Donald Trump Jr.'s Bitcoin Game: He Made $100 Million While Retail Investors Lost $500 Million

Original Title: How Eric Trump Got Rich From Bitcoin While Losing Investors A Fortune

Original Author: Dan Alexander, Forbes

Original Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor’s Note: The Trump family has a hereditary talent: bluffing and making things seem bigger than they are.

This time, Eric Trump has brought that approach into the crypto world. He has packaged his Bitcoin company as a "money printer," claiming it can mine Bitcoin at roughly half the market price.

But when Forbes reporter Dan Alexander looked at the books, a different story emerged: 70% of the company's Bitcoin holdings were not mined but bought with newly issued stock; the real all-in cost is far higher than Eric’s stated number; and the financing structure that makes the balance sheet look healthier might mean that every Bitcoin the company has ever mined will be used in bulk to pay mining equipment bills.

The numbers ultimately point to a more direct conclusion: Eric Trump's personal wealth has increased by about $90 million, while ordinary investors have collectively lost about $500 million.

After the report, Eric Trump quickly fired back on X, accusing Forbes of being acquired by China, calling the report politically driven propaganda, and citing a string of operational data in rebuttal: 7,000 Bitcoin, nearly 90,000 mining rigs, and Q4 revenue of $78.3 million. Along the way, he also brought up a story from twenty years ago about fundraising for a children's hospital, trying to prove that Forbes has been targeting him, a "good guy."

There's just one thing he never directly addressed: where did that $500 million go?

The following is the original text:

Eric Trump rousing the crowd on stage. Photo: Daniel Ceng/Anadolu via Getty Images

The ability to rouse a crowd isn't only useful in politics. Just ask Eric Trump: his Bitcoin company attracted a horde of followers, and then dumped overvalued stock on them.

This February, Eric Trump appeared energized on an earnings call, ready to do what the Trumps do best—sell.

His company, American Bitcoin, had been listed on the Nasdaq for just over a year. "We are quickly becoming a leader in the Bitcoin world, and I truly believe we have the most powerful brand," Eric said. "I want to thank Mike [Ho], Asher [Genoot], Matt [Prusak], and everyone at American Bitcoin."

Note: Mike Ho is CEO of American Bitcoin, concurrently serving as Chief Strategy Officer of Hut 8. Asher Genoot is Executive Chairman of American Bitcoin and co-founder of Hut 8, who led the deal with the Trump family. Matt Prusak is President of American Bitcoin, a former Hut 8 employee assigned by Hut 8.

This ending is quite telling. Saying "everyone" is peculiar because American Bitcoin has hardly anyone else.

The annual report filed a month after the earnings call shows the company had only two full-time formal employees, likely CEO Mike Ho and President Matt Prusak. Maybe a few more: Ho is also an executive at another company; someone who worked in investor relations at that other company for less than a year now has the title "Chief of Staff" at American Bitcoin on LinkedIn; another woman stated she has been its Social Media Manager since January. (Executive Chairman Asher Genoot, Ho, and three independent directors form a five-person board.)

The Trump family learned early on a pattern: making things seem bigger than they are can be profitable.

Allegedly, Donald's father, Fred Trump, defrauded regulators by inflating project costs to make a profit. Donald Trump inflated asset values to banks and media like Forbes, eventually being found guilty of fraud by a New York judge. Eric was also implicated in that case and was banned from serving as an officer or director of any New York-registered company for two years. Despite this, he started anew, incorporating in Delaware and operating from Florida, marketing his company in a way that would make his ancestors proud.

Note: Fred Trump was Donald Trump's father, a New York real estate developer who was allegedly involved in inflating construction costs to extract higher profits.

Eric Trump’s latest Bitcoin venture might be selling more of a story than a real business. According to him, American Bitcoin can mine Bitcoin at about half the market price, a genuine "money printer." But scrutinizing the numbers raises questions about whether the company can even profitably mine, let alone maintain such incredible margins. Representatives for Eric Trump, the Trump Organization, and American Bitcoin did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Forbes. Quite a few people trust the president's son, and real money has been wagered. On September 3, 2025, American Bitcoin hit the public market with roughly $270 million in Bitcoin on its balance sheet, and investors gave it a market cap of $13.2 billion.

Over the past eight months, American Bitcoin has used this absurdly high valuation to sell stock and buy more Bitcoin. The heavily diluted stock price has since fallen 92% from its peak. Eric Trump, who seems to have entered the game with almost no personal cost, is still doing well, seeing his estimated personal wealth grow from about $190 million to $280 million through financial alchemy. Other insiders have also profited handsomely. In contrast, the ordinary investors who bought the sales story with real money have suffered estimated total losses of $500 million.

Eric Trump (left), in his early philanthropic days, organizing a fundraiser at his father's golf course shortly after college to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Photo: Bobby Bank/WireImage

Eric Trump's first truly independent project wasn't an apartment building, but a charity.

