Donald Trump's business

Author: Paolo Confino, Leo Schwartz

Translated by: Min, Fortune Chinese

Some people just need to stand there and they are a well-known signboard. Donald Trump is such a person. Long before he became the president of the United States, the name Trump was already a "brand". First, as a billionaire, he has a high exposure on TV. Secondly, his mansion and his relationship with Hollywood celebrities have their own topics. Again, he also made a lot of products with Trump labels, such as Trump Hotel, Trump Steak, and even Trump's continuing education. Since he became the president of the United States, the influence of this "brand" has increased significantly, and now it even includes a media company and a digital currency company, which have also increased Trump's value by billions.

During Trump's first term, some people criticized Trump for always using his power for personal gain, leaving many opportunities for others to buy him -for example, when a foreign politician was on a formal state visit to the United States, he needed to stay in Trump's hotel, and his abacus beads were almost collapsed on the face of American taxpayers. [Of course, Trump insists that after becoming the US president, he has drawn a clear line with his own industries. For example, he placed some of his assets in a revocable trust managed by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. ]

Of course, now it seems that Trump's huge net worth may not be as good as the reception fee. With Trump's personal wealth growing and his continuous entry into new investment fields, the Trump family now has too many ways to make money, not to mention that he still has so many political allies and business partners to help him. The public is just unaware of these.

Although Trump's fortune mainly relies on real estate, his business empire has long expanded from reinforced concrete in New York to high-tech in Silicon Valley. Nowadays, the 78-year-old Trump can even deserve the title of "technology tycoon". However, there is one thing that has never changed, that is, his emphasis on personal brand. The most important product Trump sells to customers and the most core selling point he sells to investors is always himself.

Recently, Trump's name has appeared in several businesses. In the media field, there is the Trump Media & Technology Group; in the digital currency field, there is the World Liberty Financial project and the so-called meme coin "Trump Coin" ($Trump). "This marks the transformation of the Trump brand from offline to online," said Jordan Libowitz, vice chairman of the observation group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

According to Bloomberg, Trump's personal net worth was about $4.8 billion as of mid-March this year. This figure does not include the benefits Trump may get from his two digital currency projects - we do not yet understand the specific value of these two digital currency projects, but Fortune estimates that their value may be around $2.9 billion. However, a source close to Trump said Trump's actual net worth is higher than Bloomberg's estimate, and the value of "Trump currency" alone is more than $10 billion. But the source did not provide a basis for saying this, so Fortune magazine could not verify the figure. According to Forbes , Trump's net worth during his first term was about $3.7 billion.

To figure out the issue, Fortune magazine looked up hundreds of pages of financial disclosure documents and interviewed seven observers and experts. We also contacted Trump Organization, Trump Media Technology Group and World Liberty Financial. Although the results we collected cover all aspects, they are still incomplete. Trump's business empire structure is extremely complex, with multiple limited companies (LLCs) covering layers of shells like Russian dolls and intertwining with other entities, making their source and scale of wealth difficult to trace. In addition, his digital currency account and the ownership structure of these digital currency projects are almost completely opaque. Trump Media Technology Group's stock situation is relatively clear due to the Securities and Exchange Commission reporting rules. But even in this regard, the company has only made minimal information disclosure. It neither holds quarterly earnings meetings nor provides any metrics about the company's user base. In response, Libovitz said: "We just need to remember that Trump's financial situation is different from any politician in the world, and all business is controlled by a limited liability company that is covered with layers of shells like Russian dolls."

In response to this, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded: "President Trump handed over his multi-billion-dollar business empire for the country, and he made great sacrifices for the country." She said that Trump submits financial disclosure reports every year. As for some people who think that Trump's business activities will give people the opportunity to win over and corrupt him, Levitt believes that "this view is unreasonable and absurd." She also pointed out: "The American people obviously do not agree with this view, otherwise they would not have elected President Trump to the White House again with an overwhelming advantage." She also said: "The name Trump, and the brand Trump, have reached an unprecedented height."

