ByDan Alexander,
Forbes Staff.
onald Trump has made a lot of money this year, but no one really knows how much. It’s a mystery not because the president has a private business. Nor because he won’t share his tax returns. Nor even because gains in cryptocurrency can be difficult to track. The main reason no one knows what Trump is making is because of a single, secretive agreement that appeared around the time of the inauguration.
At some point, apparently the start of the year, Trump owned 70% of a company named DT Marks Defi LLC, which in turn owned 75% of the crypto project World Liberty Financial. The president’s financial disclosure report listed unnamed family members (presumably World Liberty cofounders Don Jr., Eric and Barron) as the owner of the remaining 30%. But a monitor overseeing the Trump Organization disclosed in a letter to a New York judge that her team learned in January that the first family was selling a stake in an unspecified company that seems all but certain to be DT Marks Defi. That deal presumably changed the ownership structure of DT Marks Defi—though exactly how remains unclear.
The agreement came with no public announcement. World Liberty’s website acknowledges that DT Marks Defi holds a stake in the project, but it doesn’t answer the key question—who exactly owns DT Marks Defi. Trump submitted his financial disclosure report in June, but it appears to offer a snapshot of his holdings as of January 1, omitting later developments. The Trump Organization shows no interest in revealing anything about the January agreement—what percentage the first family sold, who bought the stake, how much money was involved, even whether the deal closed.
