By Tom Maloney, Annie Massa and Demetrios Pogkas, Bloomberg
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
A photo of Donald Trump holding Bitcoin is displayed at a Coinhero store in Hong Kong in December 2024, marking the first time the price of Bitcoin exceeded $100,000. Image credit: Bloomberg
On the surface, Donald Trump’s personal net worth doesn’t appear to have changed much since his return to the White House: $6.5 billion on Election Day, $6.4 billion now.
But a deeper look at the data reveals a stark and unprecedented shift in how he and his family have consolidated their wealth and are profiting from their fame, influence and power at a much faster pace than ever before.
Whether applying their brand to real estate projects or associating it with perfume and mattresses, the Trump family has long used licensing agreements to make quick money, compared to real estate developments that usually require years of planning and execution. Now with cryptocurrency, the Trump family has further accelerated the speed of monetizing its brand.
Combined with the loosening of restrictions on overseas transactions during the second Trump administration, it all created a bonanza. Cryptocurrency investments have added at least $620 million to Donald Trump’s wealth in a few months, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which for the first time values the Trump family’s gains from projects such as World Liberty Financial and Trump Meme Coin (TRUMP).
Trump's wealth is increasingly tied to cryptocurrencies and Memecoin. Source: Bloomberg Billionaires Index (Note: Excludes liabilities. Publicly traded assets in the latest valuation are as of the end of June.)
A growing roster of cryptocurrencies and little-known companies that have gained value through their association with Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement are making far more money than the more than $34 million the Trump Organization raked in last year from real estate licensing deals.
Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and Trump's second son, said: "I am extremely proud of our amazing company. We have never been stronger."
While President Trump’s assets are held in a trust managed by Donald Trump Jr., he still personally benefits directly from the success of the Trump Organization, and the Bloomberg Wealth Index attributes his family’s various interests to the “patriarch.” Many of the private investments in which the Trump children are involved are not included because the details of their financial interests are unclear, including Executive Branch, a private club in Washington, Metaplanet, a Japanese hotel company turned Bitcoin hoarder, Salem Media Group Inc., a broadcast and podcast company, Kalshi, a prediction market startup, and BlinkRX, an online drug retailer.
While Trump and his children have dabbled in cryptocurrency — Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have spoken, sometimes alone and sometimes together, at events in Abu Dhabi, Washington, Dubai and Las Vegas since December alone — one of the biggest boosts to Trump’s personal wealth is a homegrown project that’s been years in the making.
Eric Trump (left) and Donald Trump Jr. at the Bitcoin 2025 conference. Image source: Bloomberg
In January, Trump National Doral received approval to build about 1,500 luxury condos on the site, a longtime Trump family goal that required extensive outreach to the community. The project has boosted the value of the more than 600-acre Miami suburb with four golf courses and a resort with more than 600 rooms to $1.5 billion from $350 million, according to Bloomberg calculations.
Meanwhile, Trump's publicly traded social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., has seen wild swings. The parent company of Truth Social, which reported a net loss of $401 million last year, added more than $4 billion to Trump's fortune in October. Today, even as the company seeks to move into finance and bitcoin, Trump's stake is worth $2 billion.
However, the craze for Trump-related crypto projects has provided the family with new avenues for profit.
The most notable of these is World Liberty Financial, a platform that sells its own tokens and issues a stablecoin called USD1, a cryptocurrency designed to be pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The Trump family has profited from the project through token sales, a stake in the project’s parent company, and holdings in its World Liberty Financial tokens.
As of March, World Liberty had sold $550 million worth of tokens. About $390 million of that went to the Trump family, Bloomberg calculated. The Trump family also owns 22.5 billion tokens, worth more than $2 billion based on the prices they changed hands in June. Because the tokens are not transferable, they are excluded from Trump’s net worth calculations, although the company has said in recent weeks that could soon change.
The Trump family reduced its stake in World Liberty to 40% from 60% last month, according to details on the company’s website. It’s not clear who the buyer was or what the Trumps received from the divestment.
