In the depths of Donald Trump’s interregnum, his eldest two sons huddled in a Mar-a-Lago conference room with boyhood pal Zach Witkoff to conjure up a new money machine. Two other would-be cryptocurrency entrepreneurs showed up, one in sweatpants.
That pre-election confab sowed the seeds for World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that, with the senior Trump back in power, is generating cash far faster than the president’s decades-old real-estate business.
While his father Steve Witkoff acts as President Trump’s all-purpose special envoy, 32-year-old Zach Witkoff now heads up World Liberty, which has doled out at least $1.4 billion to both families since the president’s re-election, based on a Wall Street Journal analysis of public disclosures and private documents. Among the payouts: a secret $500 million deal to sell almost half the company to an Abu Dhabi royal and his co-investors.
Witkoff is part of a small cadre of Trump administration offspring who, since their fathers moved to Washington, have metamorphosed into wealthy financial celebrities in their own right.
Key to their transformation has been the crypto sector, where they were all neophytes a few years ago, but now run businesses that raised billions of dollars from investors before the market turned sour. And because they were able to extract real cash from their ventures quickly, they are far less exposed to the current crypto downturn than retail investors who loaded up on digital tokens.
The younger Witkoff now tours the globe alongside a phalanx of aides with an American flag pinned to his suit jacket and counts some of crypto’s most powerful figures as friends, including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who Trump pardoned in October. He sports a Richard Mille timepiece worth half a million dollars on one day, a $250,000 rose-gold Patek Philippe on another.
Eric Trump is the public face of a bitcoin company where he holds a $90 million stake, while his brothers, Don Jr. and 19-year-old Barron join him as co-founders of World Liberty. Brandon Lutnick, the 28-year-old son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, runs his father’s former Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, a midtier investment bank that has become a top choice for crypto deals.
World Liberty has earned the Trump family at least $1.2 billion in cash in the 16 months since its launch, not counting paper gains of at least $2.25 billion from various crypto holdings. By contrast, it took eight years for President Trump’s real estate, golf and brand empire to throw off that amount of cash between 2010 and 2017, according to Trump Organization financial statements disclosed in a New York lawsuit with the state attorney general. The Witkoffs have earned at least $200 million from World Liberty.
The Abu Dhabi deal, reported by the Journal last week, marked the first time a foreign government official had taken a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company. And Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, provided crucial backing for a new World Liberty product around the time that Zhao sought a presidential pardon for his 2023 conviction for failing to maintain internal money-laundering controls, the Journal has reported.
The Trump administration — and representatives of the Trump, Witkoff and Lutnick children — have said the companies run by the children operate completely independently from their fathers. “There are no conflicts of interest,” a White House spokeswoman said, adding President Trump “only acts in the best interest of the American public.”
White House counsel David Warrington said the president “has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities.” He also said Steve Witkoff “has not and does not participate in any official matters that could impact his financial interests,” and has divested his stake in World Liberty.
A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization called the notion that politics has enriched the Trump family “laughable,” adding the crypto ventures started before Trump’s return to office and “will endure long after he leaves.”
A World Liberty spokesman, David Wachsman, said it was a privately held company “focused on deploying world-class products and services that can benefit the U.S. dollar and the American economy.” He added, “There are not, and never have been, any conflicts of interest at the firm.”
Even before co-founding World Liberty, Zach Witkoff “had established a track record of business success,” Wachsman said.
The Abu Dhabi deal didn’t grant either party involved any sort of access to government decision-making or influence over policy, World Liberty previously said. World Liberty also said it played no role in Zhao’s pardon and that its business interactions with Binance have been routine. Binance has said neither the company nor Zhao have financed or helped World Liberty.
After majoring in business administration at the University of Miami’s Herbert Business School, Zach Witkoff worked as a project manager for his father’s property firm, the Witkoff Group, and then co-led his family’s personal investment firm, Witkoff Capital. Wachsman said Witkoff helped oversee over $1 billion in capital, and billions more in real estate.
“I started at the bottom,” Witkoff said in a speech in 2024 to the Republican National Convention, where he introduced his father. “He showed me that success came from hard work, not handouts,” Witkoff added.
He had known the Trump sons since he was little.
Trump senior and first lady Melania Trump were the guests of honor at Witkoff’s 2022 wedding, which was held at the president’s Palm Beach club Mar-a-Lago. Witkoff and his wife, a fashion model, later named their first child after the elder Trump.
