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President Donald Trump’s meme coin may be a textbook cash grab not unlike his $60 made-in-China Bibles and his $400 gold sneakers but it’s not the kind of venture that can catapult his wealth into the stratosphere.
Some news outlets reported an absolute melt-up in Trump’s net worth over the weekend, and those figures have run wild on social media. Respectfully, though, you have to squint really hard and swallow a giant red crypto pill to conclude that the president’s net worth suddenly shot up 800% on the back of a digital asset that is functionally useless (more on that in a moment).
He’s still a billionaire, to be sure, but a single-digit one hundreds of billions of dollars away from the levels of the wannabe tech oligarchs who surrounded him at Monday’s inauguration.
Here’s the deal: Calculating the fortunes of wealthy people isn’t as cut and dry as it might be for you and me. Normies like us have wages or a salary and maybe some assets like a house and a retirement account, if you are very lucky. Total those things up, minus any debt, and there you have it.
But the super-rich are often loaded up with a range of assets, like stock options and stakes of private companies whose values are a bit murkier. In financial media, Forbes and Bloomberg have whole teams dedicated to reporting on the day-to-day fluctuations of the world’s wealthiest people.
Both estimate Trump’s fortune, which is largely tied up in real estate and his majority stake in his social media business, Truth Social, is valued at just over $6 billion.
Then Trump and his wife late last week launched their $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins essentially digital tokens that are, officially, the president and first lady’s endorsed cryptocurrencies. But in reality, they trade purely on emotions and lack even a theoretical utility within or outside the crypto space. (In the frenzy over those launches, someone set up an unofficial “Barron” coin that turned out to be unrelated to the president and the first lady’s son Barron Trump. That coin, according to Crypto.com, looks like the sort of textbook rug pull that has made meme coins practically synonymous with scams.)
Neither Forbes nor Bloomberg count Trump’s crypto holdings in their calculations, because, as Bloomberg notes, “their speculative nature, volatility and lock-ups make it difficult to determine their value.”
The $TRUMP coin’s official website says that 80% of the token’s supply is controlled by two affiliates of the Trump Organization, the president’s private conglomerate. The coin’s “fully diluted value” which reflects the total value, assuming all of its tokens are available stood at about $72 billion near its peak on Sunday, which would, by the power of wishful thinking, put the Trump Org’s 80% stake at nearly $58 billion.
Using fully diluted value is especially dubious in the crypto world, because it assumes the price of a given asset will remain stable, which … it definitely won’t. (The tech researcher and journalist Molly White has written extensively about this.)
In line with meme coin volatility, $TRUMP surged more than 1,00% over the weekend, then lost half its value by Monday the kind of stomach-churning loss that make meme coins the jankiest slot machines of the largely unregulated crypto casino.
Even bitcoin, the most popular and “safe” token, is too prone to wild swings for a lot of traditional investors.
Bottom line: To be sure, Trump will make some money off this thing, because, well, he loves merch. Slap the Trump name on a Bible or sneakers or watches or cologne and let the proceeds flow. (The Trump coin has arguably less direct utility than any of those products, but they are an obvious, unregulated and ultimately anonymous way to show one’s devotion to the brand.)
“He realizes that the power and theme of the presidency allows him to make a ton of money by selling Trump coins it’s completely in keeping with his character, and he doesn’t care about the potential conflicts of interest,” James Angel, a professor at Georgetown McDonough’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, told me. “It’s just a quick way for him to make a buck.”
By some estimates, the Trump Org is raking in tens of millions in trading fees.
But that doesn’t make the president a “crypto billionaire” a term that, in any context, should be taken with extreme caution.
