Before his visit to the White House, Donald Trump started a meme coin; it shot when he was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States last week. Based on data from CoinMarketCap, the coin attracted a lot of interest, particularly from retail traders, and was trading for $33.1 on Friday, valued $6.6 billion.
Nevertheless, the Trump meme coin has not yet added to the president’s net worth based on The Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes Billionaires list, two reliable journalistic wealth monitors.
Based on the assessment of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Trump’s net worth was $6.4 billion as of Friday, down 1% so far this month; his wealth largely came from his ownership of the real-estate conglomerate and licensing company Trump Organization. As of Friday, Trump was valued at $6 billion, roughly in line with what Forbes said he was worth in December.
Trump debuted the namesake meme currency on January 17. Usually derived from internet memes, meme coins have no practical value.
Data from CoinMarketCap shows that even if $Trump has seen some criticism from players in the crypto-industry, it surged over 1,000% in two days to reach $75.35 on January 19. But after first lady Melania Trump also started a namesake meme coin on Jan. 19, it dropped practically half its value.
From around $8.10 at debut and from its top of $13.05 on Monday, $Melania traded at roughly $2.6 on Friday. Early Friday’s market capitalization for it was about $445 million.
“Those numbers are based on theoretical prices for crypto assets that Trump cannot sell right now, which is why Forbes values them at zero, in keeping with our methodology of generally excluding unsellable assets from net worth tallies,” Forbes’s Dan Alexander, a journalist who has extensively covered Trump’s business interests for years, wrote while some reports claimed that Trump had added tens of billions of dollars to his fortune through the meme coin issuing.
Forbes representatives did not answer a request for comments for this story.
Based on their market capitalizations in January, the recent release of Trump’s meme currency coupled with the token sales of crypto project World Liberty Financial—linked to Trump and his family—could add billions to Trump’s net worth on Bloomberg Billionaires Index website. Nevertheless, Bloomberg said, “these are not included in his net worth calculation because their speculative nature, volatility and lock-downs make it difficult to determine their value.”
Without offering further comments, a Bloomberg spokesman highlighted the company’s approach on its website of computing Trump’s net worth.
The website of the $Trump token states that eighty percent of its maximum supply will ultimately be held by Fight Fight and CIC Digital, an associate of the Trump Organization.
Noted the website, the tokens assigned to the Trump Organization affiliates are subject to an unlocking schedule of up to three years, during which the Trump Organization will progressively acquire its portion of the token supply.
Consequently, $Trump’s worth might be different than it is right now by the time the Trump Organization can sell the tokens. With trading of meme coins being more erratic than bigger cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTCUSD), cryptocurrencies generally have great volatility.
World Liberty Financial’s September last year introduction coincided with the release of the Trump meme coin. Apart from what is briefly stated in its gold paper – its alternative version of a white paper, to “offer users with information about and access to certain third-party DeFi (decentralized finance) applications,” it is unclear what the initiative wants to do. Peer-to—peer financial services established on blockchains are collectively referred to as “decentralized finance.”
World Liberty Financial declared as of Jan. 19 that it has sold 20 billion of the so-called WLFI token, or 20% of its anticipated maximum supply. At $0.015 each, the sales of such tokens might have generated $300 million for the initiative. Based on its post on X and its website, the project then claimed to extend its sales by another 5 billion tokens, this time priced at $0.05. The project sold still another 2.7 billion of the tokens as of Friday.
Based on the distribution pattern of the project, Forbes calculated that Trump’s company received $88 million overall from the token sales.
While 75% of World Liberty Financial’s income goes to a Trump company and 25% is distributed among several entities, including an entity connected with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s incoming special envoy to the Middle East, the first $30 million of its income is set aside for funding the operation of the project.
World Liberty Financial uses the WLFI token as its governance token; buyers are not able to sell or transfer the tokens.
Requests for comments went unmet by White House and Trump Organization officials.