In 2006, he graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in Finance and Management, full of desire to change the world. At the time, his older brother Don Jr. and sister Ivanka were already working at Trump Tower on real estate projects. Driving on the New Jersey Turnpike one day, Eric later recalled in a Forbes interview, a different thought struck him: how could he truly make a difference in the world? And so, his earliest entrepreneurial venture was born—a non-profit called the Eric Trump Foundation.

The organization did a lot of good. More of a fundraising platform than an operating charity, it channeled over $16 million to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. But as time passed, the organization, and Eric himself, became increasingly "Trumpian."

Documents obtained by Forbes through an open records request (despite objections from the non-profit’s legal team) reveal a pattern of dishonest fundraising pitches, weak governance, and chaotic finances. Eric claimed to donors that he kept costs to a minimum, directing almost all funds to St. Jude, partly because his father provided venues at Trump properties for free and celebrities agreed to perform "gratis." But checks and invoices obtained by Forbes show: over $500,000 went to other charities, over $500,000 went to Trump-owned businesses, at least $90,000 was paid to various performers, and over $35,000 went to a car service company—with passengers including Eric's mother, a Real Housewives cast member, and a vanload of people heading to a Hooters restaurant.

In his daily work at his father's company, Eric mainly handled the hotel business early on, learning a lot, including a key lesson: making money by branding a business is much easier than actually building one.

The Trump Organization defaulted on a loan for its Chicago hotel in 2008, put its Atlantic City portfolio into bankruptcy protection in 2009, and its Washington D.C. hotel suffered years of losses. Eventually, the Trump family pivoted their hotel empire's expansion strategy towards what the industry calls an "asset-light" model, shifting focus from development to management and brand licensing.

Another training ground for Eric was his father's golf course portfolio, where he saw the beauty of unconventional financing structures. In the 1980s and 1990s, golf clubs typically collected deposits from members upon joining, promising to return the money interest-free after thirty years. These liabilities sat on the books, scaring off many potential investors when properties were for sale. But Donald Trump was fearless, eventually taking on about $250 million in such liabilities, acquiring over a dozen golf properties across the country, while recording these liabilities as zero on his personal balance sheet for years. By the time repayment was due, the properties were worth far more than the amounts owed.

In January 2017, Donald Trump entered the White House, and Eric and his brother Don Jr. took over their father's asset portfolio. Eric seemed to have few plans of his own, just hoping to maintain the status quo. "We're not a company that sells assets," he told Forbes in February 2017 from his office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower. "We buy, and we make them beautiful." The Trump brothers tried new ventures, including launching two mid-tier hotel brands, but with little success. Amidst struggling operations and their father's dwindling cash reserves, they spent the next seven years doing what Eric said they wouldn't: selling assets, estimated to have cashed out about $411 million.

Then, a new opportunity came: the 2024 election.

Returning to the White House means business opportunities. President Trump's children attend his second inauguration on January 20, 2025. Photo: Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images

Just two weeks after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, the company that would later become American Bitcoin was quietly incorporated in Delaware. It didn't start as a crypto play. Dubai developer Hussain Sajwani, who had partnered with the Trumps on a golf project in Dubai, appeared at Mar-a-Lago and announced a $20 billion plan to build data centers in the US, riding the AI wave. "That guy knows what he's doing," the President-elect praised. Within weeks, Trump's two sons disclosed plans to follow this strategy, naming the company "American Data Centers," with Eric Trump calling it "vital to the development of America's AI infrastructure."

A month later, he changed direction. Through mutual friends, Eric and Don Jr. met two entrepreneurs: Asher Genoot and Mike Ho. They already owned a company similar to what the Trump brothers envisioned—the data center giant Hut 8, which had not only AI business exposure but also significant Bitcoin mining hashrate. Soon after the AI wave hit, the Bitcoin reward for solving a mathematical puzzle halved, dramatically increasing mining costs. At the industry level, significant hashrate migrated to AI, and Hut 8's institutional shareholders pressured Genoot to follow the trend.

However, Genoot and Ho, with their backgrounds in branding and arbitrage, devised a more creative solution: convince the Trump brothers to abandon the data center plan by offering them a 20% equity stake in some Bitcoin mining equipment. Then, leveraging the First Family's involvement, load this hardware into a public company, igniting a hype machine fueled by the Trump aura.

The deal structure was tailor-made, seemingly designed for someone familiar with the hotel business. While machines hummed 24/7, American Bitcoin's operations were more like an asset-light hotel brand: Hut 8 owned the properties, ran the data centers, handled back-office tasks, and even provided the executives—Prusak was formerly at Hut 8, and Ho still works there, simultaneously serving as American Bitcoin CEO and Hut 8 Chief Strategy Officer. This left the Trump brothers to focus on their strength: sales.

