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.
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00:00The thing that really stood out to me the most when I was reporting this story is just
00:04how successful President Donald Trump has been at translating the Trump brand across
00:10a huge amount of categories.
00:11There are no formal legal laws that say a president can't run a business.
00:17The exact scope of President Trump's net worth is difficult to quantify.
00:20Most estimates put it at somewhere between $4.9 billion to $5 billion.
00:24Trump's financial portfolio is different than previous presidents in the modern era, in
00:28large part because it's just so big.
00:31So to report this piece, my colleague Leo and I probably read hundreds and hundreds
00:35of disclosures and SEC documents.
00:37We all know that the Trump brand started in real estate, but later over the course of
00:41his career, Donald Trump realized because his brand was so strong, he could license
00:45just the name without having to develop and invest in properties himself.
00:49And then later, he expanded the same idea across a bunch of different categories.
00:53Donald Trump over the course of his career has had vodkas, steaks, wines, even had a
00:58travel website at one point, all of these that carried the name.
01:01He once called Bitcoin a scam.
01:03Since then, he's launched two of his own businesses, one which is the Trump coin and the other
01:08which is World Liberty Financial, which is sort of a crypto trading platform and also
01:13coin in its own right.
01:14Fortunes estimates put the current value at about $2 billion, but he's managed to make
01:19money not just from the price of the coin, but also from trading fees when other people
01:23trade the coin.
01:24We estimate that he's made about $350 million just in trading fees.
01:30There seems to have been no erosion or dilution amongst the brand's biggest fans.
01:35And I think that's a really impressive and surprising thing for any consumer brand to
01:41be able to do.