When Donald Trump’s 2025 financial disclosures were revealed this month, we learned his first year back at the White House was extremely lucrative. In between the mass deportations, East Wing demolition, and war on algae, he made at least $2.2 billion — more than he took in during his entire first term in office and four times what he made the year before he returned to Washington. We also learned more than half of that money came from various crypto ventures — $1.4 billion to be exact — a number staggering in and of itself but even more so in the context of just how much money investors lost betting on the president. A real “heads I win, tails you lose” situation — and we don’t want to shock or upset anyone, but it turns out this is not the only instance in which Trump has managed to profit while others got screwed.
As The Wall Street Journal reports:
A year ago, the Trump family’s crypto venture bought control of a small payments company for $750 million. The deal has been a money loser for almost everyone except the Trumps.
The Nasdaq-listed company — previously called Alt5 Sigma, and recently renamed AI Financial — is now in talks to sell its core business to blockchain technology company Perpetuals.com, according to a corporate filing. The price being discussed is for up to $15 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction and company documents.
If you don’t have your calculator handy, those numbers translate to a 98 percent loss, and while that should be very embarrassing for the First Family of crypto, the money they made off AI Financial should help cushion the blow. Here’s the Journal again:
AI Financial has served mostly to channel more than half a billion dollars to the Trumps, in an instance of investors losing out while the presidential family rakes in cash … World Liberty acquired a majority stake in AI Financial in August by paying with its own cryptocurrency. The payments company then raised a further $750 million from investors to buy more of World Liberty’s digital tokens, called WLFI.
The deals saddled AI Financial with an enormous pot of Trump cryptocurrency that since has slumped 70% in value and is partly subject to a lockup. Investors in the raise have also seen their AI Financial shares fall over 90%, leaving the company’s market value at just $80 million.
Yet thanks to an arrangement in which the Trumps receive 75 percent of the proceeds from the sale of WLFI tokens, they got a cool $540 million in cash from the $750 million in token sales.
World Liberty and AI Financial declined the Journal’s request for comment about the deal talks. The White House declared that “there are no conflicts of interest” and that “the President has implemented policies that have made all Americans wealthier and more prosperous.”
In related news, the New York Times reported over the weekend that the nearly 1 million people who bought Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP, have lost a collective $3.81 billion through the end of June. At the same time, the president made $636 million in fees in 2025. Responding to criticism regarding the contrast between those two outcomes, a spokeswoman told the Times last week, “President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world. All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
When asked about the massive amount of money he made last year while he was ostensibly supposed to be working for the country, Trump said Monday that George Washington did it too. “George Washington had two desks, in his, pre–White House,” he explained. “And they were right next to each other. One was for business, and one was for the presidency.”
