headquarters to crypto-and-MAGA-friendly El Salvador. Ardoino gave a keynote speech and participated in a fireside chat on the main stage with Brandon Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald executive who handles Tether's accounts, a position he inherited from his father, Howard Lutnick, Trump's commerce secretary. "This year is your first time in the US," said Brandon Lutnick, more than once. Ardoino nodded. 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Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, the legendary hip-hop group, came out for a performance. Rosie Rios, the chair of America250 who, on a conference panel that day, described herself as a "fiscal conservative," bobbed her head as they rapped about blunts and rum. The goldbug Peter Schiff, who, while facing tax and money laundering investigations over his private bank in Puerto Rico, has made a sideline out of media appearances sparring with bitcoiners, sat on a couch surrounded by a retinue of young women. Bottles of iced Moët rested on tables in poolside cabanas. (Schiff, who sued the IRS, has accused government authorities of conspiring to frame his bank.) Bone Thugs transitioned into their song "1st of Tha Month" — a gold-charting, mid-'90s anthem celebrating the date when welfare checks arrive — as a group of women in cow costumes marched out carrying glowing signs that read "Steak 'n Shake" and "Accepts BTC." Above the stage, a large screen lit up with the Steak 'n Shake logo. A half-dozen suited Steak 'n Shake representatives looked on approvingly from behind a velvet rope. This sort of hallucinatory marketing stunt — part of Steak 'n Shake's ongoing MAGA/ MAHA pivot, as the fast-food chain embraces beef tallow and bitcoin — was essentially standard fare for a week filled with constant offers, giveaways, pop culture callouts, and promises of easy riches and financial liberation. Everyone was hustling, selling, promising the world. "Earn Bitcoin While You Sleep," went a pitch from a mining company handing out branded fedoras. "Unlock Passive Income." The built environment, including some people's clothing and the napkins on tables, seemed overrun with QR codes. There was always another bitcoin raffle to enter or party to seek out, and the difference between what was legitimate and what wasn't could be a matter of interpretation. The next night, at a wood-paneled bar on the 66th floor of the Conrad hotel, a crypto mining company called Digital Shovel threw a party with Maxim, the old lad mag. The names of both brands were printed across a blue curtain, in front of which guests and models hired from a local agency took photos. Asked about the role of Maxim in this venture, Scot Johnson, the president and CEO of Digital Shovel, told a group of journalists that he had rented the brand name for the evening. Later, I ended up at a party for the Taproot Wizards, a kind of low-fi, deliberately unserious group of coiners who wish to "make bitcoin magical again." Walking into the psychedelically lit Discoshow venue at the Linq Hotel, I was handed a shiny silver wizard hat and cape, which I duly put on. A bearded man in full mage garb held out his hand, offering what looked like a brown capsule. "Take it," he said. "What is it?" I asked. "It's drugs." "Can I know which kind?" "It's mushrooms." I took it and enjoyed what seemed like the suspiciously familiar taste of a brown M&M. Inside, the bar served free cocktails and cans of Liquid Death water. A few dozen people milled about in wizard clothes, the place emanating a "D&D fans throw a party" vibe. A handful of folks danced to a DJ set in a room so covered in screens and glowing panels that there was a seizure warning by the entrance. There was goofiness and some networking-free fun. No one seemed to be talking about bitcoin. And unfortunately, it was just an M&M. In Vegas, the future of bitcoin was corporate. "Bitcoin treasury companies," publicly traded corporations that are essentially holding vehicles for accumulating bitcoin, were all the rage, as several CEOs took turns paying tribute to Michael Saylor, the tech executive who has borrowed billions of dollars to turn turn his enterprise software company MicroStrategy into one of the world's largest holders of bitcoin. Saylor has encouraged other companies to adopt his "playbook," and GameStop and Trump Media recently announced that they would follow suit. Nakamoto, the company whose name sat atop most Bitcoin 2025 conference branding and signage, is a bitcoin treasury company headed by David Bailey, the principal figure behind the conference. In panel presentations, CEOs described future markets in which most companies would have bitcoin on their books, if not being explicitly devoted to it. Financial institutions and individual investors could then buy shares in those companies, like MicroStrategy and Metaplanet, which are publicly traded, and benefit from those companies' bitcoin exposure, broadening the circle of prosperity. A similar philosophy undergirded the growing adoption of ETFs, Wall Street funds that provide investors exposure to bitcoin without making customers go through the trouble of purchasing actual bitcoins. (These financial firms, in turn, benefit from the fees they reap from managing investments in ETFs, bitcoin treasury companies, and other crypto-based financial products.) "At the end of the day, it's a game and we're all going to win together," said Fold CEO Will Reeves, whose company had recently begun building its bitcoin treasury. "We're going to be the biggest companies in the world," said Simon Gerovich, the president of Metaplanet. Saylor, the silver-haired 60-year-old executive whose self-described "religious" embrace of bitcoin has catalyzed this corporate treasury movement, was one of the conference's chief draws. His keynote, on the event's third and final day, was standing-room only. Wearing all black except for a silver bitcoin pendant that hung below his throat, Saylor emerged to rock-star-level applause. Speaking in his typically craggy voice, he preached a