During President Donald Trump’s first term in office, we frequently heard about the many ways he was profiting off of the presidency and for good reason: No other U.S. president in history had enriched himself to the extent Trump did (to the tune of $1.6 billion) and in such flagrant ways (charging taxpayers for the water he drank at Mar-a-Lago, for example). But those days now look downright quaint given the unbelievable amount of money the businessman president took in during his first year back in Washington.
According to new financial disclosures, Trump made more in 2025 than he did in his entire first term in the White House, raking in at least $2.2 billion last year. (The number also dwarfs the amount he made the year before he became president again, which was less than one-quarter of 2025’s windfall.) The biggest source of riches was the president’s crypto holdings, which accounted for $1.4 billion in earnings. Those earnings included $635 million in royalties from an entity linked to the memecoin he launched mere days before his second inauguration and $500 million in proceeds from sales of tokens sold by World Liberty Financial, the company he founded with his three sons. As the New York Times notes, in January 2025, shortly before Trump became president for the second time, “an investment firm tied to the government of the U.A.E. bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty, raising a slew of ethical concerns,” and soon after that, “the Emiratis struck a deal with the Trump administration — over the objections of some national security officials — for the export of valuable computer chips that power artificial intelligence.” Other things that happened after Trump moved back into the White House: He pardoned Changpeng Zhao — the founder of Binance, i.e., the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange — and signed legislation that gave legitimacy to stablecoins, a form of cryptocurrency that World Financial had started selling just months prior.