World Liberty also launched a stablecoin, USD1. Abu Dhabi-based technology investment company MGX said it would use the token to invest $2 billion in cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which greatly increased the circulation of USD1. According to the Wall Street Journal, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng has been seeking a presidential pardon after pleading guilty to violating US anti-money laundering laws. He currently serves as an advisor to World Liberty along with cryptocurrency industry leader Justin Sun and Pakistan Cryptocurrency Commission Chairman Bilal bin Saqib.
Donald Trump attends the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville. Image credit: Bloomberg
According to Bloomberg calculations, World Liberty is valued at about $1.4 billion, based on the market value of stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group Inc. and the proportion of USDC in circulation. Bloomberg does not include USD1 in Trump's net worth due to its limited adoption, but its $2.2 billion in circulation means World Liberty may earn about $100 million from its reserves this year.
Another memecoin named after the president (TRUMP) was launched two days before his inauguration. When the price of TRUMP rises, the Trump family will benefit: Fight Fight Fight and CIC Digital, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, hold 80% of the TRUMP supply, some of which will be unlocked and sold gradually over three years. Memecoin has no underlying value and trades entirely based on market sentiment.
Trump’s memecoin, TRUMP, has been highly sought after for its ties to the current president’s family, and demand soared after a contest in May that invited 220 of the largest TRUMP token holders to a private dinner at Trump’s golf club in Virginia, where he gave a speech. Sun was among the guests, posting a selfie in black tie on his way to the event at Trump’s golf club in Virginia. Guests dined on filet mignon and seared halibut, while protesters outside held signs calling it a “scam fest.”
Memecoin valuation is difficult, usually because the creator of the token controls the vast majority of the supply, and if they sell, the market will crash. Cryptocurrency risk modeling firm Gauntlet found that a digital wallet associated with the creation of Memecoin TRUMP holds nearly 17 million TRUMP tokens.
These wallets additionally transferred approximately 17 million TRUMP tokens to cryptocurrency exchanges.
Activists from the group Our Revolution held a demonstration outside the Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Virginia, on May 22. Trump's private dinner was held there that day and 220 of the largest holders of TRUMP tokens were invited. Image source: Associated Press
The Trump Organization holds 40% of the total supply of TRUMP tokens, the same percentage as its disclosed holdings in World Liberty Financial. After applying a large liquidity discount and accounting for nearly $300 million in trading and sales gains, Trump's Memecoin investment is worth about $150 million, according to Bloomberg calculations, not including the 800 million tokens that will be unlocked over the next three years starting later this month. At current prices, the 800 million tokens are worth more than $7 billion.
Although World Liberty Financial and TRUMP were originally two separate projects, they are now intersecting in at least one way: Eric Trump revealed that World Liberty Financial plans to hoard a large number of TRUMP tokens as part of the company's crypto asset reserve.
In addition, the Trump family has another trump card in the field of cryptocurrency.
American Bitcoin, an entity spun off from a small Trump investment bank, is planning to become a public company, adding another cryptocurrency fortune to the Trump family. When the predecessor of American Bitcoin was founded in February, a press release said it would focus on artificial intelligence infrastructure and data centers. By March, the company had a new strategy, pivoted to the cryptocurrency space and changed its name.
Bitcoin miner Hut 8 Corp. agreed to acquire a majority stake in American Bitcoin and transfer nearly all of its cryptocurrency mining equipment. Hut 8 Corp. plans to merge with Nasdaq-listed low-cap company Gryphon Digital Mining Inc. to take the entire company public. The Trump family and its partners hold a 20% stake in American Bitcoin.
Bloomberg calculates that Gryphon’s share price values the new venture at more than $3 billion, a figure that seems high by any traditional valuation standard, given that the new company’s primary asset will be the bitcoin mining equipment provided by Hut 8, which has a book value of about $120 million.
But, like many of the assets and businesses that make up Trump’s new wealth, fundamentals are often beside the point.