The 1.0 era of Trump's business empire: hotels, golf courses, and the

name Trump itself

Since the 1970s, people have gradually learned about the Trump brand. At that time, Trump was just a young real estate businessman with a little ambition in New York City. The biggest impression he gave was that he usually liked to brag about the magpires and had to flatter himself if he had anything to do or not. In 1971, just three years after Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, his father Fred made him the president of the family business—the company was named Trump Management at the time. The first thing Trump did after taking office was to merge the scattered businesses under the control of the family into a new corporate entity - the Trump Group.

But Trump's real estate tycoon journey has not been smooth either. Once upon a time, he was once burdened with debt, and many of his casinos went bankrupt one after another. Since then, he began to look for low-risk sources of income. Although Trump is still developing his own real estate projects, he also found a profitable business, which is to authorize his name to other real estate projects. This business has even expanded to countries such as Türkiye, Uruguay and Oman. Now, whether in Manhattan, New York, or in the United States or even around the world, it is not difficult to find buildings with the words "TRUMP" inlaid with the golden light. Trump has a special liking for golden porn, as if only this high-end color can show that these buildings are not ordinary buildings, but luxurious real estate he personally certified.

The Trump Group has always been a family business. Since 2017, the actual controller of the company has become his two sons - Donald Jr. and Eric. According to the official website of Trump Group, now, Trump Group's business has spanned four continents, with 20 golf courses and more than 30 self-operated or authorized buildings. Although Trump's identity is no longer a "Tumu Brother" who made his fortune by building buildings, these buildings are still the main component of his private wealth.

It is difficult for us to accurately estimate the value of the Trump Group, on the one hand, because it is a private enterprise, and on the other hand, it sometimes manipulates the value of the property it publishes for more favorable interest rates or tax treatment. (In February 2024, a New York judge fined Trump and his companies $355 million because they lied about the value of their property and committed fraud to banks and insurance companies. Trump chose to appeal.) Currently, the total value of real estate held by the Trump Group is about $2.65 billion, accounting for about half of our estimated net asset value, and this does not include the digital currency he holds.

Trump Media Technology Group: Truth Social, Truth.Fi, and other media and

financial technology projects

__In 2021, in the face of the relentless pursuit and full ban by American social media, Trump once again staged a strong counterattack and established another company named after him - Trump Media Technology Group. Shortly after the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, 2021, Trump sat down with two contestants on The Apprentice and developed plans to start a social media company of his own. (However, his account permissions on Facebook and X have been restored since then.)

In the next few years, this social platform called Truth Social and similar to Twitter became the flagship product of Trump Media Technology Group. Since then, Trump Media Technology Group has slowly expanded to other digital business areas. In 2024, the same year the company went public, Trump Media Technology Group launched a streaming service called Truth+. At the beginning of 2025, the company announced that it will cooperate with Charles Schwab to launch a fintech platform called Truth.Fi.

Since its establishment in 2021, the development history of Trump Media Technology Group has also been quite bumpy. First, internal investors sued it several times, and then it was punished by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But in the end, it went public through the Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) model in March 2024. This incident has created great value for Trump. It is Trump's personal brand that gives this fledgling technology company a trustworthy halo. At the close of the first day of the Trump Media Technology Group's listing on the Nasdaq, Trump himself held a stake in the company worth $6.7 billion. Currently, Trump's stake in Trump Media Technology Group is worth approximately $2.3 billion.

From a business perspective alone, Trump Media Technology Group can only be said to have performed mediocrely. By 2024, the company's revenue was only US$3.6 million, while its operating losses were as high as US$400 million. There is a huge gap between the financial performance of Trump Media Technology Group and its stock price, which is extremely rare. In particular, the company disclosed very little information, which is inevitably even more imaginative. In the latest annual report, Trump Media Technology Group still did not provide investors with any timetable on when the company's financial situation could improve, and said it was "too early" to do so.