The following year, Witkoff was catching up with Eric and Don Jr. when he noticed they looked “downtrodden,” Witkoff told the Journal last year. The pair explained to Witkoff that, after a succession of criminal and civil actions against their father and his companies, they were scrambling to find banks that would accept them as clients.
Witkoff had befriended two internet marketers dabbling in crypto, and suggested a meetup with the Trump sons. Zak Folkman, who created a website called Date Hotter Girls, and Chase Herro, who once described himself as a “dirtbag of the internet,” at the time were running a small crypto project that they later shut down because it got hacked.
The group sat down in the Mar-a-Lago conference room and hatched a plan for a crypto venture. “We just became, like, a band of brothers,” Witkoff told the Journal.
Herro and Folkman walked the Trump brothers through their ambition to bring “decentralized finance,” or DeFi, crypto products to people who weren’t savvy traders. The pitch baffled the Trumps, who joked they would need to go to MIT to understand it. But Eric later said he and his brother came around to the appeal of an everyday product that would allow users, who like them had lost trust in banks, to move and borrow money outside the traditional financial system.
The Trump sons brought their crypto-skeptic father on board. Barron schooled his dad on the mechanics of the digital wallets in which users hold their crypto tokens. “He’s got four wallets or something,” Trump said on a livestream for World Liberty’s debut.
Trump’s involvement with World Liberty marked an about-face from his earlier public stance that bitcoin was “a scam.” For decades, his main business strategy had been to slap his name on a product — from luxury condo buildings and golf courses to vodka and steak — and earn a royalty.
But it turns out putting the family imprimatur on a crypto business was far more lucrative than steaks. Trump completed his conversion in July 2024, after a gusher of campaign donations from the digital-currency industry, when he said he would be a “pro-bitcoin president” at a Nashville crypto conference.
On launch that October, World Liberty named the senior Trump its “chief crypto advocate,” though he now is listed as co-founder emeritus. It began selling a cryptocurrency called WLFI, a so-called “governance token” that gave holders a vote in some of the company’s operations. A document published by World Liberty to advertise WLFI said the venture would pioneer “a new era of Decentralized Finance” and “democratize access to financial opportunities.”
Virtually all the money from the sale of WLFI would go straight to the Trumps, Witkoffs and their co-owners Folkman and Herro — not the company itself. Based on World Liberty’s disclosures, 75% of that money from token sales would go to a Trump entity; 12.5% to a Witkoff entity; and 12.5% to Folkman and Herro, after deducting some operating expenses. The president owns 70% of that Trump entity while unnamed family members own 30%, according to the president’s financial disclosures. The Witkoff family doesn’t disclose the breakdown of its ownership.
Zach Witkoff, who was named chief executive after the election, wined and dined potential WLFI investors, including on a yacht off Miami’s coast to watch a fireworks display for New Year’s Eve. In private conversations, he touted his powerful friends and family connections, people familiar with the discussions said. Some crypto firms bought millions of dollars’ worth.
Meanwhile Barron, according to people close to the company, dialed into World Liberty strategy calls in between his schedule at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where a fleet of black SUVs ferried him to class.
Both the Trumps and Witkoffs began cashing out during the run-up to the inauguration.
On Jan. 16, two lieutenants for Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the U.A.E. president’s brother, signed the deal to purchase a 49% stake in World Liberty for half a billion dollars — a huge sum for a company that at that time had no products. Of the upfront installment, $187 million was directed to Trump family entities, while $31 million was slated to flow to entities affiliated with the Witkoff family. The deal didn’t give the Tahnoon-backed entity any rights to the proceeds of future WLFI token sales, preserving the Trumps’ and Witkoffs’ income stream.
Two days later, Trump and his wife launched a pair of so-called memecoins, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, via a separate business partnership. Trump’s own holding of $TRUMP raced to a multibillion-dollar paper value, before swiftly plummeting. They are now down 95% and 99% respectively. It is unclear what if any cash he received from the memecoins’ sale.
World Liberty stopped selling its WLFI token to the public in March. By then, the company said it had taken in $550 million from the token sales, in addition to the U.A.E. investment money.
Folkman and Herro’s plan to develop a “decentralized lending” product had been backburnered, and World Liberty shifted in a potentially more lucrative direction: the development of a dollar-pegged stablecoin called USD1.
