President Trump’s business empire is far larger and more valuable today than it was during his first term—and his crypto holdings make its exact size harder than ever to pin down. For this story, two reporters and a data editor from Fortune reviewed hundreds of pages of financial disclosures , drew on several months of beat reporting on TMTG and World Liberty Financial, and spoke with seven watchdogs and experts. We shared our findings with the White House, the Trump Organization, TMTG, and World Liberty Financial, and incorporated their responses. Long before Donald Trump was president of the United States, he was a brand—the TV billionaire known for his gaudy properties, his celebrity hobnobbing, and a sprawling universe of products bearing his name, from resorts to steaks to continuing education courses. That brand has grown massively since, and now powers a media company and crypto operation that have added billions to Trump’s net worth. During his first term, critics complained that the president’s corporate empire was riddled with conflicts of interest and offered abundant opportunities to buy influence—when foreign dignitaries stayed at his luxury hotels during official state visits, for example. (Trump, in response, maintained that he took steps to distance himself from his holdings, such as placing some of his assets in a revocable trust managed by his son Donald Jr.) The complaints look quaint in hindsight. As Trump’s portfolio and wealth have grown and entered new sectors, they now provide myriad new avenues through which Trump and his family can amass more wealth, potentially with the help of political allies or business partners, with little public visibility. While Trump spent most of his career as a real estate developer, his empire has expanded from the steel and concrete of New York skyscrapers to the fiber-optic cables of Silicon Valley. At the tender age of 78, he has now become a tech mogul. But one thing hasn’t changed: the brand. The main product Donald Trump is selling to customers, and the core of any pitch to investors, is Donald Trump. Lately, his holdings have become even more dependent on his name: in media, with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG); and crypto, with World Liberty Financial and his $Trump memecoin. “There’s been a shift from this physical Trump brand to this online Trump brand,” says Jordan Libowitz, vice president at the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. As of mid-March, Trump’s net worth was approximately $4.8 billion, according to Bloomberg. That figure doesn’t include the billions Trump stands to gain from his two crypto projects—a value impossible to get an exact fix on, though Fortune estimates it at $2.9 billion. (A source close to Trump said his net worth was much higher than Bloomberg’s estimate, and that the $Trump coin is worth more than $10 billion. The source declined to provide calculations, and Fortune was unable to verify that figure.) Trump entered his first term in office with a net worth of around $3.7 billion, according to Forbes. Fortune looked through hundreds of pages of financial disclosures and spoke with seven watchdogs and experts. We also reached out to the Trump Organization, TMTG, and World Liberty Financial. The results we’ve gathered are extensive but incomplete: The convoluted structure of Trump’s private corporation and its lattice of limited liability companies (LLCs) and other entities make the sources and size of his wealth too murky to track. Meanwhile, his crypto holdings, and their complex ownership structure, are almost totally opaque. The area with clearer visibility is Trump’s TMTG stock, because of SEC reporting rules. But even here, the company does the bare minimum in releasing information, refusing to hold quarterly investor calls or to offer any metrics on the media company’s user base. “The thing to remember about Trump’s finances is that it’s not like any other politician’s we’ve ever seen,” says Libowitz. “Everything is owned by a series of Russian-nesting-doll LLCs.” Reached for comment, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “President Trump handed over his multibillion-dollar empire in order to serve our country, and he has sacrificed greatly.” She said he will continue to file annual financial disclosure reports and called concerns that Trump’s businesses might make him susceptible to influence “illegitimate and absurd,” adding: “Clearly the American people do not agree, or they would have not overwhelmingly reelected President Trump to the. White House.” And, she said, “the Trump name and brand is the most iconic it’s ever been. The original Trump Organization: Hotels, golf courses, and the magic of the Trump name The world was introduced to Trump, the brand, in the 1970s, when an eager young real estate developer in New York City made a name for himself as a swashbuckling dealmaker with a penchant for self promotion. In 1971, just three years after Donald graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, his father, Fred, appointed him president of the family company, then known as Trump Management. One of Donald Trump’s first acts was to consolidate the many nondescript legal entities that owned the various properties under a new corporate identity: the Trump Organization. Later in Trump’s real estate career, after taking on hefty debts that led to a string of casino bankruptcies, he looked for new sources of income that required far less risk. While Trump still developed his own properties, he would also carve out a healthy business licensing his name to buildings others owned, including internationally in countries like Turkey, Uruguay, and Oman. Across Manhattan (and, soon, the rest of the country and the world), buildings would be adorned with glittering gold letters that spelled out “TRUMP,” as if to say these were not ordinary skyscrapers but a special class of luxury. The Trump Organization