Trump Family Earned $2.3 Billion From Crypto Ventures While Investors Lost the Same Amount

Details

On June 9, 2026, Reuters published an investigation finding that President Donald Trump's family had generated at least $2.3 billion in pretax income from four cryptocurrency ventures since the November 2024 election, while more than a million outside investors lost an almost identical $2.3 billion in the same projects. The reporting, based on a review of blockchain ledgers, thousands of pages of corporate documents, public statements, and interviews, concluded that the Trump family put up little or none of its own capital, instead licensing the Trump name, promoting the ventures, and taking a share of the money investors paid to buy the tokens and stock. More than a dozen accounting and crypto specialists who reviewed the analysis told Reuters the estimates were reasonable.

Within a month, both halves of that ledger were confirmed—and enlarged—by new evidence. Trump's own annual financial disclosure, filed June 30, 2026, reported roughly $1.4 billion in 2025 crypto income, and a blockchain analysis commissioned by the New York Times found that nearly one million investors had lost a combined $3.8 billion on the $TRUMP memecoin alone—well beyond Reuters' all-venture loss estimate. Both developments are detailed below.

The figures in the Reuters accounting are unusually symmetrical. Reuters found the family's crypto ventures out-earned Coinbase, which posted roughly $2.1 billion in income over the same window, and exceeded the estimated earnings of BlackRock's spot-Bitcoin ETF business and major miners and stablecoin issuers. Asked about the findings in a July 2, 2026 CNBC interview, Trump said he was not aware of the scale of the gains and defended them: "There's nothing illegal, there's nothing wrong with it."

Trump family gains versus investor losses by venture, November 2024–April 2026. Source: Reuters (Prinz Magtulis), based on blockchain records, company statements, and interviews; chart by Steve Rattner.

The Playbook

Across all four ventures, Reuters identified a recurring structure. The Trump family risked little of its own money up front. Trump's eldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., promoted the venture. The family collected a share of the money investors paid, and buyers absorbed the losses when prices later collapsed. Experts told Reuters each venture could have been created for less than $1 million in development and legal costs, meaning the gains came almost entirely from licensing fees and revenue-sharing rather than capital at risk.

The model is one Trump has described approvingly for years. "The licensing deals are the best of all deals because there's no risk," he told Reuters in 2016, adding that they are better still because they require no capital.

The four ventures Reuters examined were World Liberty Financial, the $TRUMP meme coin, ALT5 Sigma (now AI Financial Corp.), and American Bitcoin. A separate meme coin launched by First Lady Melania Trump, the $MELANIA token, is the subject of ongoing litigation described below.

World Liberty Financial

World Liberty Financial, the decentralized-finance platform co-founded in 2024 by Trump and his sons, accounted for the largest share of the family's crypto revenue. A company entity, DT Marks DEFI LLC, holds a contractual right to 75% of net token-sale proceeds. Reuters found the project's governance-token sales generated more than $1.4 billion, with an estimated $987 million reaching the family; the reporting noted the family's take was likely higher, citing roughly 3 billion tokens that disappeared from disclosures and were probably sold quietly. Duke finance professor Campbell Harvey, who reviewed the finding, told Reuters "it appears that the insiders were dumping." A World Liberty spokesman said the company does not validate outside methodologies for valuing governance tokens.

Trump's June 2026 financial disclosure later put an official number on his personal share: the New York Times tallied $799 million flowing to the president from World Liberty in 2025, a significant portion of it traceable to the Emirati stake purchase described below.

The $WLFI token carried unlock restrictions that made it difficult for early buyers to exit, and its price fell sharply from its debut. Reuters put outside investors' losses on the token at roughly $674 million. The company disputed the methods used to calculate retail losses.

The $TRUMP Meme Coin

The $TRUMP token launched days before the January 2025 inauguration—promoted by Trump personally on social media ("My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!")—and briefly catapulted to a market valuation near $15 billion, peaking at $75.35 before collapsing. Blockchain data reviewed by Reuters indicated the token generated roughly $1.2 billion in revenue, about $616 million of it flowing to the family, largely through trading fees on the Meteora launch platform; Trump's June 2026 disclosure subsequently reported about $636 million in memecoin earnings for 2025 alone.

