Inside the Trump Family’s Money-Making Machine

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2:02The president says he wants friendship with our northern neighbor despite trade tensions, but won't give up on the idea of turning Canada into the 51st state. It's been about six months since President Trump started his second term. And if you're having a hard time keeping track of everything that's happened since then, you're not alone. The president has imposed eye-popping tariffs on our largest trading partners, what he's calling the beginning of a new system of trade, ramped up border enforcement and mass deportations, deploy about 700 Marines to the L.A. area in response to the protests over ice raids, and overhauled large parts of the federal government.

2:38Trump has also ordered military strikes on Iran, massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities, engaged in legal battles with universities and the media and signed a massive tax and spending bill into law. Passing in the Senate, it was very close. Vice President J.D. Vance with the tie-breaking vote. The White House has celebrated the last six months. The administration has argued the president has delivered on campaign promises. He's cracked down on illegal border crossings, reduced the trade deficit, and delivered tax cuts to working-class Americans. But during that time and in the months leading up to his re-election, something else has also happened.

3:16President Trump and his family have made a lot of money. The way that his wealth looks now in his second term versus his first term is very different. Annie Massa covers wealth for Bloomberg. In Trump's first term, I would say there were already calls and protests over potential for conflicts of interest because he was a businessman, he has the Trump Organization. But now as we come into the second term, it's just a much more complex picture. Today, President Trump's assets are in a trust controlled by his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr. And his family says they aren't doing any business with governments.

3:59Critics of the president would argue it falls short of separating him from his business interests. And he spent months working with a team of reporters at Bloomberg, crunching the numbers on how the assets in that trust and the Trump family's wealth have ballooned since the early days of his campaign for re-election. In that time, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, President Trump's net worth has more than doubled to about$6.4 billion. He now has a publicly traded company. That was not true last time around, and that's Trump Media, which is the parent company of Truth Social, making up a huge portion of that wealth.

4:34The other really big thing to zero in on is crypto. And so you have these branches that simply weren't there in Trump's first term at all. He didn't have these crypto ventures. He didn't have a publicly traded company. His sons are now adding themselves to advisory boards of various companies that are regulated by the government in certain ways. So it's an even more intricate picture and ballooning wealth. I'm David Gurra, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, the Trump family's money-making machine. Where's their wealth coming from? And how is Donald Trump's second presidency benefiting his family?

5:19Donald Trump is certainly not the first president to profit from the presidency. Presidents often have their windfall after leaving office, with multi-million dollar book deals and speaking engagements. But Trump has seen his net worth soar. So much so that when Bloomberg wealth reporter Annie Massa and finance reporter Max Abelson were trying to tally the president's net worth, they kept having to update their estimates as new projects were announced. Max says it's a remarkable transformation when you think of where Trump was five years ago. I mean, it is not exaggerating to say that Donald Trump, as a person, as a brand, as a businessman, as the head of a company, was facing some serious headwinds just a few years ago.

6:05I'm not talking about the 1990s. In the wake of his first presidency, he left Washington with debts coming due, a lot of money coming due at the same time. Then he also had a lot of legal trouble, not just because of that$454 million dollar civil fraud judgment, there was a conviction. We're talking criminal conviction. So I think it's helpful to keep in mind when we talk about this Trump moneymaking machine. It's not just different from the first Trump presidency. It's different from where we last saw him in the wake of his first administration. Annie Massa says one good example is Truth Social's parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group.

6:46Trump Media and Technology Group Corp, for the full name. And that's an example where, okay, so that platform really flourishes based on the president of the United States posting on there, Donald Trump posting on there. He is the largest shareholder. His shares are in a trust. The trust is overseen by Donald Trump Jr. But Donald Trump Jr. is also part of the company. So it can be very hard to untangle the knot. I think there's just nothing naughtier than the real estate. You've got... Naughtier like a knot. Knot. Like a tied knot. Naughtier like an untied knot. Because, you know, you look at the Middle East especially.

7:26Trump Organization has licensed its name to brand new skyscrapers that are worth, I think, half a billion each. Sometimes the total project cost reaches into the billions. You've got them in Qatar and Dubai and Oman, Riyadh. And it's not happening in a vacuum. You look at this money-making machine and divide it into four parts. Can you just run through kind of what the four categories are of the way in which Donald Trump and his family make money? Absolutely. You have real estate. I mean, that is the original Trump family money-making endeavor. But now you have these new pieces. You have corporate connections, which include the memberships on advisory boards and other kind of relationships that his sons have.