Truth Social also lags behind several mainstream competitors in popularity. According to data from similarweb, Truth Social's average daily active users in the U.S. APP in February this year was only 304,000, although it rose 12% from January, but it is obviously incomparable to X's average daily 25 million U.S. active users, and it is even more pale in comparison with Meta's Facebook (101 million) and Instagram (93 million). (A spokesperson for Trump Media Technology Group denounced Fortune’s inaccurate coverage of the company, but did not provide any details.)

Although Trump Media Technology Group's performance is not good and the number of users is pitifully small, the magical thing is that there are 650,000 retail investors firmly holding the shares of Trump Media Technology Group -many of them are just to express their political support for Trump.

Speaking about the Trump brand, Cait Lamberton, a marketing professor at Wharton School, noted: “Some people may ask a series of questions, but some people may argue that this just shows the success of the brand, and at least it also shows that the brand has extraordinary resilience.”

Of course, many technology companies lost money and made a lot of publicity in the early stages, and Trump Media Technology Group is no exception. Moreover, Trump Media Technology Group's balance sheet is still quite healthy. Currently, Trump Media Technology Group has $777 million in cash and short-term investments, with total liabilities of only $25 million. About $450 million of the cash came from a share purchase agreement for a small financial company in New Jersey called Yorkville Advisors, which is also a registered investment advisor for the Truth.Fi project.

The cash will be used to expand new areas of business, Trump Media Technology executives said. Earlier this year, the Trump Media Technology Group's board of directors approved a sum of funds for potential acquisitions.

The company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show that its goal is to build an "irrevocable technology company." Currently, Trump Media Technology Group is moving steadily in this direction, actively building its own proprietary technology infrastructure rather than relying on third-party suppliers.

Truth.Fi's initial plan is to set up six ETF funds that will invest in U.S. energy companies and manufacturing, as well as a field that Trump is particularly obsessed with recently - digital currencies.

Trump and the Circle: World Liberty Financial Project and "Trump Coin"

Trump, in his second term , became a "coin-playing president". You know, just a few years ago, he denounced Bitcoin as a "scam". So, what caused his position to change by 180 degrees?

It turned out that after Trump's first term ended in 2021, he tried the waters of the so-called NFT, or "non-fungible tokens." NFT is a digital crypto asset that is generally used to represent digital artworks and has strong speculative attributes. According to financial disclosures, Trump launched his first NFT series in 2022, and over the next year and a half, he earned about $7 million in revenue through NFT transactions.

David Krause, a business professor at Marquette University, said that NFT is the "entry drug" that makes Trump addicted to the currency circle. From then on, he realized that digital assets are a huge business opportunity.

In the United States, blockchain technology is largely unregulated, which allows speculators to issue their own digital currencies at will, with the value of these digital currencies not bound to anything except the project's own brand. But on the other hand, it also does not require information disclosure like traditional investment tools or provide other consumer protection measures. While most of the digital cryptocurrencies on the market can be tracked through blockchain technology (such as online, publicly verified ledger technology), it is still difficult for you to find the entities behind these crypto wallets to control and trade. Due to the lack of effective regulation of digital cryptocurrencies, it is almost impossible for us to know exactly who is behind Trump’s digital cryptocurrency projects, and we cannot know exactly how these projects are related to Trump.

During the 2024 US presidential election, the digital cryptocurrency industry in the United States spent $200 million to assist in elections, publicly saying that whoever supports the development of the currency circle will support whoever the currency circle supports. Since then, Trump has completely turned to the currency circle. He has delivered speeches in industry events many times and announced plans such as the government's strategic reserves of Bitcoin.

Although Trump did not make much money through NFTs, he soon began to further test the waters of digital assets. In the summer of 2024, Trump and his sons began to vigorously promote a digital cryptocurrency project called World Liberty Financial. Trump's son Eric posted on Platform X in August 2024: "A new era of finance has arrived!" Although they provided little details, it was soon reported that the platform will allow eligible investors to buy a token that is unique to the platform, although the token does not have a clear practical purpose. The token will be sold publicly from October 2024.

"When they first launched the coin, it wasn't very popular, it could be said it failed. But after Trump's second election, everyone started buying the coin again."

