Crypto Brought Trump a Huge Windfall, Even as Many Investors Lost Big

 

Melania Trump, the first lady, pulled in about $6 million last year in sales of her memecoin.

Crypto Brought Trump a Huge Windfall, Even as Many Investors Lost Big

 

President Trump and his family reaped vast financial rewards from a memecoin that generated losses for hundreds of thousands of investors.

 

President Trump amassed enormous wealth during the first year of his second term, with $636 million of it coming from his cryptocurrency.

 

Eric Lipton Andrea Fuller David Yaffe-Bellany

By Eric LiptonAndrea Fuller and David Yaffe-Bellany

Eric Lipton covers the Trump Organization. Andrea Fuller is a reporter specializing in data analysis. David Yaffe-Bellany covers cryptocurrencies.

 

July 1, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/us/politics/trump-crypto-memecoin-world-liberty.html

 

A large chunk of the $2 billion haul President Trump took in last year came as hundreds of thousands of his fans and other investors bet on a speculative cryptocurrency called $TRUMP, hoping its value would soar with his return to the White House.

 

But while Mr. Trump amassed an eye-popping $636 million from the cryptocurrency, known as a memecoin, many of his followers who heeded his call to purchase the coin came out losers.

 

That outcome, documented by an independent analysis of trades and fees paid out from $TRUMP token sales, is drawing renewed attention this week, as Mr. Trump for the first time has detailed the extraordinary $1.4 billion in revenue he secured just from the cryptocurrency industry since he returned to the White House.

 

The president’s 927-page financial disclosure showed how Mr. Trump and his family reaped huge financial rewards in 2025 through his money-losing Trump Media venture and a separate cryptocurrency firm called World Liberty Financial, even as routine investors suffered vast losses.

 

He also amassed hundreds of millions through deals that involved foreign governments or corporations with agenda items pending before the Trump administration.

 

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump dismissed questions about how much money he had made after returning to the White House, suggesting that he left personal financial decisions related to his investments to others.

 

“I don’t know if I had a better career in politics or business,” Mr. Trump said as he was about to board his new Air Force One jet donated by the government of Qatar with his two oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., looking on. “But I had a great career in business. And you saw the cash.”

 

The memecoin, which features an image of Mr. Trump pumping his fist the way he did after a 2024 assassination attempt, has no intrinsic value itself. Instead, it was a bet on the aura around Mr. Trump and the idea that the coin’s fortunes would rise with his presidency.

 

In a way, Mr. Trump’s cryptocurrency windfall is a reflection of the speculative nature of the nascent industry, in which executives behind these often highly volatile ventures are at times able to generate huge profits at the expense of smaller investors, who often lose vast sums on experimental coins.

 

Former federal financial regulators said Mr. Trump has taken that to a new extreme, structuring his crypto ventures so he always made money on the front end, according to disclosures from the companies, no matter what happened to the business in the long run.

 

“It is hard to wrap your head around that the president of the United States would engage in this level of self-enrichment at the expense of so many of his supporters,” said Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner who now studies cryptocurrency issues at Duke University. “This is a president of the United States who has made more money off crypto since he took office than he made in any prior year in his entire business career.”

 

The White House, in a statement Wednesday, rejected the suggestion that Mr. Trump is exploiting his followers.

 

“All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in the statement. “Neither the president nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”

 

As of the middle of last year, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm, 58 investors in the $TRUMP coin had made profits in excess of $10 million, totaling an estimated $1.1 billion — most of them early traders who got out before the coin crashed in value. At the same time, some 764,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money on $TRUMP, the Chainalysis data shows.

 

But every time $TRUMP was traded, the president and his partners collected transaction fees, which along with other revenues from the coin totaled hundreds of millions of dollars, his financial disclosure shows.

 

David Wachsman, a spokesman for World Liberty Financial, called the venture a successful one and he noted that “tens of thousands of early supporters” are still “in the black even as overall market conditions have evolved” since the decline in cryptocurrency markets since last fall.

 

Bill Zanker, Mr. Trump’s partner on the $TRUMP memecoin and a longtime associate, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

 

Separately, Melania Trump, the first lady, pulled in about $6 million last year in sales of her memecoin, which was much less successful than her husband’s.

 

Mr. Trump’s annual report shows that he earned an additional $799 million from World Liberty, including a large share when the government of the United Arab Emirates secretly purchased a stake in the company, just as Mr. Trump was returning to the White House.

