SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
bitcoin
Most of Trump's Net Worth Comes From 'Crypto Empire': Report
According to an investigation by Accountable.US, 73% of Trump's net worth may now come from crypto, which his administration is working to dramatically deregulate.
Aug 11, 2025
Over his nearly seven months as president, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has been taking a sledgehammer to regulations on cryptocurrency. A new report sheds further light on the reasons why.
The president may be profiting far more from his "rapidly-growing crypto empire" than was previously known and has used it to dramatically increase his net worth, according to an investigation released Thursday by the anti-corruption group Accountable.US.
While a report from Bloomberg on July 2 estimated the billionaire president's crypto holdings to total about $620 million of his nearly $7 billion net worth, Accountable examined other investments that had not previously been reported.
"President Trump's net worth," the group estimated, "could roughly be $15.9 billion, with about $11.6 billion in uncounted crypto assets." This would mean crypto accounts for 73% of his net worth.
Accountable reached this number by including investments that either had not yet occurred or were not public at the time of previous reporting.
These included roughly 22.5 billion tokens issued by Trump-owned WorldLiberty Financial Inc., which are estimated to be worth about $2 billion in value, but had not yet become tradable.
Other analyses, it said, also excluded the $7 billion in value of the new $TRUMP memecoins released in late July 2025.
"Two Trump-affiliated companies owned 80% of the $TRUMP venture as of May 2025 and were estimated to have collected over $324 million just in fees since January 2025," the report said.
Accountable also factored the holdings of Trump Media—the company that owns the president's social media app Truth Social. In July, the company bought $2 billion in Bitcoin and reserved another $300 million for Bitcoin options, and also announced the launch of its own set of NFTs.
As part of what they called "Crypto Week," Republicans passed multiple industry-friendly pieces of crypto legislation in July, the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, which Accountable says allow Trump to directly profit.
The GENIUS Act purported to create a regulatory framework for so-called "stablecoins," which are pegged to existing financial assets like the U.S. dollar and are poised to become part of the portfolios of increasing numbers of companies. However, as Nikki McCann Ramirez wrote for Rolling Stone in June:
One of Trump's priorities has been the normalization of these so-called stablecoins — a type of asset that his family is now hawking.
Despite the moniker, stablecoins can be extremely unstable. A 2023 study published by the Bank for International Settlements found that of 60 stablecoins analyzed in their review, all of them had become de-pegged from their underlying asset at least once.
The 2022 crypto crash was triggered by the failure of Terraform Lab's Terra/Luna "algorithmic" stablecoin—the collapse of which saw $45 billion erased in the span of a week.
The bill places only very light regulations on stablecoins, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has warned that since he controls such a large percentage of the stablecoin market, their uptake into the broader economy could "create a superhighway for Donald Trump's corruption."
"As soon as the players understand that Trump's intervention is a real possibility, then the stablecoin market is no longer about a careful review of whether there are adequate dollars to back up a particular stablecoin, or whether the stablecoin issuer has an AAA rating," Warren said.
"Instead, the whole game becomes one of trying to engage the president to weigh the end and make one set of coins more valuable, and therefore another set of coins less valuable," she added. "It's corruption, but it's also a market manipulation that ultimately drains away any development...It undermines all the markets at that point."
But the CLARITY Act, which has been passed by the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate, is "the real prize" for the industry. It would dramatically narrow the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) ability to regulate cryptocurrencies—most notably by recategorizing many assets as commodities instead of securities, which places them under the much smaller and less-resourced Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Trump would be one of the foremost beneficiaries of this bill, which would exclude digital assets like his $TRUMP and $MELANIA "meme coins" from SEC regulation.
It would also likely affect the classification of Bitcoin, which Trump Media has explicitly acknowledged would benefit the president. "If Bitcoin is determined to constitute a security," the company said in a June SEC filing, it could "adversely affect" the price of Bitcoin and the price of Trump Media's holdings.
Not only does this benefit Trump, said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk, but the legitimization and entrenchment of these unstable assets has the potential to make the whole economy less stable.
"Eerily reminiscent of the risky behavior that gave us the 2008 financial collapse, Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of casino-like speculation on Wall Street with highly volatile crypto trading in retirement accounts," Carrk said.
"While the Trump family stands to win either way with crypto investment product fees," Carrk added, "throwing such a wild card into the financial system with little to no guardrails could lead to history repeating itself—with everyday Americans footing the bill when things inevitably go south."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Self-Enrichment': JD Vance Stands to Profit From Trump Military Contracts, Crypto Reserve
Financial disclosures analyzed by Accountable.US reveal that the vice president is invested in several defense contractors that have reaped lavish contracts since Trump's return to office.
Jul 11, 2025
The Trump administration has given contracts to four defense contractors that Vice President JD Vance has a financial stake in, according to a report by the government watchdog group Accountable.US.
Financial disclosure forms published by the Office of Government Ethics for June 2025 reveal that through at least the end of 2024—the last date at which he was required to disclose his investments—Vance had anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 invested in Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital group he helped to found before taking office.
Rise of the Rest is invested in at least four military contractors that have since received large contracts from the Trump-Vance administration. Two of them received those contracts—worth millions of dollars—within two weeks of Trump beginning his second term.