The full scale of the losses on the other side of those fees emerged in July 2026. The crypto analytics firm Nansen, in an analysis for the New York Times published July 4, 2026, calculated that nearly one million investors lost money on the $TRUMP token through the end of June 2026, with total losses of $3.81 billion—an average of roughly $3,800 per losing buyer, and far beyond Reuters' earlier estimate of $700 million-plus. On the winning side, roughly 5,000 wallets—largely insiders and sophisticated early traders—collectively gained about $4 billion, and the analysis found that 82.8% of the trading patterns studied showed "evidence of artificial growth strategies designed to create a misleading appearance of market interest." The Times underscored the structural asymmetry: "Mr. Trump profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down. He collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin." TechCrunch and TheStreet carried the findings, and Forbes published interviews with wiped-out buyers under the headline "'I'm Now Broke': Meet The Investors Who Lost Billions Buying Trump Stocks And Crypto". At the time of the disclosure, the token traded around $1.67, down roughly 80% year over year.

The coin's design blunted one common criticism: like $MELANIA, it was marketed as "rug-pull-proof," with the president's and first lady's allocations locked and released on a multi-year schedule rather than dumped at once. As CNN noted, that structure did not make the token a sound investment—only that insiders could not sell everything immediately. In May 2025, Trump hosted a black-tie dinner for the top holders of the coin, an arrangement critics said effectively sold access to the president. Federal regulators including the SEC and FINRA have long warned that crypto assets can be exceptionally volatile and carry a risk of total loss—though the memecoin business also benefited directly from a February 2025 SEC statement, noted by the New York Times, declaring that such tokens would no longer be subject to the agency's oversight, reversing the Biden-era position.

ALT5 Sigma / AI Financial Corp.

Trump-linked gains also moved through public equities. ALT5 Sigma, a small Nasdaq-listed company, raised $750 million by selling new shares and used $717 million to buy World Liberty tokens; Reuters reported that more than $500 million of that purchase flowed to the Trump family through the 75% revenue-sharing structure. The deal gave public-market investors indirect exposure to World Liberty. After Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. promoted the stock for months, its share price fell from above $9 to well under $1, and the company—since renamed AI Financial Corp.—faced delisting. Reuters put outside investors' losses at roughly $675 million.

American Bitcoin

American Bitcoin, a mining venture co-founded by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in 2025 and 80%-owned by the miner Hut 8, debuted on the Nasdaq on September 3, 2025. Shares spiked toward $14.50 on the first day—trading was halted seven times for volatility—before collapsing more than 90%. Reuters attributed roughly $216 million in investor losses to the venture, against about $19 million in family gains, the smallest of the four. Company executives dismissed critical reporting as politically motivated, pointing to the firm's growing Bitcoin treasury and its policy of not selling coins. As of mid-2026 the stock was trading near record lows ahead of a reverse split.

The $MELANIA Memecoin

Less than 12 hours before the 2025 inauguration, First Lady Melania Trump launched her own Solana-based token, $MELANIA. It surged to a multibillion-dollar market capitalization within hours, then collapsed, losing more than half its value within days and roughly 80% over its launch weekend. By October 2025 it traded near nine cents, down more than 99% from an early high above $13.

Blockchain analysts said the pattern matched what the industry calls a "rug pull," in which insiders launch a token, wait for the price to spike, and cash out into the buying of later arrivals. One analysis of $TRUMP and $MELANIA found that 45 early-deployment wallets gained a combined $1.2 billion while roughly 2 million small holders were left underwater—about $20 lost by retail for every dollar insiders earned—with insiders draining liquidity pools that had been seeded with tokens but no paired cash.

An amended federal class-action lawsuit filed in October 2025 alleged $MELANIA was part of a coordinated "pump-and-dump" scheme run through the Meteora platform and Kelsier Labs, naming figures including Meteora co-founder Benjamin Chow. The complaint does not accuse Melania Trump of wrongdoing, instead describing her as "window dressing" who unwittingly lent credibility to the venture, and alleges investors "were providing liquidity to an insider-controlled market rigged for collapse." The White House and defense attorneys did not respond to requests for comment when the suit was filed.

The June 2026 Financial Disclosure: $1.4 Billion From Crypto in One Year

On June 30, 2026, Trump filed his annual financial disclosure with the Office of Government Ethics—a 927-page document submitted under a 45-day extension, with late fees assessed—and it largely corroborated the income side of the Reuters ledger from the president's own paperwork. The filing showed Trump reported at least $2.2 billion in income for 2025, his first year back in office, versus a minimum of $622 million for 2024. Roughly $1.4 billion of it came from cryptocurrency.

