It all began with a meme coin.
On January 17, three days before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as president, two entities he and his family controlled issued a meme coin called $TRUMP.
There are various kinds of cryptocurrencies, but a meme coin is like a collectible, its price driven primarily by hype and speculation. If you didn’t know anything about the crypto industry, you could be forgiven for thinking that the $TRUMP token (as a crypto unit is often called) was no bigger deal than the Trump “Never Surrender” sneakers, which sold for $140, or the Trump Bible ($99.99), or the dozens of other products Trump hawked on his way to the White House. Sure, they made him money, but it was basically petty cash.
$TRUMP, however, was the start of something much bigger—the First Family’s staggeringly lucrative crypto business, which has added billions to the president’s net worth in a matter of months and led to accusations of corruption. Forbes has calculated that in the 10 months since the election, Trump’s wealth rose by an astonishing $3 billion—from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion. Reuters reported that in the first half of 2025, the Trump Organization saw its revenue increase 17-fold, from $51 million to $864 million. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump family made $5 billion in a single day: September 1. Since the introduction of that meme coin in January, Trump and his sons Eric, Don Jr., and even 19-year-old Barron have turned their crypto business into a cash machine.
