How the Trumps made a $1.2bn crypto fortune

In the depths of Donald Trump's interregnum, says The Wall Street Journal, his two eldest sons, Don Jr and Eric, huddled in a Mar-a-Lago conference room with childhood pal Zach Witkoff, whose father would later become the president's all-purpose special envoy. They were meeting two wannabe crypto entrepreneurs: one had previously launched a website called Date Hotter Girls; the other once described himself as a "dirtbag of the internet". At first, Don Jr and Eric were baffled by all the crypto jargon. But the five men soon gelled – "We just became, like, a band of brothers," says Witkoff – and together they conjured up a "new money machine": World Liberty Financial.

The Trumps got their crypto-sceptic father on board with the help of their teenage half-brother Barron, who "schooled his dad" on the mechanics of so-called "decentralised finance". Before long, the crypto venture was generating money "far faster" than the president's decades-old real estate business. Since World Liberty's crypto token launch in 2024, the business has earned the Trumps at least $1.2bn in cash, and another $2.25bn in paper gains. (Some $500m came from an Abu Dhabi royal, shortly before the Trump administration granted the UAE access to tightly guarded American AI chips.) The Witkoffs have pocketed another $200m: Zach, 32, now tours the globe with a "phalanx of aides" and wears a $500,000 Richard Mille watch. By happy coincidence, the investment bank of choice for crypto deals is Cantor Fitzgerald, run by the 28-year-old son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. This is only the start. World Liberty has released a second crypto instrument, a "stablecoin", that could generate another $200m a year. Eric Trump holds a $90m stake in a separate Bitcoin company. These MAGA nepo babies have become "wealthy financial celebrities in their own right" – all thanks to crypto.

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