The crypto line items, itemized by CBS News, included about $635 million in $TRUMP memecoin royalties, more than $500 million from World Liberty Financial token sales, roughly $65 million from World Liberty equity sales, and $196 million from equity sales of Stablecoin Holdco LLC. One of the largest single components, the New York Times reported, traced to the January 2025 sale of a 49% stake in the family's crypto venture to a UAE investment firm for $500 million—the secret deal described below—which generated more than $200 million for Trump. The Times noted that the memecoin's $636 million alone slightly exceeded everything Trump made from all his other business operations worldwide in 2024, and recalled that Trump once called crypto "a haven for drug dealers and scammers" before becoming the industry's chief operator and policymaker. The disclosure also revealed roughly 21,000 securities trades during his first year in office, including—per a Sludge review also reported by NBC News—327 stock purchases worth up to $12.8 million made April 8, 2025, the day before Trump's tariff pause sparked a roughly 10% S&P 500 rally.

The Guardian reported that the filing set off "alarm bells over conflict of interest" among ethics watchdogs, noting tens of millions in fees from new foreign real-estate deals—$10.4 million from a UAE property, $9 million from a Saudi development, $5 million each from Qatar and Bucharest projects—in countries where the administration was simultaneously making foreign-policy and arms decisions. Unlike predecessors who divested or used blind trusts, Trump placed assets in a revocable trust overseen by Donald Trump Jr., the Wall Street Journal noted, and he remains its beneficiary. Trump told reporters, "I don't get involved in my personal [finances]. We have funds that run my money," and later, "I never speak to any of the people that run the money." White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump "proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world" through executive actions and that there are no conflicts of interest; the White House noted the president is exempt from federal conflict-of-interest statutes. California Governor Gavin Newsom offered the opposition's framing: "He got richer" while "His crypto supporters got rug-pulled."

The 2025 Ethics Agreement

The crypto ventures unfolded against a backdrop of markedly looser self-imposed restrictions than in Trump's first term. On January 10, 2025, the Trump Organization released a voluntary ethics white paper that made no promise to divest and, unlike the 2017 version, did not bar the company from pursuing new deals with private foreign businesses while Trump was in office. Eric Trump, who runs the company, had said he wanted a freer hand this time. Shortly before the election he was blunter still, telling reporters: "The first term we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway... We can't just sit out in perpetuity, and I won't." Presidents are exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest statute but remain subject to the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause.

The agreement did retain one narrow pledge: no new transactions directly with foreign governments, apart from "ordinary course" business. House Democrats and ethics lawyers argued even that limited promise was strained in practice. In a July 1, 2025 letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Representatives Linda Sánchez and colleagues noted the organization had continued to strike multibillion-dollar deals with businesses backed by sovereign wealth funds and foreign governments—citing a $1.5 billion Vietnam resort whose groundbreaking coincided with that country's tariff negotiations in Washington. The crypto ventures pushed the question further, because their largest single infusion came from an entity controlled by a sitting foreign government official.

Foreign-State Money and the Emoluments Question

The starkest example involved the United Arab Emirates. On May 1, 2025, World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff announced that MGX, an Abu Dhabi state-backed fund, would use $2 billion of World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin to settle an investment in the crypto exchange Binance. Because stablecoin issuers earn interest on the reserves backing their tokens, the transaction effectively handed World Liberty—and therefore the family—$2 billion of interest-bearing reserves. MGX is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi's deputy ruler and the UAE's national security adviser.

The Wall Street Journal later reported that the relationship ran deeper and predated the inauguration. In January 2025, days before Trump took office, Eric Trump signed a deal with lieutenants of Sheikh Tahnoon to sell him a 49% stake in World Liberty for $500 million, an arrangement kept secret until the Journal's 2026 reporting. The deal closed four days before the inauguration and included $218 million in upfront payments to entities linked to the Trump family and to Steve Witkoff, Trump's lead Middle East envoy and Zach Witkoff's father; a Center for American Progress account broke that down as $187 million to Trump family entities and $31 million to Witkoff-tied entities. Trump's June 2026 disclosure confirmed the transaction generated more than $200 million for the president personally. The MGX purchase came roughly two weeks before the administration approved UAE access to hundreds of thousands of advanced American AI chips. Trump also pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao—who had pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering violations—after Binance helped scale USD1.

The counterarguments are on the record. MGX told Forbes it selected USD1 for business suitability and "compliance history." Binance's chief executive said MGX alone chose the settlement currency and that Binance gave USD1 no preferential treatment. Donald Trump Jr. dismissed conflict-of-interest concerns, and CEO Zach Witkoff said the fathers were not involved in the business. Still, after the deal became public, Senator Richard Blumenthal and twelve colleagues filed a resolution invoking the Foreign Emoluments Clause; Senate Republicans blocked it.