post-cypherpunk prosperity gospel under the unassuming title "21 Ways to Wealth." Acknowledging that he was used to speaking to top corporate executives and politicians, Saylor said he was happy to now be speaking to the people, bringing them the digital fire of Prometheus. "Satoshi gave you an idea worth half of everything on earth," said Saylor. "The greatest idea in the history of the human race." Scrolling through 21 instructive axioms — "master artificial intelligence," "domicile where sovereignty respects your freedom" — each accompanied by an AI-generated image, Saylor told his audience not to "chase your own good ideas." Only one pursuit mattered. Everyone listening should sell or mortgage everything they have, take out loans upon loans, and use it all to buy as much bitcoin as they could as quickly as possible. "Raise and reinvest capital relentlessly — velocity compounds wealth," read one slide. Saylor described how a dentist whose practice brought in a couple of hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue could theoretically — through a series of corporate maneuvers, loans, share sales, and lines of credit — become a bitcoin billionaire. Why aspire to be merely rich when you could be the "first billionaire dentist on your block," he said. A constant on the bitcoin media circuit, Saylor talks in comically overwrought tones about bitcoin's power and perfection. He exhibits the personal commitment and persuasive abilities of the leader of a sophisticated multi-level marketing scheme. Over the past few years, Saylor has raised billions of dollars in debt to make periodic bitcoin purchases, MicroStrategy's stock has soared, and his once criticized thesis of constant corporate bitcoin accumulation is on the verge of being widely imitated. (Last year, Saylor agreed to pay $40 million to settle a tax fraud lawsuit filed by the Washington, DC, attorney general.) "This is a race to capitalize on bitcoin," Saylor said, sounding far more zero-sum than the we're-all-going-to-win CEOs who had praised him hours earlier. "He who has the most bitcoin at the end of the game wins." The crowd cheered. Ross Ulbricht, the speaker who followed Saylor, had attained practically mythological status among diehard bitcoiners. One of the first major dark web drug markets and a transformational event in bitcoin's history, the Silk Road provided it a clear use case: buying drugs online. As one former Silk Road customer turned crypto industry professional once told me, the Silk Road was the greatest onboarding event in bitcoin history. For years after Ulbricht received multiple life sentences without parole, coiners had lobbied for his release, until Trump pardoned him on January 21 of this year. After an introductory video chronicling his years in prison followed by shots of him surfing, swimming, and diving into waterfalls, Ulbricht came out to warm applause. But the crowd had thinned since Saylor's commanding speech — some chairs sat empty — and would get thinner as Ulbricht went on. He tried to rouse the audience with a cry of "Freedom!" and a raised fist. "I'm so, so thankful that we elected him and he is who he is," Ulbricht said of Trump. "He's a man of integrity." However foundational Ulbricht had been to bitcoin's early growth, the movement seemed to have passed him by. In his speech, he acknowledged starting the Silk Road but said almost nothing about why he went to prison, the drug war, or the flawed criminal justice system (some Silk Road investigators were prosecuted for stealing evidence). There were some general appeals to principle, but it was a stilted, overlong presentation by a figurehead who seemed to have been far more appreciated when he was locked up out of view. Ulbricht offered a stem-winding anecdote about renting a secluded cabin, where he planned to grow magic mushrooms for his nascent drug market. He found the cabin covered in seven wasp nests. The wasps reflected some of Ulbricht's most treasured principles — freedom and decentralization. But they lacked another, unity, which made it easy for him to destroy each nest in turn. What kind of unity Ulbricht was looking for wasn't clear. No one seemed as jazzed about Ulbricht's stoic devotion to decentralization as they did about Saylor promising to share the everlasting cyberfire of half the world's wealth. The conference's closing keynote — an appearance by the bitcoin political cause celebre, on the 10th anniversary of his being sentenced to a lifetime in prison — ended with tepid applause and a rush to the exits. In a week of politically infused celebrations, this was supposed to be Ulbricht's moment. There had been a special lunch for him that day, one of many fundraisers since his release. The conference included the auctioning of his prison art and the jumpsuit he wore on the day of his release. "Free Ross," a mantra that had been printed on stickers handed out at every bitcoin event for a decade, had won. But bitcoin's top political prisoner, its once occluded hero, had bored a crowd with abstract talk of freedom and insects. That night, I went to another bitcoin-related party at a nightclub in the Venetian. A healthcare recruiter in her late 40s named Jen, who lived in Atlanta, told me about converting her retirement account to bitcoin tokens and shares in bitcoin ETFs. A DJ played some recent hits while a mix of middle-aged coiners and Gen Z club kids swayed and pawed at each other's bodies. Some women in gravity-defying dresses danced on an elevated bar while velvet ropes denoted exclusive areas, where tables could run a couple of thousand dollars. "I've had such a hard time orange-pilling my friends," she told me. But her bitcoin investments had gone up 140% in the past year. Wasn't that proof of something? She asked if I had done the same. I gave a halting answer about not investing in what I write about and not really having much of a retirement account anyway. She looked at me as if I were from another planet before her face adopted a look of profound concern. "You have to do it." I said I would. Jacob Silverman