has remained a family affair, in the hands of sons Donald Jr. and Eric since 2017. That sprawling real estate empire now stretches across four continents and comprises 20 golf courses and more than 30 buildings that Trump owns or licenses, according to the Trump Organization’s website. And while he is no longer only a real estate magnate, those holdings still constitute a major portion of his wealth. It is difficult to put an exact figure on the Trump Organization’s value, both because it is a private company and because, like other real estate companies, it has sometimes manipulated the reported value of its properties to obtain more favorable interest rates or tax treatment. (Last February a New York judge fined Trump and the Trump Organization $355 million for defrauding banks and insurance companies by lying about the value of their properties. The verdict has been appealed.) The value of the Trump Organization’s real estate holdings is around $2.65 billion. That accounts for about half of Trump’s estimated assets, not including his crypto holdings. TMTG: Truth Social, Truth.Fi, and other media/fintech plays In 2021 Trump, ever the consummate comeback artist, turned a broad social media ban into a multibillion-dollar stake in yet another company that bears his name: Trump Media & Technology Group. Shortly after being booted from every major platform following the events of Jan. 6, Trump sat down with two former contestants from The Apprentice and sketched out plans to launch his own social media company. (He has since been reinstated on Facebook and X.) Over the next several years, Truth Social, as the Twitter clone was dubbed, would become TMTG’s flagship tech product. From there, TMTG slowly branched out into other digital businesses. In 2024, the same year it went public, TMTG launched a streaming service, Truth+. And the company kicked off 2025 with the announcement that it was starting a fintech platform in partnership with Charles Schwab called Truth.Fi. From its inception in 2021, TMTG would take a winding path through several intra-investor lawsuits and a slap on the wrist from the Securities and Exchange Commission before finally going public via a SPAC in March 2024, an event that created immense value for Trump, the man whose brand lent the fledgling tech company an aura of credibility. By the end of TMTG’s first day on the Nasdaq, Trump’s share of the company was worth $6.7 billion. The current value of Trump's shares is about $2.3 billion. TMTG’s business fundamentals leave much to be desired. It closed 2024 with $3.6 million in revenue and operating losses of $400 million. The size of the gulf between TMTG’s financial performance and its share price is extremely unusual, even more so when one considers how little information the company shares. In its latest annual report, TMTG offered investors no timeline for when its finances would turn around, saying it would be “premature” to do so. Truth Social also lags its mainstream social media competitors in popularity. In February, Truth Social had an average of 304,000 daily active users on its app in the U.S., according to data from market research firm Similarweb. While that was a 12% increase from January, it still paled in comparison to X’s 25 million daily average U.S. app users, and it is far behind the 101 million and 93 million of Meta’s Facebook and Instagram respectively. (A spokesperson from TMTG condemned Fortune’s reporting on the company as inaccurate but did not offer specifics.) Still, TMTG’s lackluster income statement and relatively small user numbers have done little to scare off the roughly 650,000 retail investors who own the stock—many as a show of political support for Trump. “What some people might keep bringing up as a pattern of problems, other people will see as—if not success—then at least demonstrations of remarkable resilience,” says Wharton School professor of marketing Cait Lamberton of the Trump brand. TMTG isn’t the only tech company to prove unprofitable in its early years, of course, and the company’s balance sheet is rather healthy. TMTG is currently sitting on $777 million in cash and short-term investments and has only $25 million in total liabilities. About $450 million of that cash came from a stock purchasing arrangement with a small New Jersey financial firm Yorkville Advisors that is set to become the registered investment advisor for Truth.Fi. TMTG executives say the cash hoard will be put to use expanding the company into new lines of business. Earlier this year, TMTG’s board approved a fund for the pursuit of possible acquisitions. TMTG’s goal, with its various tech holdings, is to create an “uncancelable tech company,” according to SEC filings. Slowly but surely, TMTG has made strides in that direction, building its own proprietary tech infrastructure rather than relying on third-party vendors. Truth.Fi’s initial plans will include six ETFs that will invest in U.S. energy companies, the manufacturing sector, and Trump’s latest infatuation: cryptocurrencies. Trump and crypto: World Liberty Financial and the $Trump coin Trump may have entered his second term as the “crypto president,” but it was only a few short years ago that he was describing Bitcoin as a “scam.” So what changed? After leaving office in 2021, Trump dabbled in non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, crypto assets representing tradable and speculative pieces of digital art. After launching his first collection in 2022, Trump netted $7 million in revenue from digital trading cards over about a year and a half, according to financial disclosures. For Trump’s adventures in crypto, “NFTs were the gateway drug,” says David Krause, a business professor at Marquette University. “He realized digital assets were an opportunity.” A largely unregulated space, blockchain technology allows speculators to launch their own tokens, with values often tied to nothing except the brand