Donald Trump made a staggering amount of money last year

Photograph by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images 

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Donald Trump quadrupled his business earnings last year, declaring a personal income of $2.2bn.

So what? When Jimmy Carter was elected, he put his peanut farm into a blind trust, while Harry Truman left office with no income beyond an army pension of $112.56 a month. But even by modern standards, Trump’s financial takings as president are unprecedented. They

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  show how central crypto has become to his wealth;

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  do not tell us anything about how much he is paying in tax; and

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  undermine the notion that the leader of the free world should avoid potential conflicts of interest.

Disclosure day. Trump earned roughly $42.3m a week from his private businesses last year, compared to $7,600 a week from his presidential salary. Tuesday’s disclosure, mandated under the Ethics in Government Act, runs to 927 pages, nearly the length of Don Quixote.

For comparison, Biden’s 2023 disclosure was 11 pages. Obama’s 2014 disclosure was eight.

More than a meme. The biggest chunk of Trump’s earnings – $1.4bn – came from crypto. The president made $635m in royalties from sales of his memecoin, $Trump, which has since plunged in value, and $799m from World Liberty Financial, his family’s crypto firm. Although the deal is not explicitly mentioned in the disclosure, a UAE state-linked company paid $500m for a 49% stake in World Liberty four days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Four months later, Washington allowed the UAE to import 500,000 Nvidia chips a year.

On the house. Trump earned more than $470m from golf courses and clubs around the world, including $77m from Mar-a-Lago. He also made at least $35m in revenue from real estate branding deals in the Middle East and at least $20m in countries such as India and Romania.

Stock figure. The length of Trump’s disclosure is mainly down to his eight investment accounts, which traded in hundreds of companies last year. These accounts made up to $1.4bn of purchases and up to $433m of sales. Trump does not direct his trades and outside brokerage firms cannot accept requests from him and his family. But unlike previous presidents, Trump has not put his assets into a blind trust. This means he could conceivably shape policy to benefit stocks he knows that he owns.

Sue can do it. Trump earned more than $86.5m from legal settlements with media and tech firms. He made $16m from a lawsuit against ABC, $16m from CBS, $22m from YouTube and $24.5m from Meta. The disclosure says that the proceeds of several of these settlements were donated to Trump’s future presidential library, as well as the trust that manages the National Mall and is also handling private donations for the new White House ballroom.

Pick ‘n’ mix. Some of the more esoteric earnings include $4.7m in royalties from Trump-branded watches, a $250,000 giant bronze statue depicting Trump raising his fist after his assassination attempt, $208,000 in royalties from a special edition of the Bible, $122,000 in complimentary sports tickets and $86,000 in pensions from film and TV trade unions.

IMDBehave. Trump hosted The Apprentice, as well as making cameos in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Zoolander and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

What does the disclosure not cover? The $400m Qatari jet which Trump began using as Air Force One on Wednesday. Although the filings detail the earnings of Melania Trump, the first lady, they do not account for the financial dealings of other family members, nor for the thousands of stock trades already made in Trump’s name this year.

What does the disclosure not tell us? How much Trump paid in tax on his array of earnings. Trump and the Internal Revenue Service recently reached a settlement that permanently bars the IRS from auditing the tax returns of the president, his family and his businesses.

Questions to answer. The filings throw up several coincidences of timing. Trump

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  made 327 previously undisclosed stock purchases worth up to $12.8m on 8 April 2025, a day before he announced he would pause some of his Liberation Day tariffs;

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  bought up to $5m of shares in Nvidia on 6 May 2025, a week before he allowed Nvidia to sell hundreds of thousands of AI chips to Saudi Arabia; and

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  bought up to $5m of shares in Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia on 23 July, the same day that the White House unveiled its AI action plan.

For the record. There is no indication that any investment decisions were related to information privy to Trump or announcements made by him.

The Wall Street Journal says: “The Trump clan is cashing in on the presidency in big and sketchy ways.”

The Free Press says: “There is no modern parallel for the scale and shamelessness with which Trump has enriched himself while in power.”

The White House says: “Neither the president nor his family has ever engaged – or will ever engage – in conflicts of interest.”

Trump says: “I’ve made a lot of money before I became president, and [outside parties] invest my money, and I don’t talk to them.”

But we know that Trump reportedly meets his financial advisers once a year for an update on his accounts.

We also know that there is no comparison between the $622m that Trump reported in 2024, before his return to the White House, and the billions he made last year.

What’s more… Presidents are exempt from the ethics laws that prohibit conflicts of interest in the executive branch. Past leaders acted as though they were subject to the same rules as everyone else. But Trump appears to have no truck with the good chap theory.