Nigel Farage's crypto friends include Ben Delo who made fortune in Hong Kong

You'd assume the man behind the single largest-ever political donation makes a habit of splashing his cash.

But apparently this couldn’t be less true of Ben Delo. The UK’s youngest self-made billionaire, 42, reportedly enjoys nothing more than using special-offer vouchers to pay for his McDonald’s meals. He once admitted to owning just three pairs of shoes – trainers, leather brogues and flip-flops.

He used to spend weekends dressing up as kids’ book character Where’s Wally. And he converted a large windowsill in his Hong Kong flat into a single-bed Airbnb, to cover some of the rent. Delo came from semi-humble beginnings. The eldest of four siblings, he was born in Sheffield around the time of the miners’ strike to mum Claire, a teacher, and dad Andrew, a civil engineer.

He was the class clown at school, which got him kicked out three times, and he was later diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.

He recalled in a 2016 interview: “The head teacher, when he kicked me out, said he had aged two years in those three months. I was then out of school for the rest of that year.” The family later relocated to Thame, Oxfordshire, where Delo went to comprehensive Lord Williams’s School.

It was here that his dreams of earning big bucks began – he used his home economics classes to make pizzas to flog to pupils and teachers. And at 16, he wrote about wanting to be an “internet entrepreneur, millionaire [and] computer programmer” in an annual pupil review.

This new-found confidence ramped up when he got a place at Oxford to study maths and computer science. Fellow students recall he once turned up to a formal dinner wearing a wetsuit with his gown – the rules stipulated a gown and a “suit”. After short spells at the US Patent and Trademark Office and several hedge funds, he founded the crypto currency trading platform BitMEX in 2014.

Four years later, the Times named him the UK’s youngest self-made billionaire. Things looked bad in when in 2022 he was convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls in BitMEX... but luckily, President Trump pardoned him in 2025.

Once a Tory Party donor, billionaire Christopher Harborne has already given millions to Reform UK over the years. The crypto tycoon is estimated to be the sixth-richest UK billionaire, with a personal fortune of around £18.2bn.

Over the past seven years, Harborne had given more than £22million to Reform, accounting for two-thirds of all funding received by Nigel Farage ’s party. Before he matched Ben Delo’s £36million donation, Harborne’s £9million had been the largest single amount ever given by a living donor.

According to his lawyers, Harborne is an “intensely private person” and has given no public explanation of his reasons for donating. Crypto currency has turbocharged Harborne’s wealth. He is one of half a dozen owners of crypto firm Tether, which is often branded the most profitable company per employee in history.

Harborne grew up in Mosborough, a village near Sheffield.