Photo: Samuel Corum/Girl/Bloomberg via Getty Images
During President Donald Trump’s first term, we often heard about how many times he profited from the presidency, and for good reason: No other U.S. president in history had enriched himself on this scale (to the tune of $1.6 billion) or in such a blatant way (e.g., charging taxpayers for the water he drank at Mar-a-Lago). But those days look downright quaint today, considering the incredible amount of money the businessman president made in his first year in Washington.
According to new financial disclosures, Trump earned more in 2025 than he did in his entire first term in the White House, raking in at least $2.2 billion last year. (That figure also exceeds the amount he earned in the year before he became president again, which accounted for less than a quarter of the windfall in 2025.) The largest source of wealth was the president’s crypto holdings, which accounted for a profit of $1.4 billion. That revenue included $635 million in royalties from a company linked to the memecoin he launched just days before his second inauguration, and $500 million in proceeds from the sale of tokens sold by World Liberty Financial, the company he founded with his three sons. Than New York Times notes, in January 2025, just before Trump became president for a second time, “an investment firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty, raising a number of ethical concerns,” and shortly afterward, “the Emiratis struck a deal with the Trump administration to export valuable computer chips that power artificial intelligence, despite the objections of some national security officials.” Other things happened after Trump returned to the White House: He pardoned Changpeng Zhao – the founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange – and signed a law that legitimized stablecoins, a form of cryptocurrency that World Financial had started selling only months earlier.
The White House appears to have yet to comment on the president’s 2025 bonanza, although spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement in May: “President Trump acts only in the best interests of the American public, which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office. There are no conflicts of interest.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, was less inclined to see it that way, saying Wednesday that Trump’s crypto dealings show why Congress must pass legislation to prevent “the president, vice president, senior administration officials” and others from “profiting from the crypto industry” and stop “Donald Trump’s brazen crypto corruption.”
Of course, crypto wasn’t the only way the president made money last year. He also made millions from licensing deals abroad, including in Saudi Arabia and Qatar (which gave him the $400 million 747 he now flies); he sold Bibles with the Trump logo; and he sued and collected settlement money from various media organizations, including ABC News and CBS. (He also received settlement money from Meta, which he sued for suspending his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Capitol insurrection on January 6.)
Trump himself emphasized on Wednesday that he had had nothing to do with his money since taking office and that the reason for his profits was that “the stock market is up – everyone benefits.”
“I benefit because I have a lot of money and cash and I give it to institutions,” he told reporters. “I don’t know if they know what they’re doing or not, but they buy a wide variety of things.”
By the way, the investigative report also showed that despite his vast wealth, Trump still owes writer E. Jean Carroll more than $50 million (and now he has to pay, since the Supreme Court just rejected his latest appeal against her).
“What strikes me as remarkable is how many areas Trump has a hand in,” Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University, told NBC News. “There’s no precedent to compare it to. No president in the 20th or 21st century has had anything even remotely comparable.”
Of course, the president isn’t the only Trump benefiting from his second term in Washington. At the weekend it was Just revealed that in addition to the crypto money they make with their father, Don Jr. and Eric Trump will rake in a nice chunk of change from a Kazakh tungsten mine the president secured access to last fall, a project for which the federal government has approved a whopping $1.6 billion in funding. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump now have their island.
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