It was January 2025, crypto fever was raging, and Donald J. Trump was preparing to return to the White House. So when Fatime Elrgdawy’s friend told her about an online message from the U.S. president-elect hyping the launch of his own crypto coin – “GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW” – she thought: “Oh my God, this is brilliant.”
If Trump was putting his name behind it, Elrgdawy recalls thinking, “it must be a legitimate investment.”
The 29-year-old software project engineer in Santa Barbara, California, put $2,000 of her savings into the $TRUMP meme coin – a purely speculative crypto token whose value is often driven by social media hype. All that remained, she thought, was to sit back and wait for the price to climb.
Instead, the price plummeted. At the end of May, her $TRUMP holding was worth less than $120. Meanwhile, the Trump family pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from the token sales after putting little to none of their own money into the project.
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The $TRUMP meme coin is one of four Trump family crypto projects that have turned into a financial jackpot for the Trumps and a very bad bet for buyers like Elrgdawy. While they vary in size and structure, each of these ventures has followed the same playbook. The Trumps risked little up front. Trump family members – notably, the president’s oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. – hyped the venture. The Trumps raked in money as investors piled in. And those buyers lost big when, for various reasons, the prices of their Trump-related crypto assets later tanked.
A Reuters examination shows that the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April, according to a Reuters analysis. Those investors include retail buyers of crypto and crypto-linked equities, as well as those who invested indirectly through funds like ETFs with exposure to Trump crypto. The loss total includes paper losses on unsold investments.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump spoke at a crypto conference in Nashville. REUTERS/Kevin Wurm/File Photo
The Reuters analysis of Trump crypto gains and investor losses was based on a review of blockchain records – essentially a database of crypto transactions – thousands of pages of corporate filings, online disclosures by the Trump companies, and public remarks by the Trumps and their projects’ executives, as well as interviews with crypto industry executives. The findings were reviewed by more than a dozen accounting and crypto experts, all of whom found Reuters’ estimates and its underlying analysis of the Trump businesses to be reasonable.
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The four businesses covered in the analysis include World Liberty Financial, the Trumps’ flagship crypto venture. It has brought the family more than $1.4 billion from sales of its governance tokens on a persistent promise “to build and democratize a new financial system for the benefit of millions,” as it said in an early social media post. The tokens, which give holders a vote on some governance matters, have crashed in value.
The Trump brothers have also heralded two publicly listed firms, American Bitcoin and AI Financial Corp, known as ALT5 Sigma until April, as convenient ways to gain exposure to crypto tokens through their shares. The companies’ stock prices have collapsed. And there’s the $TRUMP token, its poor performance typical of meme coins, whose value reflects the popularity of internet trends or celebrities associated with them.
Reuters previously documented the hundreds of millions of dollars that crypto has brought to the Trump family. This report is the first to show that the Trumps have not only enriched themselves to an unprecedented extent for a sitting U.S. president and his family, but have done so through crypto deals that carried little to no downside risk for them while resulting in big losses for retail investors.
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