Before his first presidential bid, TV personality and real estate tycoon Donald Trump was doing just fine, financially speaking.
The benefactor of a $5.5 million trust fund, adjusted for inflation — not to mention a $20 million inheritance from his father, split with his siblings — Trump’s actual net worth has always been a hazy target for estimates. As he left office in 2021, Trump’s net worth seemed to be around $2.3 billion, according to Forbes, thanks to legal fallout and a real estate portfolio reeling from the pandemic. By the end of 2024, he’d bounced back to a respectable $6.1 billion — allowing him to regain his membership among the Forbes 400.
But now, the richest president in history is a whole lot richer, thanks to some extremely well-timed financial moves on the blockchain — an industry he’s pushed hard to deregulate while profiting madly from it.
Arguably the most brazen example is Trump’s infamous meme coin, he launched just days before becoming president, netting him billions of dollars — while losing money for almost all his fans who bought it.
Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump family fortune has ballooned by a whopping $5 billion after their “flagship crypto venture” WLFI officially launched on Monday.
WLFI is the “official token” of World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company founded by the Trump dynasty in 2024. Until this week, crypto traders could buy WLFI, but couldn’t exchange it for real life money.
In other words, Trump has allowed his most devoted acolytes to pump his proprietary cryptocurrency full of their money for the better part of a year, a transaction that could only go one way.
Now that WLFI is exchangeable, the WSJ notes that the token is likely now the Trump family’s most valuable asset, worth more than even their vaunted property holdings.
As if that weren’t absurd enough, an analysis of trading volume by watchdog group Accountable.US shows that at least 66 percent of WLFI’s total trading volume so far happened on foreign exchanges, which US senator Richard Blumenthal decried as a major national security and corruption risk.
Security and foreign interference concerns felt laughably justified when traders began complaining that hackers were targeting wallets the instant they accepted WLFI tokens from the exchange.
Trump’s immense blockchain fortune — untold riches made up entirely of other people’s money — are an outlandish display of just how far the crypto industry has come. To say we’re in uncharted waters might be an understatement; never before has a sitting US president exposed this much of his personal wealth to foreign interference.
Indeed, no president has ever had this much wealth to expose.
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