The Unprecedented Profiteering Revealed by Donald Trump’s Financial Disclosure
In late November, 2024, when the Chinese-born billionaire Justin Sun first invested thirty million dollars in a speculative crypto venture linked to Donald J. Trump, then the President-elect, it looked more or less like a bribe. Shortly before winning the election, Trump had begun selling crypto tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, a company that he had founded with his friend Steve Witkoff and their respective sons. It promised an ill-defined platform to borrow and lend digital money; the tokens carried no promise of ownership in anything, could not be resold or traded, and entitled owners only to some vote at an unspecified future date on what the company would actually do. The fine print revealed that seventy-five per cent of proceeds from token sales went into the pockets of Trump and his family.
Sun, who was thirty-four years old at the time, was facing federal criminal charges for fraud and market manipulation. Among other offenses, several celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, the rapper Lil Yachty, and the porn star Kendra Lust, had acknowledged receiving undisclosed payments from Sun to promote a cryptocurrency that he was selling, at a time when its sale in the U.S. was illegal. But he was also revered as an idol by crypto investors for the vast wealth he had accumulated. Sun purchased a total of seventy-five million dollars’ worth of World Liberty tokens, and signed on as an adviser to the company. He spent another two hundred million dollars on $TRUMP, an even goofier digital token, known as a memecoin, that the President had begun selling in the days before his Inauguration, purely for his own profit, without the pretense of any connection to a business venture (the way a rock star might sell a souvenir T-shirt, but without any actual shirt). Then, soon after Trump took office, federal securities regulators announced that they were negotiating a settlement with Sun. Although his fraudulent crypto schemes had allegedly netted him thirty-one million dollars, the regulators, in March, dropped the charges in exchange for a relatively minor fine of ten million dollars, raising questions about a potential quid pro quo.
Yet the story of Sun’s business with Trump has not ended happily. In April, a month after he settled the charges, he sued World Liberty for fraud, accusing its founders of having pressured him to pay two hundred million dollars to buy stablecoin that the company was issuing, and then punishing him by freezing his World Liberty tokens even after other owners were allowed to begin trading them. In a post on social media, he denounced World Liberty as “World Tyranny.” World Liberty, in turn, countersued Sun for defamation, claiming that he had conspired to bet on a decline in the price of its tokens.
Earlier this week, Trump released a nine-hundred-and-twenty-seven-page personal-financial-disclosure report, for 2025, revealing the windfall he has reaped from his return to the White House. It recorded more than $2.2 billion in earnings, up from six hundred and twenty-two million dollars in 2024, a jump in profits without precedent in Presidential history. More than $1.4 billion of those earnings came from crypto tokens or investments like the ones Trump sold Sun, including some eight hundred million dollars associated with World Liberty and more than six hundred million dollars that appears to come from the partnership that sold his $TRUMP memecoins.
His transactions with Sun were hardly the only instances in which Trump ignored conspicuous conflicts of interest and heedlessly cashed in on his public office. (The White House and World Liberty have both maintained that there was no connection between Sun’s payments to Trump and his Administration’s favorable actions, although it is hard to imagine that Sun would have ponied up for World Liberty tokens or $TRUMP if Trump had lost the election.) In one glaring example, Trump appears to have reported proceeds of about two hundred and sixty-three million dollars from the secret sale of a half interest in World Liberty Financial, on the eve of his Inauguration, to the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, a country that has benefited in conspicuous ways from his Administration’s foreign and trade policies. (Neither Trump nor World Liberty disclosed the transaction at the time. The Wall Street Journal unearthed it earlier this year, and Trump’s disclosure report appears to acknowledge the payment, declaring sixty-six million dollars as an “equity sale” and a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars as “capital contribution,” without naming the actual source of the money.) World Liberty’s profits have also been driven, in part, by a partnership with the crypto giant Binance, whose founder and owner, Changpeng Zhao, Trump pardoned, last fall, for violations of anti-money-laundering laws. (Binance had allowed Iran to evade sanctions, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, it has continued to, even after the pardon. Binance denied those allegations, and announced that it has filed a lawsuit against the Journal for defamation.) Trump recorded making more than eighty million dollars last year by settling civil lawsuits he had filed against major media companies that his Administration regulates—claims that legal experts have described as absurd. According to calculations by the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Trump also disclosed earning more than a hundred and seventeen million dollars from business deals outside the U.S.—much of it coming from a blitz of new real-estate development in the monarchies of the Persian Gulf—up from about forty million dollars a year in foreign revenue during his first term. What’s more, this week’s report is already dated. It does not include the gift of a four-hundred-million-dollar Boeing 747 from the Emir of Qatar; Trump, coincidentally, unveiled it on Wednesday as his new Presidential airplane (he has had said that he would pass it to his foundation when he leaves office).
Sun’s lawsuit against World Liberty is a reminder that the unseemliness of Trump’s rampant Presidential profiteering goes beyond conflicts of interest. Announcing the début of World Liberty during the 2024 campaign, Trump predicted, grandly, that the future of crypto would be “gigantic” and said that, for the good of the country, “crypto is one of those things we have to do, whether we like it or not.” Trump and his sons have often described World Liberty and their other crypto ventures as efforts to make such digital assets available to small and unsophisticated investors, and Eric and Donald, Jr., have both repeatedly urged mom-and-pop investors to jump in with both feet. In one speech last year, Donald, Jr., implored every “average American” to “buy as much as you can,” and he and Eric, who together founded a bitcoin-mining company, have repeatedly predicted that the price of bitcoin would soar to a million dollars, from its peak last year of about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.
Yet the President’s disclosure of his own stunning crypto profits has arrived at a painful moment for anyone who has bought what the Trumps have been selling—often, his own political supporters. The World Liberty tokens that Sun may have sought to unload have plunged in value by more than eighty per cent, to less than six cents each. The price of $TRUMP memecoin has fallen from a peak of nearly seventy-five dollars before Trump’s Inauguration to about a dollar and seventy cents. Bitcoin has fallen by more than sixty per cent from its peak last year, to less than sixty thousand dollars. Shares of American Bitcoin, the crypto company owned by Don, Jr., and Eric, have fallen by more than ninety per cent from their peak, to about sixty cents. Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates Truth Social and has turned itself into a bitcoin-holding company, have also fallen by more than ninety per cent, to less than ten dollars a share.
Disappointing the trust of investors, of course, is a familiar experience for Trump: before he entered reality television, his real-estate businesses sought bankruptcy protection six times. Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me that the through line of Trump’s career had always been the idea that “it doesn’t matter what happens to anyone else, as long as he gets paid.” His $2.2 billion in profits last year suggest that the White House has been a uniquely powerful prop for Trump’s pitches. ♦