"I will forever remember saying to them, 'Listen, there have to be two words in the name,'" Eric Trump later recalled in a CoinDesk video interview. "'It has to have 'America.' It has to have 'Bitcoin.'' One of them said, 'Eric, call it American Bitcoin. That's the name.'"

On the day American Bitcoin went public, investor enthusiasm was high, and Eric Trump's estimated personal wealth briefly topped $1 billion. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Ever since Eric Trump entered the crypto space, he has been telling a myth about why he got into it. "Every bank in this country has blacklisted me," he said at a conference in Wyoming last August. "Because my father is a political figure, we were de-banked," he added about a week later in Hong Kong. "Every major bank started closing our accounts," he claimed in Palm Beach earlier this year. "You know what we did? We went out and got into decentralized finance, because we realized that's the future of finance."

But that's not what happened.

It is true that Capital One and JPMorgan Chase closed some Trump accounts in 2021, six years after Donald Trump entered politics. By then, the former president's reputation had been battered by the January 6th Capitol attack and a sweeping investigation by the New York Attorney General, which ultimately found the Trump Organization had engaged in fraud and was likely to do so again.

Even so, plenty of banks were still willing to work with the Trumps—even JPMorgan, shortly after closing some accounts, participated in refinancing two of the largest loans in the Trump portfolio. Trump left the White House cash-poor and highly leveraged, desperately needing support from major lending institutions, and he got it: between January 2021 and mid-2022, the former president, with help from sons Eric and Don Jr., completed nearly $700 million in debt refinancing as part of a balance sheet restructuring.

So, why did Trump really enter crypto? A more plausible explanation is that he saw an opportunity to extend his licensing business, selling Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) the same way he sells sneakers and guitars. He started with NFT trading cards, digital images depicting Trump as a superhero. The product sold out within a day, netting the former president over $7 million in cash and crypto proceeds—every penny crucial for a man facing a nearly $500 million fraud judgment. (An appeals court judge later overturned this judgment based on disputed fine amounts, but did not deny the finding that Trump committed fraud.) Subsequent crypto projects brought in hundreds of millions more in liquidity, increasing the First Family's stakes, including an independent plan announced last May to purchase about $2 billion in crypto through Trump Media and Technology Group.

In 2025, hoarding Bitcoin became the trade of the year. Over 200 public companies rushed to copy Michael Saylor's Strategy playbook—which amassed over $50 billion in Bitcoin, its market cap soaring when prices surged, and recently plummeting along with it. American Bitcoin stood out in this frenzy for an obvious reason: the First Family halo. But on the day American Bitcoin hit the public market, September 3, 2025, Eric Trump offered a more data-driven narrative in an X Spaces conversation. "Our actual cost to mine a Bitcoin per day is around $57,000, $58,000," he said, noting that a Bitcoin's market price was about double that at the time. "Our fundamentals couldn't be better."

It was a persuasive argument, even though the speaker had a history of selectively ignoring unfavorable expenses during his charity fundraising days. The $50k+ figure covered American Bitcoin's operational equipment costs. But factoring in other expenses—including equipment purchases, marketing, and capital allocation—the all-in cost climbed much higher, around $92,000 per Bitcoin at that time, only profitable if cryptocurrency prices remained elevated.

Including depreciation is particularly crucial in American Bitcoin's case because it inherited a very unconventional financing strategy from Hut 8. Between August and September 2025, American Bitcoin spent roughly $330 million to upgrade its mining fleet. But instead of paying cash immediately, it pledged some Bitcoin and obtained an option on the final payment method: if the Bitcoin price rose, the company could pay about $330 million in cash and reclaim the pledged Bitcoin; if the price fell, it could just use the pledged crypto to settle the debt.

Since that large purchase, Bitcoin has fallen about 30%. This means, as things stand, American Bitcoin will likely pay for the equipment with its pledged crypto assets. But here's the problem: American Bitcoin had pledged a total of 3,090 Bitcoin (as of March 25), while the company has mined an estimated 1,800 Bitcoin so far. In other words, if the price doesn't recover, every single Bitcoin the company has ever mined will be forfeited to pay for equipment costs as the options expire around August 2027, leaving nothing.

Investers may not understand this. The company has about 15 months to decide whether to pay for the equipment with crypto or cash, and in the meantime, the mined Bitcoin remains on the balance sheet. The result is that American Bitcoin looks much healthier than it actually is. The company pitches this Bitcoin reserve as a core selling point to investors, while downplaying the fact that all or most of it will ultimately be used to pay for the machines that mined it.

Beyond marketing appeal, it's easy to see why the Trumps were interested in this payment method—they built their golf course portfolio using similar unconventional financing. They won that bet because the assets themselves appreciated in value.

Eric Trump has become a regular at major global crypto conferences, pictured here at an event in Hong Kong. Photo: Daniel