Unlike memecoins and other regular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, whose prices can wildly fluctuate on the market, stablecoins are supposed to track the value of a real-world currency. This makes them useful to crypto traders who want to shelter their holdings from turbulent markets, or to people who want to ping money instantaneously around the world.
Like a savings account at a bank, stablecoin issuers take crypto traders’ dollars and put them into assets like U.S. Treasury bills, except the issuer keeps the profits from the interest, while the traders typically make nothing. The world’s largest stablecoin issuer, Tether, reported $10 billion in profit last year from its holdings.
World Liberty’s own small team of software engineers, hired by Folkman and Herro from their previous crypto venture, weren’t involved with the project to develop USD1, people familiar with the matter said. Instead, Binance deployed engineers to build the blockchain technology behind the stablecoin, the Journal previously reported.
In April, Zach Witkoff and Eric flew into Dubai to promote USD1 at a crypto conference. Once the U.S. Secret Service sealed off the room, the pair took the stage to announce that a state-backed Emirati investment firm would use USD1 to buy a $2 billion stake in Binance. This move would set World Liberty up to earn about $80 million a year from Treasurys backing the stablecoin.
Their new venture aimed to ultimately replace the big banks that cut the Trump family off, the two men said on stage. “We like to say at World Liberty Financial, ‘Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered,'” said Witkoff, now sporting the Richard Mille watch.
At the same time, Eric, 42, and Don Jr., 48, were building a separate crypto company of their own, to be known as American Bitcoin. Beginning in mid-February of last year, the two brothers invested $1 million each into Dominari Holdings, a former biotech company pivoting to finance that leased an office in Trump Tower, and had become a sort of in-house investment bank for the Trump family.
At first the brothers thought they could make money in AI-focused computing servers, and joined with Dominari to launch an entity they called American Data Centers.
Their dalliance with AI didn’t last long. Weeks later, they announced American Data Centers — which owned no data centers — was merging with another company and would go in a different direction: buying and mining bitcoin, the term for running supercomputers that process transactions. They called it American Bitcoin, and Eric emerged as the face of the company, named as its co-founder and chief strategy officer.
While other competitors were struggling to stand out, American Bitcoin leaned into its Trump-tied starpower. When it struck a deal to become a stand-alone public company in May by merging with a tiny publicly traded former cannabis software firm, a slide deck for public investors featured a photo of Eric in front of an American flag with a quote saying, “Crypto is the future,” and “American Bitcoin will set the standard.”
It worked: In June, just four months after the Trump brothers formed a nascent data center company, American Bitcoin raised $220 million from undisclosed investors, who valued the company at over $1 billion.
When it completed its merger and listed publicly in September, investors clamored for the stock, sending its market capitalization above $5 billion.
Seizing on demand, it launched another share sale that raised $134 million through mid-November at an average price of over $7 a share — roughly around the $5 billion valuation. The lead investment bank on the sale: Cantor Fitzgerald.
It was one of many deals that helped Cantor to its best year ever, with its investment-banking revenue soaring. Cantor also advised Trump Media, owner of the Truth Social platform, on a plan to buy billions in bitcoin. Brandon Lutnick, its chairman, only joined Cantor in 2022 as a trader, and soon after spent months working in the Swiss offices of stablecoin giant Tether, a key business partner of Cantor. The financial firm acquired a 5% ownership interest in Tether in April 2024.
For shareholders of American Bitcoin, however, it hasn’t gone well. Two months after the listing, bitcoin the cryptocurrency slid, and so did American Bitcoin stock. In early December shares plunged further when lockup restrictions expired, unleashing waves of selling.
American Bitcoin shares are now trading around $1.30, down over 80% from the public listing. Eric Trump still made plenty in paper gains — his shares were worth around $90 million as of Friday, according to securities filings — while Don Jr.’s holding remains undisclosed.
The plan: World Liberty would take over a publicly traded firm, raise money from investors by selling shares, and use the funds to buy World Liberty’s own WLFI token, people familiar with the proposal said. The stated approach was similar to that of crypto-fan-favorite stock Strategy, which uses shareholder money to buy bitcoin. By buying so much bitcoin, it helps push up the price of the cryptocurrency, and Strategy’s stock — a virtuous cycle, so long as bitcoin is rising.
