Trump family is making billions on crypto. Their investors are losing money

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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WBUR podcasts, Boston.

**Michelle Conlin** (0:20)
You know, they all felt like, he's the president, he's putting his name on these things, his family is connected. These things have got to go up.

**Ashley Locke** (0:32)
The Trump family gains more wealth from cryptocurrencies as investors lose.
It's Thursday, July 9th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Ashley Locke. Today on the show, artist and activist Ai Weiwei reflects on the state of free speech in China and the West. And grandparents are a quiet safety net for the American economy as housing prices spike.

**Deborah Whitman** (1:11)
We find more and more families moving in together, either temporarily or permanently. And grandparents are really playing that role.

**Ashley Locke** (1:22)
But first, we now know that President Trump made a lot of money during his first year back in office, more than half of which came from cryptocurrency ventures. That's according to financial disclosures released last week. Investigative reporters at Reuters have also reported something else. While the Trumps have netted $2.3 billion from their crypto businesses since 2020, four, two and three of their customers lost money.
Michelle Conlin co-wrote a deep dive on the topic. She shares more details with Indira Lakshmanan.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (1:56)
So Donald Trump called crypto a scam back in 2021 So let me just ask you the simple question. Is it a scam?

**Michelle Conlin** (2:05)
Ah, that's a question for the ages that's, of course, widely debated. And you're right, Donald Trump did call crypto a scam.
Fairly recently, in fact, and that all changed in the summer before the 2024 election, when the crypto industry really set its sights on Trump as a possible benefit to them, if they could help reelect him. And a few months later, shortly before the US election, he launched his own crypto company, a crypto exchange called World Liberty Financial, that you can kind of think of as the bank of Trump, so to speak, for crypto.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (2:45)
Right. So he and his sons created this business together in 2024
Explain to us how they could possibly make so much money, $2.3 billion in less than two years, with so little investment and almost no risk of failing.

**Michelle Conlin** (3:02)
You're right. For our examination, we examined four of their largest crypto connected holdings.
And the playbook was the same all four times. Basically, the Trumps invested little, if any money, probably none. We couldn't find any evidence that they had invested any of their own money. And retail buyers flooded in, many of them supporters of the president. And at the end, ended up losing $2.3 billion on these ventures as the four assets all tanked.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (3:36)
Right. So you report that two-thirds of Trump's crypto investors, or maybe buyers is the better word for it, lost money. And the total amount lost was as much as the Trump family made. They were making money on transaction fees, on buying and selling cryptocurrency, regardless of whether the cryptocurrency itself rose in value. Explain to us, who are these investors and what did they think they were buying?

**Michelle Conlin** (4:02)
Good question. There are people who bought Trump's crypto token, World Liberty Financial. There's another crypto venture, a meme coin, known as Trump. They bought the meme coin. And then there's two Trump-connected publicly traded companies where investors also bought shares. And you know, I think almost to a person, you know, they all felt like he's the president. He's putting his name on these things. His family is connected.
These things have got to go up.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (4:35)
Well, Trump's company, World Liberty Financial, discloses on its website that its token is not an investment and that people shouldn't expect to earn money from them, that they're more like souvenirs.

**Michelle Conlin** (4:46)
You're right. There's fine print on Trump's crypto exchange, World Liberty, and there's also fine print on the Trump meme coin website. Very fine print that makes it clear that people shouldn't view these as traditional investments.
However, you know, three days before Trump's inauguration, when the news popped all over the world on social media that Trump had launched a meme coin, people didn't necessarily read that fine print, and they thought, huh, this thing's got to pop. He's about to take office. If you're a sophisticated crypto investor, you kind of know meme coins can kind of go up and then dump very quickly. But this was the president, and this was just regular, everyday retail investors who weren't perhaps as sophisticated. And for some, it was the first time they had ever bought a crypto asset.