President Trump has made plenty of money conjuring up his own cryptocurrencies. His bet on bitcoin, however, is off to a rough start.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Donald Trump, the crypto skeptic-turned-“chief crypto advocate,” became one of the world’s biggest bitcoin investors this summer, when his Trump Media and Technology Group purchased $2 billion of the cryptocurrency. On stage at a bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, one day after news of the plan became public, first son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t help but gloat. “I think you saw, all, the announcement yesterday,” he said, his voice rising like a politician anticipating applause. “We’re very long crypto. I mean, it’s a huge part of everything that we do right now.”
The price of bitcoin had just jumped 57% in a year, and Don Jr. predicted it would increase about 35% to 60% more in the year to come. Next to him on stage, his brother Eric foresaw a 55% jump. A half year later, those calls look like signs of an overheated market. From the time Trump Media purchased its pile of bitcoin in July, the cryptocurrency is down an estimated 12%. The president, in turns out, got in at the top, or pretty close to it.
Volatility is inherent in crypto, as Donald Trump pointed out in 2019. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he tweeted at the time. Five years later, with crypto money pouring into the 2024 election, he changed his tone. “You are the modern-day Edisons and Wright brothers and Carnegies and Henry Fords,” he told a gathering of bitcoin enthusiasts in Nashville.
As the price of bitcoin soared, the president’s social-media business flailed. Truth Social, Trump Media’s copycat of Twitter, never attracted as many users as the original. Its market debut in early 2024 nonetheless caught the imagination of meme-stock traders who liked the idea of a Trump-powered social-media app. Then Elon Musk purchased the real Twitter, reversed Trump’s ban, and made the idea of a more-conservative Twitter seem pointless. Losses piled up at Trump Media, and shares tanked, declining 68% from their peak and erasing $3.3 billion from Trump’s net worth by May.
Surely hoping to spawn another stock surge, Trump Media announced its bitcoin play that month, promising the president—who now owns 41% of the shares—an indirect position in the cryptocurrency—roughly $830 million. Investors, perhaps wary after the company’s struggles, didn’t think much of the idea. Shares dropped 19% in three days, and Trump lost another $560 million.
At some point between July 1 and July 21—it’s not clear exactly when—Trump Media amassed its bitcoin stockpile, buying when the price was an estimated $115,000. It looked like a decent bet for a while, with bitcoin moving up and down in a relatively tight band. Then, over the last month, the cryptocurrency dropped 17%. Trump Media’s bitcoin holdings, which cost $2 billion (on top of the $76 million required to gin up the capital to make the investment) are now worth an estimated $1.7 billion. Shares of Trump Media, which assumed about a billion dollars of debt in the process, fell 24%, wiping out $490 million of Trump’s now-$6.7 billion personal fortune. A turnaround in bitcoin’s price could send the stock—and the president’s net worth—up again.
Amid the current troubles, Trump Media, which previously sued Forbes and other outlets for allegedly inaccurately reporting losses, is back to criticizing the press. “Only a fake news outlet like Forbes could look at Trump Media, which grew its financial assets from $274 million when we went public just a year and a half ago to more than $3 billion as reported in our last quarterly earnings, thanks in large part to our bitcoin treasury strategy, and conclude that the strategy failed,” a Trump Media spokesperson said in a statement.
It’s true that the bitcoin play increased Trump Media’s assets. But simply buying stuff, particularly at high prices, does not necessarily make someone richer. And unfortunately for Trump Media, it is investors—not news outlets—who have concluded the company is now worth about one-third of what it once was.