Unlike digital cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum that can be traded on exchanges, the World Liberty Financial Coin sets a fixed price and is not transferable and is only offered to qualified investors. Its functionality is similar to a kind of "government currency" that allows users to interact with decentralized financial applications such as lending protocols. "Governance coins" are not uncommon in the currency circle. Popular platforms like Uniswap and Aave each have corresponding "Governance coins", with market value of billions of dollars. However, unlike World Liberty Financial coins, they can all be traded on their respective exchanges and have special functions. And as for World Liberty Financial, Bloom said so far, “it has no value except for people’s cognitive value.”

According to the official website of the World Liberty Financial project, entities associated with Trump hold a total of 22.5 billion World Liberty Financial coins, while the remaining World Liberty Financial coins are sold at 1.5 cents to 5 cents each. These entities also earn 75% of sales revenue.

Zaheer Ebtikar, founder of the digital cryptocurrency hedge fund Split Capital, pointed out that because the vision of the World Liberty Financial project is very blurry, and the official advisor to the project is Trump's three sons, the market only regards World Liberty Financial as a way to "make you some kind of connection with the Trump family." In other words, it’s just buying feelings.

A spokesperson for the World Liberty Financial project refuted the statement that the World Liberty Financial currency has no practical use. "The World Liberty Financial platform will continue to expand, and eventually it will connect traditional financial markets with blockchain technology." However, they also pointed out that World Liberty Financial is not a political organization.

One of the largest buyers of World Liberty Financial coins is Justin Sun, a currency businessman from Hong Kong, China. He once sued the Securities and Exchange Commission for suspected fraud. But Justin Sun's lawyer denied the allegations and said that the SEC sued him for "complete control of digital assets." In November 2024, Justin Sun purchased $30 million worth of World Liberty Financial coins and then became the official consultant for the project. He then invested an additional $45 million in the project. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced in late February this year that it would suspend its lawsuit against Justin Sun. A spokesperson for the World Liberty Financial project said Justin Sun's investment was "purely based on the value and market potential of the project."

The World Liberty Financial project has used some of the funds obtained from selling coins to accumulate a batch of other digital cryptocurrency assets, including both Bitcoin and Ethereum and some less famous coins.

Ebticar believes that some investors may view World Liberty Financial as a weighted index of a series of digital currency assets that may one day be used for transactions or for financial purposes, including lending. "This could have an interesting result," Ebticar said.

Investors in the currency circle are still arguing about what the World Liberty Financial currency is, and Trump has begun another attempt in the currency circle - issuing his personal currency. Of course, this thing doesn't seem to be practical. "Trump Coin" was officially launched on Friday the week before his inauguration (on the same day, a group of industry leaders held a dazzling crypto industry dance in Washington, DC.) This also gave speculators another opportunity to follow the trend and hype.

In response, Klaus said: "Many people like Trump very much and are willing to buy even the air that Trump endorses. Trump coins actually have no value."

Like many other companies under Trump's name, the structure of this project is also very opaque. 80% of the total supply of Trump coins is held by several entities associated with Trump, and all Trump coins will be gradually issued within three years. As of mid-March this year, the trading price of Trump coins was about $11, with a total of 1 billion coins planned to be issued. So theoretically, Trump is expected to make billions of dollars in profits by selling coins. However, the current market value of the project has plummeted by nearly 85% compared with the highest point at the time of its release.

According to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, several entities related to Trump have earned up to $350 million in transaction fees and handling fees, but this figure does not include losses due to the decline in currency value in the later period.

Since digital cryptocurrencies are still largely outside the regulatory scope of government agencies, and the Trump administration is continuing to promote the relaxation of regulation, some critics believe that several Trump's currency circle projects actually give foreign officials and entities the opportunity to "bribe in disguise" so that they can invest in Trump's businesses outside the supervision of the US public.

Klaus said: "Is this a fraud, greed, or a genius? To a certain extent, there are both of them. This reflects Trump's marketing genius." (Fortune Chinese)