of the project itself—and without the need for disclosures or other consumer protections required by traditional investment vehicles. Though most cryptocurrencies can be traced through blockchains— online, publicly verifiable ledger technologies—the entities controlling and trading crypto can still be obscured. Because of the lack of regulatory guardrails around crypto, it is virtually impossible to know exactly which entities own Trump’s crypto projects, and how they trace back to the president. After the crypto industry launched a $200 million campaign to back pro-blockchain candidates during the 2024 election, Trump began to embrace the sector, making speeches at industry events and announcing plans for initiatives like a government strategic reserve that would hold Bitcoin. Trump also began to explore further ventures in the digital-assets space beyond the relatively modest profits that he made from NFTs. Last summer, Trump and his sons began to tout a new crypto project called World Liberty Financial. “A new era in finance is here,” Trump’s son Eric posted on X in August. Though they provided few details, it soon emerged that the platform would allow accredited investors to buy a token native to the platform with no clear utility. A public sale went live in October. “When they first released the token, it was not a hit—it flopped,” says Alexander Blume, founder and CEO of digital-assets-focused investment firm Two Prime. “When Trump got elected, everyone started buying the token.” Unlike other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which can be traded on exchanges, WLFI is set at a fixed price, is nontransferable, and is available only to accredited investors. It operates as a so-called governance token, a type of crypto asset that allows users to interact with decentralized financial applications, like lending protocols. Governance tokens are common in crypto, with popular platforms like Uniswap and Aave each having a corresponding token with market caps in the billions of dollars, though—unlike WLFI—they are tradable on exchanges and have a dedicated function. As of now, “[WLFI]" has no value other than perception,” says Blume. According to World Liberty Financial’s website, Trump-affiliated entities own 22.5 billion tokens, with the rest sold at a price set between 1.5 and five cents. The entities also earn 75% of revenue from the sales. With vague promises that WLFI holders will be able to use the token to “shape the future” of the project, and Trump’s three sons serving as official advisors, the market perceives the token mainly as a way to “basically put yourself on the map with the Trump family,” says Zaheer Ebtikar, founder of crypto hedge fund Split Capital. Chart shows TMTG stock performance A spokesperson for WLFI disputed the suggestion that the project has no clear utility, saying, “The expansion of the WLFI platform will bridge traditional financial markets with blockchain technology.” They noted that WLFI is not a political organization. One of the largest buyers has been Justin Sun, a Hong Kong–based crypto entrepreneur who faced a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud. Lawyers for Sun denied the charges, arguing the lawsuit was part of the agency’s “ever-widening campaign seeking dominion over digital assets.” Sun became an official advisor to World Liberty Financial after purchasing $30 million of the token in November. He later invested another $45 million into the project. The SEC announced in late February it would pause its case against Sun. The WLFI spokesperson said Sun’s investment was “based purely on the project’s merit and market potential.” World Liberty Financial has used some of the proceeds from its token sales to gather a treasury of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a number of smaller tokens. Ebtikar argues that some investors could view WLFI as a weighted index of different assets that could someday be tradable or used for other financial purposes, including borrowing and lending. “It could be an interesting outcome,” says Ebtikar. While crypto investors argue over the aims of World Liberty Financial Trump’s other foray into the crypto space—his self-branded memecoin—does not make any claims of utility. Launched the Friday before his inauguration, on the day that a group of the industry’s top leaders was hosting a glitzy Crypto Ball in Washington, D.C., Trump’s memecoin offers speculators the opportunity to buy and trade an asset tied to the president. “People like him so much they’re willing to buy air,” says Krause. “It’s digital nothing.” Like many of Trump’s enterprises, the project has an opaque structure, with 80% of the total supply owned by Trump-affiliated entities, though the full number of tokens will be released over the course of three years. Still, with the Trump coin trading in mid-March at around $11 and 1 billion tokens set to be released, Trump could theoretically stand to profit to the tune of billions of dollars, though the project’s market cap has plummeted nearly 85% since its all-time high, around its launch. According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, Trump-affiliated entities have already made $350 million in revenue from trading fees and trading the token itself, though that figure does not include unrealized losses. With crypto still largely outside the purview of government agencies, and the Trump administration advancing a deregulatory agenda, critics argue that Trump’s crypto projects present unprecedented opportunities for foreign officials and entities to invest in his enterprises outside the glare of public scrutiny. “Is it grift, greed, or genius?” asks Krause. “In a way, it’s all three. There’s marketing genius behind this.” This article appears in the April/May 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline: "The business of Trump." This story was originally featured on Fortune.com ...read more read less