Here's How Trump Made An Estimated $1 Billion On Crypto

Forbes

2 days ago

Donald Trump is cashing in on crypto. Over the last nine months, beginning slightly before the election, he has stirred up new ventures, new coins, new noise. All of it makes the president money, but how much? About $1 billion, according to Forbes' calculations, lifting his net worth to an estimated $5.6 billion.
Crypto has done more than just make Trump richer—it has also provided liquidity that the president desperately needed. A year ago, he was short on cash, with about $400 million on his balance sheet and more than $500 million in legal judgments against him, the vast majority from a fraud case he lost (and is currently appealing). Now, however, Trump holds roughly $900 million of liquid assets, about half of which come from crypto ventures.
There are hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, more on the way. World Liberty Financial, one of Trump's ventures, is only just beginning to ramp up. Meanwhile, his memecoin, a nonsensical cryptocurrency that landed right before the inauguration, is beginning to release unlocked tokens to Trump and his partners. So far, they've gotten an estimated 8% of their allotment. With the other 92% still coming, it's little wonder why the president is doing things like holding a private dinner for people willing to purchase his cryptocurrency.
'The team that's helping him is actually pretty savvy,' says Jeff Dorman, the chief investment officer at digital-asset firm Arca. 'They know that you have to continue to add features to give it value.' In other words, the dinner that scandalized Washington may have only been an appetizer.
Crypto insiders are now speculating about what Trump might offer his investors next. 'The Trumps opened up a new club in D.C.—maybe you get exclusive access there,' suggests Dylan Bane, an analyst with the crypto firm Messari. 'Maybe you get some kind of access to Mar-a-Lago. You know, any of the Trumps' hotels or resorts or golf courses—maybe you get access there. Maybe you get special rights to invest in other Trump ventures. … The possibilities are endless.'
Especially with a president who has so few qualms about using power to turn a profit.
Trump's entry into crypto started with absurdity. 'MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT!' he posted in December 2022 on Truth Social, another business that allows him to capitalize on politics. 'My official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection is here!' An image embedded in the post showed Trump dressed as a superhero, a red-white-and-blue cape over his back and a gold title belt around his waist. 'GET YOUR CARDS NOW!' he wrote. 'Only $99 each!' Even Trump's most ardent supporters sneered. 'Sheer insanity,' said former White House deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka. 'I can't do this anymore,' added onetime strategist Steve Bannon.
Digital-asset obsessives, however, loved it. They snapped up $4.4 million of the cards in a day, leading to additional rounds of sales. Trump, who had a licensing deal to shill the nonsense, received at least $7 million in cash and crypto. He also came away with something more valuable—an understanding that crypto, an industry he had previously mocked as 'highly volatile and based on thin air,' could provide him with truckloads of money.
Leading up to the 2024 election, Trump launched another endeavor, World Liberty Financial, taking to Truth Social to unveil the decentralized-finance project. 'I promised to Make America Great Again, this time with crypto,' he declared. '#WorldLibertyFi is planning to help make America the crypto capital of the world!' Or, at least to make Trump a few bucks. The project started by hawking a bunch of tokens that promised no share of future profits.
A 'gold' paper detailed why the tokens were a good deal—at least for Trump. After $30 million of token sales, Trump's company would apparently keep 75% of everything else. Few people showed up to buy the tokens initially. Then Trump won the election, and a crypto hypester named Justin Sun, who happened to be facing charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission, shelled out $30 million, setting up Trump to receive a cut of every other dollar invested in the tokens. Sun announced another $45 million investment on Jan. 19, one day before Trump reclaimed the presidency. Others joined in, eventually buying a total of $550 million worth of tokens, pushing an estimated $390 million in Trump's direction. The president walked away with $246 million after taxes, according to Forbes' calculations.
Days before he assumed office, Trump announced a new memecoin, $TRUMP, with fine print warning buyers that it was 'not intended to be … an investment opportunity.' Lots of people invested nonetheless, allowing Trump and his partners to shake loose $350 million in trading fees and dollar-tied crypto, according to the firm Chainalysis. Trump's exact stake in that venture remains unclear. If Trump took 90% of the money flowing to him and his partners, similar to how he set up Truth Social's parent company, he could have received a $315 million windfall.
That's about twice as much as Trump's entire real-estate empire generated in operating earnings during the most profitable year of his first term.
The crypto industry dumped well over $100 million into the 2024 election, recognizing that its borderless currencies were, in fact, very reliant on government decision-making. By releasing his own memecoin, Trump signaled that he had no plans to police the party—and, in fact, wanted to be at the center of the revelry. Mania spread through the nation's capital, with a crypto ball inside the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium leading up to the inauguration, attended by industry luminaries like Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong and cultural icons like Snoop Dogg. 'It's time to celebrate everything we stand for,' posted the president-elect, 'WINNING!'
Trump's estimated $315 million memecoin haul, it turned out, was just the beginning. The president and his partners initially released 200 million tokens, but they structured things so they would eventually receive another 800 million down the road. Locked up out the outset, those coins began to unlock in mid-April, boosting the president's net worth. So far, Trump and his partners have freed up an estimated 64 million tokens, or 8% of their eventual stash.
Trump's memecoin is currently trading at $11, which would suggest that the recently unlocked tokens are worth roughly $700 million. But industry insiders have questions about whether someone—Trump or anyone else—could sell 64 million tokens for that much money, given that there may not be enough interest to buy all of it. One way of measuring the size of the market is to look at the total value of the 200 million coins released at the outset, which are now worth a cumulative $2.2 billion.