8:12And you also have other ventures, which is really just a grab bag that kind of defy categorization. And you also have crypto, which includes the Trump family's meme coins and a crypto platform. Trump was a crypto skeptic, going so far as to call Bitcoin a scam. More recently, he's embraced it, calling it amazing and great for our country. I asked Annie to explain that about face. Well, we can't 100 percent get inside Trump's head. We do know that he loves an opportunity to put the Trump brand on something. And crypto has a lot to do with branding and kind of the attention economy that Trump is such a master of.

8:56So he did transform really in the past year into a crypto entrepreneur of sorts. So he and his family promote a platform called World Liberty Financial. So that's one piece. And they earn money from this. endeavor. It has something called a stable coin affiliated with it. It's a crypto platform that hasn't done all that much yet, but there's an affiliated token you can buy. So that's one piece. There's also a meme coin that was unveiled on his inauguration weekend to much fanfare when everyone was paying attention to Donald Trump. I want to pick up on something you said, and I think that one of the great geniuses or evil of Bitcoin, depending on how you want to look at it, is that it is certainly, among other things, a new and potentially very lucrative way of turning attention into cash.

9:49It financializes attention. And Trump is, I think it's fair to say, at the forefront of figuring out how to financialize attention. And it came from, to refer to an earlier story I wrote, this was many years ago, it came from essentially a crisis in his career where things were not going well for him in the late 80s and the very early 90s. He was over levered. Companies were going bankrupt. Things were not looking good. And he really rebuilt his career in the 1990s and then into the aughts as someone who would use other people's capital and sell his name. It was a savvy move. And now we're seeing versions of that now as for what the family is doing while he's in the White House.

10:28Let's look at real estate, which for so many years has been the bread and butter of the Trump organization. How has the approach evolved or changed from the Trumps to real estate? We see a lot of deals being announced in the Balkans, in the Middle East. What's different this time around? It's black and white. What we're seeing now is a willingness for the Trump family to partner quite literally around the world, sometimes in ways where arms of the deals touch arms of foreign governments. And that's just simply not something we saw. I think in the first administration, the rule that Trump put on his company was no new deals around the world.

11:08This time around, the white paper that was a sort of ethics plan that he put out was no new deals with foreign governments. Directly with foreign governments. That opened the door to deals from Vietnam to Serbia. In some cases, investment in a Trump-affiliated property can get you significant perks. According to a website for the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Dubai, investors who spend roughly 545 ,000 U.S. dollars can get a 10-year golden visa. At Trump Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, anyone who spends a million dollars is eligible for Saudi residency. And I want to be clear about what's happening, and I want to be clear about what's not happening.

11:53What's not happening is Donald J. Trump, the president, starting hotels himself because, as he points out, his assets are in a trust that are run by his son. What is also not happening is the Trump organization, you know, getting into into deals with the Japanese government, qua the Japanese government, or I just use that as an example. What they are doing, though, because we've seen photos of it and we've seen press releases about it, is that they are working on deals where government officials are involved in the signing ceremony. It's new. And I think that the way we're figuring out how to cover this is by just being like very precise.

12:34Max and Annie say that since the early days of Trump's reelection campaign, the Trump name has powered more than$10 billion of real estate projects. Coming up, drones, sneakers, and the difficulty of separating the president's financial interests from his sons.

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15:04We've talked about crypto, talked about real estate. Let's move into the corporate side of things. A few weeks ago, I was leaving the building, Bloomberg headquarters. In came Donald Trump Jr., the president's son, with a really sizable entourage. He was here for an interview. We've talked about him here during the course of this conversation. What role is he playing now in this whole organization, this apparatus, Donald Trump Jr.? Right. So we've talked about the Trumps affixing their names to buildings. Nothing new there. The president affixing his name to a cryptocurrency. But you also have this phenomenon of Donald Trump Jr.

15:39and Eric Trump affixing their names and their advisory services to various companies in all kinds of industries. Spell that out. What are we talking about? We're talking about drones. We're talking about a very small investment bank that's headquartered in Trump Tower. We're talking about a blank check company that took an online gun retailer public. So really a huge number. I mean, Eric Trump is involved in a Japanese Bitcoin stockpiling operation. There's really no limit to the different industries that they've become involved in. We've advanced beyond the Trump winery to all these outside businesses.

