Donald Trump's Son's Bitcoin Game: He Made $100 Million, 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 skill: bluffing and making things seem bigger than they are.

This time, Eric Trump has brought this approach into the crypto world. He packaged his Bitcoin company as a "money-printing machine," claiming it could mine Bitcoin at nearly 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 shares; the real comprehensive cost was far higher than Eric's claimed figure; and the financing structure that made the balance sheet look better could also mean that all the Bitcoin the company has mined so far will eventually have to be handed over in bulk to pay for mining rig bills.

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

After the report was published, 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 Bitcoins, 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 only one thing he never directly addressed: where did that $500 million go?

The following is the original text:

Eric Trump riling up the crowd. Photo: Daniel Ceng/Anadolu via Getty Images

The ability to rile up crowds is not just useful in politics. Just ask Eric Trump: his Bitcoin company attracted a large following, and then dumped a pile of overpriced stock on them.

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

"We're quickly becoming a leader in the Bitcoin world, and I truly believe we have the strongest brand," Eric said during the call for his company, American Bitcoin, which had just been listed on Nasdaq for a year. "I want to thank Mike Ho, Asher Genoot, Matt Prusak, and everyone at American Bitcoin."

Note: Mike Ho: CEO of American Bitcoin and Chief Strategy Officer at Hut 8. Asher Genoot: Executive Chairman of American Bitcoin and co-founder of Hut 8, who led the partnership deal with the Trump family. Matt Prusak: President of American Bitcoin, a former Hut 8 employee seconded from Hut 8.

That ending is quite telling. Saying "everyone at American Bitcoin" is interesting because American Bitcoin hardly has anyone else.

The annual report, filed a month after the earnings call, showed the company had only two full-time official 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 Ho's investor relations role at that other company for less than a year now lists themselves as "Chief of Staff" at American Bitcoin on LinkedIn; another woman stated she has been serving as the company's social media manager since January. (Executive Chairman Asher Genoot, along with Ho and three independent directors, make up the five-person board.)

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

Donald's father, Fred Trump, is said to have defrauded regulators by overstating project costs. Donald Trump overstated asset values to banks and media outlets 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 executive or director of any New York-registered company for two years. Despite this, he started anew, incorporating his company in Delaware and basing it in Florida, marketing it in a way that would make his predecessors sit up and take notice.

Note: Fred Trump: Donald Trump's father, a New York real estate developer, suspected of overstating 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, making it a genuine "money-printing machine." But a closer look at the numbers raises questions about whether the company can even mine profitably, let alone maintain such astonishing margins. Representatives for Eric Trump, the Trump Organization, and American Bitcoin did not respond to Forbes' multiple requests for comment. Many trust the president's son, and real money has been wagered. On September 3, 2025, when American Bitcoin hit the public market with about $270 million in Bitcoin on its balance sheet, investors valued the company at a staggering $13.2 billion.

Over the past eight months, American Bitcoin has used this wildly inflated valuation to sell stock and buy more Bitcoin. The heavily diluted stock price has now fallen 92% from its peak. Eric Trump, who seemed to enter the deal with little to no cost, is still doing well, seeing his estimated personal wealth swell from about $190 million to $280 million through financial alchemy. Other insiders have also benefited handsomely. In contrast, ordinary investors who heard the sales pitch and put in real money have seen estimated total losses of $500 million.

Eric Trump (left) in his early days, presenting a charitable image, shortly after college he organized a fundraiser at his father's golf course for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Photo: Bobby Bank/WireImage

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

In 2006, he graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in Finance and Management, full of passion to change the world. At the time, his older brother Don Jr. and sister Ivanka were already working in the Trump Tower, involved in 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 do something for the world? Thus began his earliest entrepreneurial venture—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, began to become more "Trumpian."

Documents obtained by Forbes through public information requests (despite objections from the non-profit's legal team) reveal dishonest fundraising rhetoric, weak governance, and chaotic finances. Eric told donors he kept costs to a minimum, directing almost all funds directly to St. Jude, partly because his father provided venues at Trump properties for free and celebrities agreed to perform "pro bono." 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—whose passengers included Eric's mother, a Real Housewives star, and a vanload of people heading to a Hooters restaurant.

In his early years working for his father's company, Eric mainly handled the hotel business, learning a lot, including a key lesson: making money by licensing the brand is much easier than actually building the buildings.

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 shifted its hotel empire expansion strategy towards the industry's so-called "asset-light" model, shifting focus from development to management and brand licensing.

Eric's other training ground was his father's golf course portfolio, where he learned the beauty of unconventional financing structures. In the 1980s and 1990s, golf clubs typically collected deposits when members joined, promising to return them interest-free after thirty years. These ongoing liabilities scared many investors away from potential property sales. But Donald Trump was unfazed, eventually taking on about $250 million in such liabilities, thereby 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, when Donald Trump entered the White House, 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 follow the established path. "We're not the kind of company that sells assets," he told Forbes in an interview from his 25th-floor office in Trump Tower in February 2017. "We buy, and we make them beautiful." The Trump brothers tried to develop new businesses, including launching two mid-range hotel brands, with little success. Against a backdrop of struggling operations and their father's dwindling cash reserves, they did a lot of what Eric said they wouldn't do over the next seven years: sell assets, generating an estimated total of about $411 million.