World Liberty settled on a small Nasdaq-listed crypto payments firm called Alt5 Sigma. In August, World Liberty said it would use its tokens to buy a controlling stake in Alt5, which in turn would raise $750 million from investors at a price of $7.50 a share. Witkoff was named Alt5’s chairman and said the deal would benefit both companies, touting plans for Alt5 to incorporate World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin into its payment products.
“Alt5 is an incredible company, with incredible technology,” Witkoff told CNBC on the day.
The largest investors in the deal were major U.S. hedge funds — including Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management, which contributed $37 million — as well as several China-focused financial firms. Soul Ventures, a Hong Kong-based family office that put in $85 million, viewed the investment as another way to bet on Trump.
“They are launching their product at the right time with the right team,” Soul Ventures co-founder, Warren Hui, told the Journal at the time of the deal, adding that World Liberty’s political ties would ensure Alt5’s growth.
The day after the announcement, Witkoff, Eric, Don Jr., and others from the World Liberty crew rang the bell at the Nasdaq stock exchange and posed for photos in Times Square.
Flush with $750 million, Alt5 directed almost all that money into buying WLFI tokens at 20 cents apiece — 60% above a price a private investor had recently paid.
But unlike when Strategy buys bitcoin, Alt5 didn’t buy the tokens on the open market — instead it bought tokens directly from World Liberty, according to Alt5’s securities filings.
It is similar to how a public company sells newly issued shares that dilute shareholders, but with a remunerative twist: Based on the terms disclosed by World Liberty, the money would go to the original owners of the company, meaning over $500 million to a Trump family-owned entity and $90 million to the Witkoff family.
At the time, holders of WLFI weren’t able to sell their tokens, since they were still “locked” in crypto parlance. But the Alt5 deal was allowing the Trumps and their fellow co-founders to cash out in a different way.
Within three weeks, Alt5’s stock price began sliding. Company executives warned World Liberty that investors were already dumping shares, according to people familiar with the talks. Since the raise, Soul Ventures, Point72 and other big investors, including New York trading firm Jane Street, have shed much of their holdings, disclosures show.
A Point72 spokeswoman declined to comment. Jane Street didn’t respond to a request to comment.
Alt5’s new owners also made little progress integrating the USD1 stablecoin, as Witkoff had said it would. No USD1 transactions have ever been processed on its payment platform, trading data on Alt5’s website show.
In the last three months of the year, Alt5 announced the departure of the chief executive, acting chief executive and chief financial officer, chief operating officer, and a board member who chaired the audit committee.
By this month, any investor who held on from the August fundraise was down over 75%, with Alt5’s share price languishing around $1.70. The price of WLFI has also slumped to 10 cents. Dozens of WLFI holders have been complaining in World Liberty’s public online forum that the company won’t let them sell, since most of their tokens are still subject to the lockup.
Alt5 CEO Tony Isaac said in a statement that the company was focused on growing both its WLFI treasury and payments businesses. “The company believes that these businesses are well positioned to generate long-term shareholder value,” Isaac said, adding that, “We are excited about our future and our ongoing partnership with World Liberty Financial.”
In late November, as his father, Steve Witkoff, was negotiating the terms of a Ukraine peace deal with a Ukrainian delegation at his Miami-area golf club, Zach was across town hosting a birthday party for his son at a family-owned megamansion on Miami Beach’s Sunset Islands.
Days later he returned to Dubai to attend the Binance Blockchain Week event, where he told the crowd that World Liberty would soon roll out more crypto products, backed by real estate, oil and gas. Recently pardoned, Binance’s Zhao strode onto another conference stage a few days later — wearing orange high-tops emblazoned with the words, “Trump. Crypto President.”
Afterward, Binance unveiled a “USD1 Booster Program” that offered generous rewards to users for holding the stablecoin on its platform, including $40 million in bonus payments. Witkoff’s deputy, Zak Folkman, tweeted that “Christmas came early.”
The new Binance boost has sparked traders to put another $3 billion into USD1, meaning the stablecoin’s cash pile could now generate some $200 million a year in revenues for World Liberty. A Binance spokeswoman said the platform supports more than 15 stablecoins today, and it was “misleading to focus on a single promotion.”
Witkoff, Eric and Don Jr. are preparing to host the first “World Liberty Forum” on Feb. 18, with speakers including Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and several top U.S. officials and Republican senators. The venue: Mar-a-Lago.
