According to an analysis by a Reuters reporting team, the Trump family’s crypto empire made more than $800 million in the first half of 2025 alone. This year, that number is closer to $2.3 billion – at least.
Reuters found those figures through the president’s official disclosures, property records, financial records and crypto trade information, among other sources. Then the reporting team detailed instances of investors investing in the Trump crypto venture in the hopes of obtaining presidential favors.
Reuters journalist Tom Bergin, who covers regulatory abuses and illicit money flows, told the Reynolds Center how the investigation was conducted, the challenges with data and what their findings tell the public.
Why crypto?
The deep dive into the family’s business ventures started long before the crypto boom attracted the Trumps’ attention, Bergin said.
He chronicled conditions in the family’s real estate and golf course ventures in 2016, uncovering how capturing the presidency helped turn around these struggling businesses. Crypto took this to another level.
“Cryptocurrency has got a rather hypothetical value,” Bergin said. “It’s not based on anything. There is no underlying business there. It’s entirely sentiment driven.”
President Donald Trump was originally skeptical of the digital currency, Bergin said, but on the campaign trail for the 2024 election, “he really got on board.”
Crypto became the Trump family’s biggest money maker last year, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. The profits mainly came from two entities: World Liberty Financial and a Trump meme coin, known as $TRUMP. Overall, crypto made up 90% of their earnings in this timeframe, Reuters found.
“With the arrival of the return of President Trump to the White House [in 2024], we knew that this was going to be an important story,” Bergin said. “It was going to be important to follow the money.”
Bergin and his colleagues followed World Liberty’s investors and highlighted the ethics of a business devoted entirely to digital currency while also being closely related to the president of the United States.
The majority of these investors came from outside the U.S. Reuters spoke to half a dozen of them, opening the story with an account of Eric Trump pitching the currency to an investor from China.
“We were seeing a lot of the people who had been pitched by the Trumps by their associates were people in Asia in particular,” Bergin said. “So we were really trying to illustrate the practical practicalities of everyday business selling hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto tokens for the Trump family.”
But the Trump family’s lack of transparency with how they’ve handled the cryptocurrency is also a key factor. Bergin said World Liberty was found selling tokens valued at over a billion dollars, without disclosing the sales to the public, according to a European regulatory filing.
He said this tidbit was surprising because the administration is demanding more transparency in how digital currencies are being handled, but World Liberty isn’t following that game plan.
“That raises questions about whether the people that you’ve been selling these coins to are getting the full facts, whether they might feel that they have been treated fairly, and whether they have been dealing with a transparent company in this case,” he said.
For investors in the Trumps’ crypto businesses, any doubts were swept away by the hope of making a quick buck on a speculative investment touted by the president’s two sons.
Crypto is marketing
Bergin said in both of the Trump family’s crypto businesses, buyers weren’t “buying this purely because they were fans of the president.”
“We spoke to many people who were supporters of the president, people who (were) three time voters for the president,” Bergin said. “When we spoke to those, all of them were optimistic that they would make money out of this.”
Bergin said cryptocurrency, unlike investing in a business and owning a small share of its production, is more like owning a “betting slip.” If a crypto business fails, there’s often no foundational assets underneath it.
“Hundreds of thousands of crypto tokens have been created, and almost all of them become worthless,” he said. “It’s not a hypothetical to say that crypto is something which inevitably, in most cases, fails.”
None of the investors who spoke with Reuters about their experiences with the Trump brothers and their partners in World Liberty could recount them promising presidential access or favors if they invested in the business.
Still, Bergin said investors felt World Liberty would be privileged by Trump being in the White House, and investors would benefit from putting money into the business.
“Everyone that we came across was buying to make money, and they believed because the Trumps were in the White House, that was more likely,” Bergin said.
Challenges in sourcing and data
Bergin advised that it is critical to stay organized when working on such a complex investigation like this, and to fact-check every detail “religiously.”
“Even if you make a mistake on a relatively minor aspect of an exercise like this, the subject will use that particular error to undermine everything,” Bergin said.
And when the subjects of the investigation are known for retaliating through the legal system, it’s harder to find sources who are willing to bear the consequences of going on-the-record.
“We can’t do this job reporting on complicated issues like tax issues, crypto financial accounting, all of these things, we can’t do them without experts,” he said. “It’s becoming worryingly difficult to find technical experts to talk to us about these sensitive issues if they involve the president or his family.”
The key takeaway Bergin said readers should take away from his team’s investigation is that the Trump family has been able to effectively “monetize the presidency.” Bergin and Reuters continue to document the Trump family’s crypto empire, and added two more crypto projects from the family into their reporting this year after their award-winning work from 2025.
“The billions of dollars they’re currently making is money which is unimaginable that they could have earned were it not for the fact that Donald Trump was in the White House,” Bergin said.