 

Meanwhile, the price of $WLFI, a cryptocurrency coin created by World Liberty Financial, has sunk to less than 6 cents, a more than 80 percent drop from its peak, generating enormous losses for investors who bought in at a higher price.

 

That decline did not matter much for Mr. Trump: A Trump entity received a 75 percent cut of all sales of $WLFI, according to a disclosure by the company, allowing him to profit from the coin long before its price cratered.

 

While he was accumulating this new wealth, Mr. Trump’s administration was taking steps that allowed his crypto ventures to raise their profits. Early last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it would not regulate memecoins like a security. And Mr. Trump promoted legislation he signed into law expanding the use of stablecoins in the United States, a few months after World Liberty issued its own such coin.

 

 

(Stablecoins are a form of cryptocurrency that are supposed to maintain a lock on a $1 value and then are used as a way to store crypto investment funds or buy goods or services. Memecoins are considered collectibles that buyers speculate might increase in value.)

 

“I find it sad that these investors have no protection from the S.E.C. — the agency has gleefully abandoned them,” said John Reed Stark, the former chief of the S.E.C. office that investigated online investment fraud. “It is all about a scam that is as old as securities markets themselves — and it is called a pump-and-dump scheme that enriches a few at the expense of the masses.”

 

The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

Mr. Trump has not shown signs that he is discouraged by the financial losses of his investors. Instead, he has looked for ways to temporarily increase the price of his cryptocurrency ventures through special promotions.

 

Last year, for example, he held a dinner at his Virginia golf club for the top buyers of his memecoin, sparking a bidding war that attracted investors from around the world, temporarily pushing up the price.

 

A similar event at Mar-a-Lago this year generated much less investment, with the price of $TRUMP hovering around $2.83, about an 80 percent decline from a year earlier.

 

The coin is “completely dead,” said Morten Christensen, an investor who attended the $TRUMP event at Mar-a-Lago. “Nobody cares about a meme that’s down 97 percent.”

 

Even some of the president’s staunchest supporters in the crypto world have grown disillusioned.

 

In April, the crypto mogul Justin Sun, who spent tens of millions of dollars on $WLFI and $TRUMP, sued World Liberty, claiming that the company had illegally prevented him from selling his stash in order to prop up the price. (World Liberty denied the claims.)

 

Other significant chunks of Mr. Trump’s earnings in 2025 came from deals with foreign governments or businesses based overseas, mainly in the Middle East, as the Trump family, unlike during his first term, has moved ahead with new international deals with nations that have keen interests in U.S. policy.

 

Mr. Trump himself has shown little remorse about backing away from his first-term pledge to not have his family conduct business abroad.

 

“I could have done so many deals, and I didn’t do deals,” he told The New York Times in an interview this year, adding, “I found out that nobody cared.”

 

The financial disclosure also revealed details about the extent of the president’s investments in companies affected by new administration policies.

 

On July 23, Mr. Trump purchased up to $5 million each in Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia, all companies focused on profits from artificial intelligence markets, the filing shows. That same day, the Trump administration unveiled its artificial intelligence action plan, in which the White House expressed a desire to deregulate the industry. Prices for four of the six stocks have since increased, with Apple and Broadcom surging more than 30 percent.

 

Those purchases were not listed on any of the periodic transaction reports that covered 2025, as is required under law. His disclosure report filed on Wednesday shows he paid a small fine for failing to honor this rule.

 

Mr. Trump’s brokerage firms have authority over his accounts and are prohibited from accepting trade requests from him and his family, as The New York Times previously reported.

 

On Wednesday, the president reiterated that he was not involved in individual stock decisions, saying the choices are made by investment advisers who do not consult him or his family.

 

“I don’t even speak to them,” Mr. Trump said. “So I have many people, I don’t know what they call it, closed accounts or something. You put your money in and that’s it. I don’t talk to them. They’re big institutions and they run it.”

 

The president’s revenue since returning to the White House vastly surpassed that of Vice President JD Vance, though he also saw an increase in income after his election from his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In 2025, he made between roughly $1 million and $5 million off royalties from his book, compared to less than $100,000 the year before.

 

Ben Protess Kenneth P. Vogel and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

 

Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.

 

Andrea Fuller is a data journalist at The Times, using data analysis to make sense of complex topics.

 

David Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry for The Times from New York. He can be reached at davidyb@nytimes.com.