To account for possible dilution, Forbes divided that $2.2 billion market cap by the estimated 264 million tokens that can now be freely traded, yielding an implied value of $525 million for the recently unlocked tokens. Tack on a 10% discount, as Forbes typically does for assets with questionable liquidity, and the stash might be worth $475 million. If Trump owns 90%, his personal holdings would amount to roughly $430 million. More than $3 million of additional tokens unlock every day.
Amid all this financial complexity, it can be easy to miss what Donald Trump is really selling: the presidency. After all, before he won the 2024 election, his memecoin did not exist and World Liberty Financial looked about as promising as Trump Steaks.
But roughly a month ago, Eric Trump, who runs the Trump Organization while his dad serves in office, took the stage at a conference in Dubai. Zach Witkoff, whose father Steve Witkoff testified on the president's behalf at his fraud trial and now serves in his administration, leaned back in a chair next to Eric. Interviewing the two heirs on stage was Justin Sun, the mogul who pumped money into World Liberty shortly after the election.
Facing a crowd of crypto enthusiasts, the moment marked something of a coming-out party for World Liberty Financial. The venture had recently launched a stablecoin named USD1. Like other stablecoins, USD1 ties to the dollar and allows investors to move in and out of cryptocurrencies without worrying too much about volatility. It's not clear what USD1 offers that is unique relative to other stablecoins, other than its connection to the president. 'Everybody can mint a stablecoin,' explains Matt Zhang, the founder of digital-asset firm Hivemind. 'The difficult part is how you drive adoption.'
For Trump, a man who has always had a knack for drawing a crowd, stablecoins are easy money. Investors hand over dollars and then issuers, like World Liberty, create a blockchain-based digital version and typically invest the proceeds in Treasury bills, as a reserve. However, unlike banks that offer interest on deposits, stablecoin issuers often keep all the income they make from investments like Treasurys. Thus, the more people Trump gets to use his new stablecoin, the more money his World Liberty earns.
'We have been through the amazing journey,' smiled Sun, who spent his early years in China and picked up some English watching 'The Apprentice.' 'What's the next?' Witkoff made an announcement: a firm created by the president of the United Arab Emirates planned to use the Trump family coin to make a $2 billion investment in Binance, a major crypto exchange (that was also facing SEC charges, which the commission dropped last week). The total market cap of Trump's stablecoin now measures $2.2 billion. If World Liberty can earn 4% in interest annually, it will bring in about $90 million.
It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to wonder if there's some sort of corrupt deal going on. 'You don't need to use a specific stablecoin—like $1 is $1,' says Bane, the analyst. 'So if you do use one, there's probably an underlying motive.'
Collecting tribute provides nice cash, but it's not the most transferrable business model. However, if World Liberty were valued similarly to other stablecoin issuers, it might be worth roughly $125 million today. Assuming the Trump family, which appears to control a 60% stake, splits its share in the same way it divvied up its old D.C. hotel, the president's personal interest could be worth as much as $60 million.
World Liberty Financial, the Trump Organization and the White House did not respond to a list of questions about the president's crypto endeavors. Last month, however, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt rebuked a journalist who suggested there might be something toxic in his cocktail of business and politics. 'It's absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,' Leavitt declared. 'This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country.'
In fact, the president didn't give it all up. He did just the opposite. He maintained ownership of his old business empire while creating new ventures to capitalize on his second term.
Keeping the party raging will require some salesmanship. That's good news for the Trump family, which mastered the art of promotion generations ago, when Donald's father Fred figured out how to use newspapers to conjure up excitement for real-estate projects. The crypto landscape is full of promoters with tricks for propping up tokens, such as handing out free crypto by surprise.
Because Trump and his partners are set to control 800 million of the eventual 1 billion $TRUMP memecoins, they could certainly afford to give away a handful of tokens as a way of stoking interest. World Liberty Financial, in fact, said Wednesday that it doled out $4 million of USD1. But Trump, the greatest salesman in American history, can also offer one-of-a-kind prizes, like the gala dinner for his top memecoin holders. 'I don't think there's ever been a big, formal dinner of community members just for holding tokens,' says Bane. 'That's unprecedented.'
Ethics aside, there's some business genius to all of this. As Dorman, Arca's chief investment officer, sees it, people buy things for three reasons: (1) future profits, like a cash-flowing business (2) utility, like a hunk of steel and (3) coolness, like a baseball card. At the outset, Trump's coin seemed dependent on the 'cool' factor. But by hosting a dinner, Trump added some utility to his coin. The more goodies Trump offers, the more his coin begins to look like a real investment. 'If you start adding utility functions and financial functions, then you can no longer really call it a memecoin,' Dorman says. 'This is the first memecoin of any substance that has tried to do stuff like this.'
Anyone familiar with how political campaigns raise money knows that some people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million, to have dinner with a politician. In cryptoland, where absurdities pile on top of each other, investors are evidently willing to hand over multiple millions for such perks. Such an obvious scheme of self-enrichment draws plenty of negative coverage. But Trump has long benefitted, in both politics and business, from a willingness to do things that would embarrass almost anyone else.
The crypto community, or at least a sizeable portion of it, couldn't care less about the moral issues embedded in all of this. In fact, the belief that Trump regards ethics as little more an annoyance might actually prop up the value of his crypto ventures. If people think Trump operates with no boundaries, they might dream up all sorts of potential benefits they could receive for buying the president's crypto. Will the believers actually reap big returns on their investments? 'The gala is a high bar to pass,' says Bane. 'But, you know, it's possible. Like, it is the Trumps, right? They're kind of sensational people.'