How Trump made over $2bn last year – The Latest
episodePreviously titled “Crypto, Bibles and watches: how Trump made over $2bn last year – The Latest” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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How much money did Trump make from crypto last year?
This is The Guardian.
You know, Trump is selling Trump and his personality, and everyone else is taking on the risk. If they win, he wins. If they lose, he still wins.
Well, you know why I'm profiting? Because the stock market's going up. Everybody's profiting.
Trump licenses image to the sneaker company, just like he licensed his image to the meme coin. Trump has just run roughshod over any kind of institutions that could check him.
From The Guardian's Today In Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hoth. So at the start of 2025, Donald Trump, the US president, announced that he wanted the US to be the crypto capital of the world. A year later, we've learned the extent to which he has made that a reality for himself and for his family. Aisha Dan, you're a Guardian reporter. We've had these figures released on how much Trump has made from crypto and also his other business ventures, which we'll come to. But what have we learned about crypto in particular?
So he's got four crypto ventures, more than a billion dollars that he's made through that. It's a little, it's actually a little strange because this was a mandatory government disclosure where he had to kind of come out with all of his interests.
That applies to every other president.
Yeah, it was a 927 page disclosure where, you know, his four main crypto interests, which include World Liberty Financial, which is a crypto company owned by Trump and family that, you know, sells crypto products. The Trump meme coin and a Bitcoin mining more than a billion. Right. Worth noting here, like Trump was always a crypto president. First term, Trump was like crypto is a scam. But there is sort of the Biden administration, at least this is sort of how I understand it, went hard into regulating crypto, made a lot of problems for a lot of the crypto, you know, enterprises, billionaires, among them the founder of Binance, CZed. And they, in a way, turned to Trump or Trump saw an opportunity to make money by rescuing them, which he's basically done in his past administration.
The start of a very beautiful friendship for all involved, Aisha. It's worth saying that it's not just Trump, but it's also his wider family, right? It's his sons in particular. Yeah. I'm just wondering how he has made all this money from crypto and from what sources, because it's both his own coin, Trump coin, which we gather from this over 900 page disclosure has made him a whopping figure of $635 million. Although I now understand that the coin is tanking some bad news for the Trump warehouse. But where's it all coming from? Is it loans? Is it donors? Is it his own coins?
It's actually, and this is, I think, a key thing for not just his crypto, but for his other merchandise. He holds the crypto. And just to kind of, you know, back up for crypto in the room, what is crypto? Crypto is a virtual, unregulated currency. It's traded in a special way and managed in a special way so that in theory, you know, it's not controlled by a central node or, you know, a federal reserve who can sanction a country or an individual.
What are Trump's main crypto ventures and their significance?
But whatever, virtual currency. Yeah. Now, if Trump were a crypto purist, you could kind of argue that he would hold a lot of his own crypto. And I think indeed he does. But things like the meme coin, it's actually I think there's been reporting that kind of calls into question how much of Trump's meme coin Trump still has.
Right.
What all this mean? Trump charges transaction fees. On the meme coin, right? Just as Trump's family or company on World Liberty Financial, they get a cut of every transaction made. And so backing up what that means, World Liberty Financial can go up or down. As long as there's volume being traded in there, he's going to make money.
He's making money.
You're selling the pickaxes and shovels to the gold rush, right? You're running the infrastructure. I think for the meme coin, he didn't even set up that infrastructure. Now, I don't mean to get wonkish here, but you do need like a blockchain and whatever, blah, blah, blah, to run a virtual currency.
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