Trump family amasses $1.3bn from crypto ventures in weeks

Key topics:Trump family earns $1.3bn from two crypto ventures under a year oldWorld Liberty, American Bitcoin boost Trump net worth to $7.7BTrump sons actively lead, promote, and expand crypto holdings.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By Annie Massa and Tom Maloney.It took just a few eventful weeks for President Donald Trump’s family to rack up about $1.3 billion from two crypto ventures, each less than a year old.The haul from crypto firm World Liberty Financial and separate mining operation American Bitcoin Corp. shows how still-nascent projects are already translating into tangible wealth for the first family. The sums rival the values of long-held golf and resort properties that had been synonymous with the Trumps, whose fortune now stands at $7.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, still share the role of executive vice president at the Trump Organization, but are increasingly the faces of the family’s growing crypto portfolio..World Liberty, which they co-founded last year along with the president’s youngest son, Barron, reached a key milestone on Sept. 1, opening up the ability for customers to trade its eponymous token. Last month, it clinched a lucrative deal with a public company to stockpile the asset. .Read more:.The Economist: Wall Street embraces Crypto's next wave.Together, those developments added about $670 million to the Trumps’ net worth, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index, which now treats it as a family fortune. Bloomberg’s calculation excludes roughly $4 billion worth of tokens owned by the Trumps that remain locked for now.Eric Trump’s stake in American Bitcoin, created in March to mine virtual assets, was worth more than $500 million when the stock surged in its trading debut on Sept. 3. The blitz suggests a new reality is setting in for the first family: The properties most closely associated with them, like Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and even the palm-fringed Mar-a-Lago resort, aren’t the fastest path to new wealth. And even for a family that’s long attached its name to everything from steaks to vodka, the speed and magnitude of their crypto gains are unlike anything they’ve done before.The Trump Organisation and the White House didn’t respond to requests for comment. David Wachsman, a spokesman for World Liberty Financial, declined to comment..The Trumps have new ideas in progress, too. Warren Hui, co-founder of Soul Ventures, which invested in Alt5 Sigma Corp., the public company that started buying World Liberty tokens last month, said the crypto company’s founders recently suggested they may start “tokenizsng” real estate assets — creating a digital proxy for something that exists in the physical world. Eric Trump was among the group pitching the idea, he added.“We had confidence when we talked to Eric Trump, from his experience with hospitality and real estate,” Hui said. ‘Buy Right Now’World Liberty and American Bitcoin are now operating at the intersection of crypto and public markets. While crypto enthusiasts once sought an alternative to traditional finance, increasingly they’re using publicly listed vehicles to bolster the value of their tokens. It’s a riff on a concept crypto celebrity Michael Saylor pioneered and a way to create a more steady source of demand for volatile virtual assets.Under earlier regulatory regimes, the crypto industry was under greater scrutiny. The Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration cracked down on crypto exchanges for selling unregistered securities, and sued some of the best known companies, including Coinbase Global Inc. and Kraken. Under Trump, who appointed friendlier regulators and promised to turn the US into the “crypto capital of the world,” those high-profile cases were dropped. In response to criticism over the potential for conflicts of interest, given the family’s involvement in virtual assets, President Trump’s sons have said their businesses are distinct from the government. .Still, during the Bitcoin Asia conference at the end of August, Eric Trump said he had urged his father to address Bitcoin enthusiasts while campaigning in Nashville last year. Eric Trump, who told Bloomberg last week that he’s been buying Bitcoin for “several years,” often makes a sales pitch for the asset class now helping his family amass substantial new wealth. “Buy right now,” he told the Bitcoin Asia audience in Hong Kong. “Buy this second.” He followed up with a mention of Saylor’s entreaty to “sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin.”World Liberty Financial World Liberty got its start in September 2024, while Trump was running against Kamala Harris. The Trumps were listed as co-founders, alongside Steve Witkoff, who became the administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, and his sons Zach and Alex Witkoff. At first, buyers could only use World Liberty Financial tokens to cast votes to “shape the future” of the project. There have been three proposals to date, including whether to make the WLFI token tradeable, according to a snapshot on the company’s website.One matter that wasn’t put up for a vote: a deal in August with Alt5 Sigma, a little-known Las Vegas-based firm previously focused on biotechnology. Publicly-traded Alt5 Sigma said it would buy about $1.5 billion of World Liberty tokens. The transaction had two legs: The company traded its own shares for about $750 million worth of tokens at 20 cents each, and bought roughly the same amount using cash. At the time, the WLFI token was still straitjacketed and untradeable. The Alt5 Sigma deal is worth about $670 million all-in to the Trumps, according to Bloomberg calculations. Though shares of Alt5 Sigma have lost more than half their value since the tie-up was announced, they’re still worth nearly $170 million to the first family. The Trumps also get 75% of the proceeds from World Liberty token sales, worth roughly another $500 million. .“We are at the tip of the spear,” Eric Trump said at Nasdaq’s Times Square office, where he gathered with Zach Witkoff and fellow co-founders Chase Herro and Zak Folkman to celebrate the union. “We are really going to rewrite the whole playbook.”The wild card through it all is the Trump family’s 22.5 billion WLFI tokens, which they received when the project began. WLFI tokens started partially trading in the past week, at prices that would value the Trumps’ haul at $4 billion..Read more:.Bitcoin surges past $89K amid hopes for pro-crypto Trump policies.But unlike the portion of the tokens that became tradeable for early investors, the tokens allocated to the Trumps, Witkoffs and other World Liberty team members remain “locked.” The Bloomberg Billionaires Index excludes these tokens from the total value of the Trumps’ crypto holdings because they can’t yet be traded.American Bitcoin American Bitcoin, for its part, emerged about two months after President Trump’s inauguration with a plan to mine Bitcoin and backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. While Bitcoin mining is an energy-intensive process, dependent on droves of computers, they didn’t need to supply any of the specialised equipment — instead, a public company called Hut 8 Corp. offered its own mining machinery in exchange for a majority stake in the fledgling firm.American Bitcoin became a public company in short order. Rather than pursue the more traditional path of an initial public offering, it had public company Gryphon Digital Mining absorb American Bitcoin’s name and business, changing its stock ticker to ABTC. Eric Trump now owns about 7.5% of the public company, according to Bloomberg calculations, which for a fleeting moment last week made his stake worth close to $1 billion. Donald Trump Jr. also held a smaller stake in American Bitcoin, but its size wasn’t listed in public filings.When asked about the ballooning size of his American Bitcoin wealth on Bloomberg TV, Eric Trump said only that “we are incredibly fortunate in life with or without this endeavour.” But he nodded to the fact that he now spends considerable time promoting crypto and the companies he has backed. .© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Trump family amasses $1.3bn from crypto ventures in weeks

Key topics:

Related Stories