16:17Exactly. As the White House forwards this MAGA agenda, Donald Trump Jr. is, I think, forwarding a certain kind of MAGA capitalism. And there once again is a certain kind of financial political loop that we see that, you know, if you want to be fair about it, Donald Trump Jr. himself will say, look, like, I'm a private citizen. That's what he told his first story. I'm a private citizen. I've been a businessman and I've been a serial investor. my entire life, it would be ridiculous to expect me to stop doing what I've always done to provide. I think he said to provide for my five children. And, you know, you could take that idea and extend it and say, like, it would be ridiculous to expect him to stop forwarding a kind of MAGA financialization agenda simply because his dad is doing the same.

17:04And if I were to draw a Venn diagram, so it's like Donald Trump Jr.'s business interests and then President Trump. Is there any intersection here? I imagine back in 2016, 2017, you might have had a President Trump who is interested in the state of his real estate portfolio, for instance. Any indication that he's taking a substantial interest in what his son, what his sons are doing when it comes to business? Or is this very much their own venture? Yes, built on their shared surname. Sometimes it can be hard to disentangle. And as Max mentioned, there's often a kind of virtuous circle at play where you have both the president and the activity of the president and his family.

17:48So it can be hard to fully disentangle. Amazon, for example, plays a role in several Trump family projects. It recently purchased the rights to Melania Trump's documentary, paying$40 million to license the film. According to the Wall Street Journal, that is almost triple the next best offer. Max and Annie say Amazon falls into their fourth and final category of the Trump money-making machine, what they call ventures. So one good example is Trump's sneakers. You actually saw Trump, when he was on the campaign trail, stop by a sneakerhead convention, and he's kind of hawking sneakers. There are perfumes that are branded in a 45-47 way, referring to the numbers of his presidencies.

18:33And it just captures the range of different kinds of material goods that he's applied his name to. I mean, I think it's only fair to point out that we're not talking about someone who was elected to the White House and then suddenly woke up and decided to become a global businessman. It's Donald Trump's M.O. I mean, I'm pretty sure it's sort of exactly what his fans and his voters and supporters are embracing. This idea of a savvy businessman who is not held back by the same standards of, you know, for example, embarrassment. He's certainly unembarrassed about being a brand. Although it does occur to me that I've never seen a picture of him wearing the Trump sneakers.

19:17We're going to need to request that from the White House. We're going to have to get to the bottom of that. Could I ask you about something that's in this ventures bucket, and that's settlements. Right. There's this piece. again, a pretty new phenomenon in this second term where various huge companies have come to multimillion dollar settlements with Trump. Law firms, media organizations. Yes, that's right. Media organizations, other social media platforms like Meta and X. And even if those dollars don't necessarily go into the pocket of the president and they come in the form of a donation to the as yet to be created presidential library, that's also a way that the cash register rings.

20:04President Trump has said those settlements with law firms will go to pro bono legal services to causes he supports during his second term and beyond. He said the settlement with Paramount will go toward advertising and public service announcements. Let me end with a question I'd like both of you to answer, and that is sort of how much does this machine grow unconstrained? At the top, we talked about the criticism and pressure that the president was under. What's your sense of where this goes from here? There's a sense that many are overwhelmed or kind of inured almost to the scale of the money making happening.

20:43and the question that I have is whether the resistance that's out there, and there is some, there have been Democratic lawmakers who've, for example, spoken out against the meme coin, but has there been a unified front to shut it down in some way? Would that even be viable? So I guess the lingering question is whether there's any force that could really resist a money-making machine with this many different arms. My mind is going to the changes that are happening in the United States government, where a fellow billionaire, Elon Musk, was called in by Trump to help reshape the government. And that's like, it's not an abstract thing.

21:29And it includes the agencies and offices that oversee Trump's own public company. And it includes the agencies and offices that oversee his crypto projects. It even includes the people who oversee the actual conflicts of interest themselves. So we're not necessarily in the business of predicting the future. But I'm betting that it's going to become harder and not easier to understand what people in power are doing and how people in power are making money. And I am not specifically referring to Donald Trump. I think it's going to be true of Republicans and Democrats. And I think it will take a kind of concerted effort to reverse some of the things that have happened in these past few months.

22:33Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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