Senate Democrats Demand Hearings

The congressional response escalated on June 23, 2026, when five senior Senate Democrats—Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Gary Peters, Richard Durbin, and Ron Wyden—formally asked their Republican committee chairs to hold hearings into the secret $500 million Emirati investment. Their letter called the deal "something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president's company," and said hearings should compel administration officials to "explain under oath what they knew and when about payments to the families of the President and his lead diplomat for the region." The senators catalogued administration actions benefiting the UAE after the stake purchase: a $1.4 billion arms sale in May 2025, a chip-export authorization allowing the Emirati firm G42 to receive 35,000 Nvidia chips, and the creation of a "Known Investor Pilot" program the UAE had lobbied for. Neither World Liberty nor the UAE government responded to requests for comment.

As of July 10, 2026, CNBC reported the push remained active and had broadened to Trump's overall crypto holdings and foreign investors generally, but with Republicans controlling the Senate, no hearings had been scheduled.

World Liberty's Partnership With Sanctioned Figures

In October 2025, the administration announced sanctions and criminal charges against the Prince Group, which the Justice Department described as a transnational criminal enterprise running at least ten violent scam compounds in Cambodia and defrauding Americans through "pig-butchering" fraud. The Treasury designated more than 140 people and entities on October 14.

Roughly a month later, on November 12, 2025, World Liberty announced an arrangement with a blockchain network called AB to carry its USD1 stablecoin. A Wall Street Journal investigation reported that AB's flagship "blockchain theme resort" in East Timor had been led by three people caught in the October sanctions, including the resort's controlling shareholder, Yang Jian, and its general manager, Yang Yanming—both designated for alleged ties to the Prince Group. AB removed the sanctioned individuals after the Treasury action.

World Liberty's lawyers said the company had "never had any association or relationship with the sanctioned individuals," had no knowledge of the planned resort when it announced the AB arrangement, and characterized the deal as a "limited non-exclusive technology integration" rather than a partnership. AB said the resort was a separate memorandum of understanding it canceled after the sanctions, before implementation. Neither the two men nor AB has been charged, and reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found no evidence that illicit funds flowed into the resort project.

The episode fit a broader pattern documented by lawmakers. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed asked Treasury and the Justice Department to investigate whether World Liberty maintains meaningful sanctions controls, noting reporting that the company had, over the course of 2025, sold tokens to buyers linked to North Korean state-sponsored hackers and sanctioned Russian money-laundering entities. Federal investigators were also reported to be examining two World Liberty operational figures, Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman, over prior ventures.

Amazon, Bezos, and the Media Deals

A parallel set of payments flowed through Amazon, whose founder and executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Washington Post. In late January 2026, Amazon released "Melania," a documentary about the first lady, for which it paid a reported $40 million at auction—more than 70% of it, roughly $28 million, going to Melania Trump herself—with combined production, marketing, and distribution costs estimated near $75 million. The Journal reported that Trump floated the project to Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos over dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024. The film grossed about $16 million and drew a 10% Rotten Tomatoes score, and critics characterized it as an effort to court the administration; comedian Jimmy Kimmel called it a "brazen corporate bribe." Trump's June 2026 disclosure showed the first lady collected a $10.7 million license fee for the film, plus $6 million from NFT and collectible sales.

In late April 2026, the Journal reported that Amazon executives had held early internal discussions about rebooting "The Apprentice"—the reality show that built Trump's national profile—with Donald Trump Jr. as a possible host. Amazon co-owns the property with Trump Productions and continues to pay Trump royalties on the original, reported at between $100,000 and $1 million in 2024. Amazon said the reboot was not in active development and that any host reporting was "purely speculative." Trump, asked about it, said his son was "good" and had "a little charisma going."

The media relationship coincided with a rightward shift at The Washington Post. In February 2025, months after Bezos spiked the paper's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris—a decision that prompted more than 300,000 subscription cancellations—he announced the opinion section would publish only in defense of "personal liberties and free markets," with opposing views "left to be published by others." Opinion editor David Shipley resigned. Amazon had earlier donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration, which Bezos attended. Bezos has denied that the company's dealings were an attempt to gain favor with the administration, telling one interviewer Amazon licensed the Melania film only because it believed customers would like it.

Ethics Experts and Congressional Response

Eight government ethics experts told Reuters the overall arrangement represents a conflict of interest without precedent in modern American history: the Trump administration directly regulates the crypto industry while his family profits from it. All eight also noted that the conduct is legal so long as no regulatory favors are exchanged for financial gain, and no court has found wrongdoing. Establishing a violation in crypto markets would require proof of specific unlawful acts.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, called the family's crypto business "brazen crypto corruption" and, with colleagues, has repeatedly sought records and investigations, culminating in the June 2026 hearings demand described above. Democrats have used the conflicts to complicate the ethics provisions of pending crypto market-structure legislation. The Reuters report landed during floor debate over that bill, giving opponents fresh material.