Then a new money-making opportunity arrived: 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 entity that would later become American Bitcoin was quietly incorporated in Delaware. It wasn't a crypto play initially. Dubai developer Hussain Sajwani, who had partnered with the Trumps on a golf project in Dubai, appeared at Mar-a-Lago, announcing 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," which Eric Trump called "crucial to the development of America's AI infrastructure."

A month later, he changed direction. Introduced by 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—data center giant Hut 8, which had exposure to AI business and significant Bitcoin mining power. Shortly after the AI boom hit, the Bitcoin reward for solving mathematical puzzles halved, sharply increasing mining costs. At the industry level, a large amount of computing power migrated to AI, and Hut 8's institutional shareholders pressured Genoot to follow the trend.

Genoot and Ho, however, with backgrounds in brand management and arbitrage trading, came up with a more creative solution: persuade the Trump brothers to abandon the data center plan by offering them equity in 20% of their Bitcoin mining equipment. Then, leveraging the first family's involvement, they loaded this hardware into a public company, igniting a hype machine fueled by the Trump aura.

This deal structure was tailor-made, as if specifically designed for someone familiar with the hotel business. The machines hummed day and night, but American Bitcoin's operations were more like an asset-light hotel brand: Hut 8 owned the properties, operated the data centers, handled the back office, and even provided the executives—Prusak was from Hut 8, and Ho still works there, serving concurrently as CEO of American Bitcoin and Chief Strategy Officer of Hut 8. This left the Trump brothers to focus on their strength: sales.

"I will always remember telling them, 'Listen, the name has to have two words,'" Eric Trump later recalled in a CoinDesk video interview. "'It has to have 'America,' and it has to have 'Bitcoin.' One of them said, 'Eric, then call it American Bitcoin, that's the name.'

On the day American Bitcoin went public, investors were enthusiastic, and Eric Trump's estimated personal wealth briefly surpassed $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 in. "Every single bank in this country has blacklisted me," he said at a conference in Wyoming last August. "Because my father is a political figure, we experienced de-banking," he added about a week later in Hong Kong. "Every big bank started closing our accounts," he claimed earlier this year in Palm Beach. "You know what we did? We stepped out and went into decentralized finance because we realized that was the future of finance."

But that's not what happened.

It's true that Capital One and JPMorgan Chase closed some Trump accounts in 2021, six years after Donald Trump entered politics. At the time, the former president's reputation was battered by the Capitol riot and a sweeping investigation by the New York Attorney General, which eventually led to a court ruling that the Trump Organization engaged in fraud and was likely to do so again.

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

So why did Trump really get into crypto? A more plausible explanation is that he saw an opportunity to extend his licensing business, selling NFTs just like sneakers and guitars. He started with NFT trading cards featuring digital images of himself as a superhero. The product sold out within a day, eventually generating over $7 million in cash and crypto profits for the former president—every cent mattered for someone facing a nearly $500 million fraud judgment. (An appeals judge later overturned the ruling due to objections over the fine amount, but did not dismiss the fraud finding.) Subsequent crypto projects brought in hundreds of millions more in liquidity, increasing the first family's bets, including a separate plan announced last May: investing about $2 billion in crypto through Trump Media and Technology Group.

In 2025, accumulating Bitcoin became the year's hottest trade. Over 200 public companies rushed to copy the strategy of Michael Saylor's Strategy, which amassed over $50 billion in Bitcoin, saw its market cap soar when prices surged, and has since crashed heavily. 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 pitch during an X Spaces conversation. "Our actual cost to mine a Bitcoin is around $57,000 or $58,000 a coin," he said, noting the market price was about double that at the time. "Our fundamentals couldn't be better."

The argument was compelling, though the speaker had a history of glossing over unfavorable expenses when hosting charity fundraisers. The $50,000-plus figure indeed covered American Bitcoin's operational costs for the equipment. But including other expenses—equipment purchases, marketing, capital allocation—the comprehensive cost climbed much higher, to about $92,000 per Bitcoin at the time, only profitable if crypto prices remained high.

Including depreciation is particularly crucial in American Bitcoin's case, as it inherited a very unconventional financing strategy from Hut 8. Between August and September 2025, American Bitcoin splurged about $330 million to upgrade its mining fleet. Instead of paying cash immediately, the company pledged some Bitcoin and obtained an option on the final payment method: if Bitcoin's price rose, it could pay around $330 million in cash and redeem the pledged Bitcoin; if the price fell, it could simply hand over the pledged crypto as payment.

Since that large purchase, Bitcoin has fallen about 30%. This means, as it stands, 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 Bitcoins (as of March 25), while the company has probably mined only about 1,800 Bitcoins to date. In other words, if prices don't recover, every single Bitcoin the company has ever mined will be used to pay for the mining equipment when the options start expiring around August 2027, yielding nothing.

Investers may not understand this. The company has about 15 months to decide whether to pay for the equipment with crypto or cash, during which the mined Bitcoin remains on the balance sheet. The result is that American Bitcoin looks much more robust than it actually is. The company touts this Bitcoin reserve as a core selling point in investor presentations, but downplays the fact that all or most of it will eventually be used to pay for the very machines that mined it.

Beyond marketing appeal, it's easy to see why the Trump family would be interested in this payment method—they built their golf course portfolio using similar unconventional financing. They bet right that time because the assets themselves increased in value.

Eric Trump has become a regular at major global cryptocurrency conferences