The White House cash cow: How Trump monetizes his presidency through crypto, family ventures, and foreign ties

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Trump's wealth

Donald Trump is the wealthiest president in U.S. history, and his cabinet cabinet is the wealthiest ever as well. Since his return to the White House, Trump’s wealth has only continued to grow. A year ago, his net worth was estimated at $2.4 billion. By the start of his second term, it had reached $3.7 billion. And now, just three months into his new four-year mandate, that figure has surged to $5.1 billion.

Since the 1970s, the core of Trump’s fortune has been his real estate firm, the Trump Organization, which he inherited from his father. Today, its assets include roughly 20 golf courses and more than 30 buildings that are either directly owned by the Trump family or generate revenue through licensing deals that trade on the family name. The company is valued at around $2.65 billion, accounting for nearly half of the president’s total assets. But as is common in real estate, firms often manipulate property valuations — downward in order to lower their tax burdens, or upward to secure favorable terms on loans. It was exactly this sort of self-interested bookkeeping that landed the Trump Organization in legal trouble — in February 2024, a New York court fined the company $355 million and temporarily barred it from doing business in the state.

In 2021, after being banned from many social media platforms in the wake of the January 6th riot, Trump launched the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), along with the Twitter clone social network Truth Social. It is there that the president comments on current events, attacks opponents, and announces many of his policy decisions. In 2024, TMTG went public, reaching a valuation of $6.7 billion by the end of its first day of trading on the NASDAQ. It is now valued at $5.4 billion. Trump and his family own more than half of the company’s shares, making their combined stake worth a total of $2.3 billion.

But TMTG’s business performance has been underwhelming. In 2024, its revenue totaled just $3.6 million, while operating losses reached $400 million. As of February 2025, Truth Social had an average of only 304,000 daily active users in the U.S. By comparison, BlueSky has 3 million users, and Twitter (X) boasts 25 million.

The crypto president

These estimates of the president’s net worth do not include his personal cryptocurrencies — the $WLFI token and the meme coin $Trump. The value of these assets has surged over the past six months and is now approaching $3 billion — more than the rest of Trump’s business holdings combined. Very little is known about who has invested in the Trump family’s crypto ventures, and in the meantime, his administration is pushing for even deeper deregulation of the sector.

In the summer of 2024, Trump and his sons began promoting a crypto project called World Liberty Financial. Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which can be traded on exchanges, the initiative’s $WLFI token has a fixed price, cannot be transferred, and is available only to accredited investors.