"Honest Graft": Historical and Editorial Verdicts

The June 2026 disclosure prompted an unusual convergence of judgment across the political spectrum. Most strikingly, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board—Rupert Murdoch's flagship conservative opinion page, and normally friendly territory—published a July 1, 2026 editorial, "The Trump Family and 'Honest Graft,'" declaring that "The Trump clan is cashing in on the Presidency in big and sketchy ways." The board (this is opinion, not news reporting) wrote that the family's dealings "demean the office" and described them as graft, distinguishing the episode from past presidential-family controversies such as Hunter Biden's by how "brazenly open" the self-enrichment is. It flagged the Witkoff entanglement—the man negotiating U.S. policy in the Gulf co-founded a crypto firm receiving Gulf money—and the Binance thread, warning that foreign actors "are being led to believe they can buy American goodwill or favors" by cutting the Trump family in.

News-side historical assessments reached similar conclusions. A New York Times analysis, "Trump's Moneymaking Run: Unrivaled in Presidential History" (June 30, 2026), canvassed presidential historians and found none could identify another president who entered new business ventures just before taking office and then personally profited from them during his term; prior episodes—Lady Bird Johnson's broadcast stations, Billy Beer, the "Jimmy's Got It" scandal that forced FDR's son from his government post—were smaller, indirect, or ended under public pressure. "It is completely unprecedented," said Megan Gorman, author of a history of presidential wealth, calling the conduct "a betrayal of the American social contract." The Times noted the ventures profited from Trump's own official acts, including the Zhao pardon, the July 2025 stablecoin legislation signed four months after World Liberty launched its own stablecoin, and the SEC's retreat from memecoin oversight. A companion Times analysis, "Trump's Huge Windfall Has Few Known Global Precedents" (July 2, 2026), found no modern Western leader—not even Silvio Berlusconi—had disclosed windfalls of this scale while in office, and reported that experts said the earnings "moved him into an echelon of enrichment more associated with strongmen in Russia and Turkey." Corruption scholars quoted in the piece warned the example undermines international anti-graft norms the United States once set: leaders elsewhere can now ask "why should I regulate my behavior?" when the world's greatest power does not regulate its president.

The framing has migrated into mainstream commentary as well: a June 19, 2026 episode of The Ringer's Plain English podcast ran a "corruption scandal draft" of the administration's second term, with host Derek Thompson asserting—as opinion, while noting some conservative commentators agreed—that "this is the most corrupt administration in American history."

Company and White House Response

World Liberty Financial disputed the loss figures and defended its business as a private American fintech company. Spokesman Gautier Lemyze-Young told Reuters it was wrong to characterize a private enterprise's activities as a public conflict. The White House did not engage the specific findings; spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a written statement that "all actions of President Trump and his administration are in the interests of the American people," and the administration has said Trump has never engaged in conflicts of interest, arguing that his sons run the businesses. Trump has attributed his rising net worth to a strong stock market, said of his finances "I never speak to any of the people that run the money," and, in the July 2 CNBC interview, said there was nothing wrong with the crypto gains.

Some crypto-industry commentators have argued the losses reflect the inherent volatility of speculative tokens rather than any scheme, and that buyers ignored years of regulatory warnings. As Newsweek observed, a speculator who bought a president-branded token after such warnings "has a hard time arguing the house owed him a win." Reuters, the Times, and Forbes have documented buyers across the political spectrum—many of them Trump's own supporters—some of whom continue to defend the president even after losing their savings, and others who describe the experience as a pump-and-dump.

Status

As of mid-July 2026, the four ventures remained in operation, their tokens and shares trading well below their peaks—$TRUMP near $1.67, down about 80% year over year—with large blocks of insider tokens locked in contracts that expire around the end of Trump's term. Trump's own disclosure had confirmed roughly $1.4 billion in 2025 crypto income within a $2.2 billion year, and the Nansen analysis had put retail losses on the $TRUMP coin alone at $3.8 billion across nearly a million investors. No enforcement action had been brought, litigation over the $MELANIA token was ongoing, and Senate Democrats' demand for hearings into the $500 million Emirati investment remained pending without a scheduled hearing in the Republican-controlled chamber. The administration and the companies maintained that the ventures are lawful private businesses in which the president plays no operational role.