Hermeus, the maker of hypersonic aircraft, received a contract worth $9.36 million from the Department of Defense in February. Another company, Slingshot Aerospace, has been awarded $1.7 million in contracts from the Air Force. The report notes that Slingshot's tools, which include GPS monitoring technology, have been used in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The most lucrative company in Vance's portfolio is Anduril, which has received an eye-popping $220 million in government contracts since Trump and Vance took office and seen a 125% increase in its valuation.
It is expected to reap massive new contracts from the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" that Trump signed into law earlier this month through its creation of expansive new border surveillance technology.
As Sam Biddle reported for The Intercept on Wednesday, the bill includes language that effectively grants Anduril "a monopoly on new surveillance towers for U.S. Customs and Border Protection":
A provision buried in the new mega-legislation stipulates that none of the $6 billion border tech payday can be spent on border towers unless they've been "tested and accepted by [CBP] to deliver autonomous capabilities."…
That reads like a description of Anduril's product—because it might as well be. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that under the new law, Anduril is now the country's only approved border tower vendor.
Anduril is also reportedly one of the main firms in contention for contracts to help build Trump's $175 billion "Golden Dome" security system.
Vance left Revolution in 2020 to start his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, and two of the companies received investments from his previous firm after his departure. However, Vance directly acknowledged that he had a financial stake in all four of them on a Senate financial disclosure form in 2023, "indicating awareness of the investments," according to Accountable.US.
The Rise of the Rest Seed Fund presents other potential conflicts of interest as well. In addition to its investments in the defense industry, it has also been a major backer of The Bitcoin Company, providing it with more than $2.1 million in seed money in 2022.
Vance himself is a major Bitcoin enthusiast. His disclosures reveal that he personally holds anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 worth of the cryptocurrency.
During his time in the White House, President Donald Trump has launched initiatives meant to supercharge the cryptocurrency industry, including a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve," which sent the digital currency's price soaring in March.
Accountability.US executive director Tony Carrk describes Vance's financial entanglements as part of a broader pattern within the Trump administration.
"Vance's background and investments in companies benefiting from Trump government contracts come as no surprise given this administration’s record of benefiting themselves while raising costs and gutting health care for hardworking Americans," he said.
Past reports by the group have highlighted the president's own profiteering from cryptocurrency and other financial ventures. And last month, an investigation revealed that Donald Trump, Jr. also stood to profit tremendously from the "Golden Dome" project via his own investments in Anduril and Elon Musk's company SpaceX.
"As much as the Trump administration claims to be draining the swamp, their conflicts of interest, self-enrichment, and ties to special interests show they are creatures of it," said Caark. "Vice President JD Vance is no exception."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Media Reportedly Plans to Raise $3 Billion to Buy Cryptocurrencies
"So much corruption and all out in the open," said one economist.
May 26, 2025
Monday reporting from the Financial Times that U.S. President Donald Trump's family media company "plans to raise $3 billion to buy cryptocurrencies" sparked a fresh wave of alarm over his administration's policies and potential corruption.
After winning a second term last year, the Republican president transferred his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG)—which is behind the Truth Social platform—to a revocable trust overseen by his son Donald Trump Jr.
Citing six unnamed sources, FT reported that TMTG "aims to raise $2 billion in fresh equity and another $1 billion via a convertible bond," and "also plans to launch an exchange-traded fund focused on cryptocurrency."
According to the newspaper:
TMTG said in a statement that "apparently the Financial Times has dumb writers listening to even dumber sources" but did not comment further. Representatives for Donald Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
After Reuters also requested comment on the reporting, the news agency noted, TMTG called both Reuters and FT "fake news."
Responding on social media, Elizabeth Sheppard Sellam, director of the politics and international relations program at the University of Tours in France, said that "the most shocking thing is not the project itself, it is who benefits from it: those close to the president, through an opaque structure, and at the heart of the administration."
"The Trump administration has a very strong pro-crypto policy: favorable taxation, favorable regulation, promotion of investments. And meanwhile, his own family is preparing to raise $3 billion to go all-in on bitcoin," she wrote, highlighting Donald Trump Jr.'s role at TMTG.
Sheppard Sellam also noted that both he and the president's second-eldest son, Eric Trump, are set to speak at the Bitcoin 2025 conference, scheduled to start Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada. Other planned speakers include Vice President JD Vance, Trump's "Crypto Czar" David Sacks, and various Republicans in Congress.
"Where does politics end and business begin?" the professor asked. "He is a sitting head of state whose immediate entourage is organizing massive financial operations, with a direct effect on the markets... and on their wallets."
trump is corrupt. Republicans don't care.
[image or embed]
— Action Together New Jersey (@actiontogethernj.bsky.social) May 26, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Florian Hollenbach, an economist at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, simply said, "So much corruption and all out in the open."
The FT reporting came just days after the president dined with the top investors in his meme coin at his Virginia golf club—an event that drew protesters whose chants included: "America's not for sale," "Lock him up," and "Trump is a traitor."
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has also generated alarm with his crypto executive order. His administration faced further criticism last month for disbanding a U.S. Department of Justice unit tasked with investigating criminal actors in the digital asset space—a decision laid out in a memo authored by the president's former personal defense attorney.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular