What is Donald Trump's net worth?

Going back to his days as a celebrity real estate developer, President Donald Trump has long used his wealth as a cudgel to get what he wants, whether it be from contractors, legal adversaries or Republican rivals for office. As a candidate for the presidency in 2016, he claimed that his wealth would insulate him from special interest corruption since he could not be bought — though he has certainly not behaved like someone who is satisfied with the amount of money he already has. Early in his second term as president, Trump's policy-making efforts are increasingly hard to distinguish from his family's wealth-making enterprises, as when the government of Vietnam approved a $1.5 billion Trump Organization development proposal in advance of trade negotiations in May 2025. He has also aggressively pursued policies and made personnel decisions that appear designed to boost his growing cryptocurrency wealth. Unsurprisingly, as Trump continues to erase bright red lines that once existed around a U.S. president's ability to engage in self-enrichment in office, his financial portfolio has grown substantially.

Figuring out the trajectory of the president's vast wealth, let alone appraising its overall size, is a significant challenge made all the more difficult by his refusal to release his tax returns or share the kinds of financial disclosures that were once routine in American politics. Much of his wealth is tied up in volatile assets like cryptocurrency or real estate properties vulnerable to inflation or interest rate–driven changes in value, and he continues to use tariff policy to deliberately roil the financial markets that contribute to (or take away from) his bottom line. This makes putting a number on President Trump's fortune feel a little like playing darts in the middle of an earthquake.

How did Trump originally amass his fortune?

In Trump's telling, he is a self-made man who built his fortune with a small loan from his father. But in "every era of Mr. Trump's life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father's wealth," said The New York Times; the outlet claims that his parents ultimately transferred nearly $1 billion to their children while paying almost nothing in taxes. "Fred Trump was relentless and creative in finding ways to channel this wealth to his children," and much of his maneuvering was "structured to sidestep gift and inheritance taxes using methods tax experts described to The Times as improper or possibly illegal."

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Trump's father, Fred, was a real estate tycoon who operated mostly in and around New York City, and Donald Trump "served his own apprenticeship in the less glamorous family business of renting apartments," said the Los Angeles Times. One of his earliest duties was "booting poor, nonpaying tenants" out of a Cincinnati apartment complex purchased by his father. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1968, Trump returned to New York City and took on a larger role in the family business. He "took control of the company — which he renamed the Trump Organization — in 1971," said BBC. His "first big move" was "to negotiate an unusual arrangement with the government of New York City," including a 40-year tax abatement, in order to purchase the Commodore Hotel in New York City, said the Miller Center. The hotel was relaunched in 1980 and rebranded as the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

As his portfolio expanded, "the one that made him" was Trump Tower, said Curbed. In 1979, he bought the department store Bonwit Teller for $10 million and demolished it to make way for the mixed-use high-rise that would eventually bear his name. When it opened on October 1, 1983, Trump Tower "offered an unprecedented mix of high-end retail space and luxury condominiums," said The Hollywood Reporter. "Celebrity was a big ingredient" in its success, added Curbed, and Trump sold residential units to Hollywood stars including Steven Spielberg and Fay Wray. With his real estate empire expanding, Trump also embarked on a media blitz that "helped the real estate developer transition from a figure of note in New York City to a national celebrity and household name," said The Atlantic. In 1987, he published a ghostwritten book, "The Art of the Deal," that was a "phenomenal success, spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list," said The New Yorker. By 1990, his holdings included not just Manhattan high-rises and other real estate developments but also casinos, golf courses and the Eastern Airlines shuttle service he had purchased in 1989 and renamed Trump Shuttle.

Overcoming bankruptcy with a little help from family and reality TV

The Trump Organization fell on hard times in the 1990s. Hit hard by the 1990-1991 recession, "the amount of cash that Mr. Trump had available to him had fallen below $1.7 million and was expected to fall below $800,000 within months" in 1991, said The New York Times. The basic problem was that "Trump's empire could not keep pace with the enormous debt payments he owed," said NPR. Trump was forced to sell his airline to USAir in 1991. Those struggles pushed him into the "transaction that would eventually free him from his financial travails": taking his "struggling casinos public, selling stock to raise money and shifting his personal debt into the new company" in 1995.

In 1997, Fred Trump transferred his real estate holdings to his four children, which they sold off in 2004. Donald Trump received $177.3 million. Yet he filed an "individual tax return reporting $89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year" in 2004, said The New York Times. It was also in 2004 that Trump began hosting NBC's reality show "The Apprentice," in which a group of contestants competes to win a contract from the Trump Organization. The show, which Trump hosted from 2004 to 2015, helped him make "some $197 million" over 16 years. In addition, "$230 million flowed from the fame" associated with the show.

Not everything that Trump touched during this time period turned to gold, however. Between 2005 and 2010, Trump operated Trump University, which ultimately had to pay out a $25 million settlement to "more than 6,000 Trump U students who paid thousands of dollars for courses they describe as worthless," said NPR. In 2006, he launched a self-branded vodka business that "stopped production in 2011, reportedly due to a lack of interest," said Time. Trump also operated an unsuccessful steak business, a failed travel search engine and a short-lived mortgage company between 2006 and 2012.

Assuming the presidency and pursuing social media

When Trump launched his bid for president in 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth at $4.5 billion. During his first term, he largely refrained from new ventures, while his "assortment of businesses brought in some $2.4 billion in revenue and some $550 million in income from 2017 to 2020," said Forbes. After leaving office in 2021, he founded the Trump Media and Technology group, which included his new far-right social media website, Truth Social. But legal troubles, including an $83.3 million judgment in a civil trial stemming from sexual assault allegations against him by journalist E. Jean Carroll and a $454 million fraud liability in New York, took their toll. By early 2024, his "political prospects were shaky, his financial future nightmarish," said Forbes.

However, over the following year, Trump "more than doubled his estimated fortune, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion, in large part by taking Truth Social public, delaying payment on his judgments and plunging himself into a third quest for the presidency. It was a bid he would ultimately win, setting the stage for an even more aggressive and norm-shattering plan to capitalize financially on his position as the country's chief executive.

New tariff regime sends markets into turmoil

If anything, the first six months of President Trump's second term have rendered it even harder to make a confident appraisal of his net worth. The biggest contributor to that uncertainty was his decision to implement sweeping tariffs on nearly every country in the world on April 2, 2025, which he pledged to do during his campaign and for weeks preceding the announcement. He dubbed it "Liberation Day" and argued that the new tariffs "will free the U.S. from a reliance on foreign goods," said The Associated Press.

But the most immediate reaction was widespread fear that the levies "could push the U.S. economy into recession if they aren't quickly pulled back," said CNN. As many analysts expected, that maneuver sent stocks tumbling immediately and introduced almost unprecedented uncertainty into financial markets. In absolute terms, the world's wealthiest people took the biggest hit in the early days of the new tariff regime. "The world's 500 richest people lost a collective $536B in the first two days of stock market trading" following the tariff announcement, said The Guardian. Given that Trump is one of those 500 people, there is no question that his own portfolio and wealth took a temporary hit.

Reeling from that financial turmoil, President Trump announced a "pause" on April 9, 2025, saying that while his administration worked out individual trade deals with dozens of countries, he would impose a "universal tariff rate for the next 90 days" that would be "10% for virtually all countries, with the exception of China," said CBS News. That stabilized markets until the expiration date of the original "pause" approached in July, when he announced significant new tariffs on 14 countries that lacked new trade agreements, including South Korea and Japan, triggering another round of market mayhem.

In March 2025, prior to Trump's tariff decisions, Forbes estimated President Trump's net worth at $5.1 billion. Bloomberg offered a significantly higher assessment of $6.5 billion as of March 2025. But the turmoil in the markets had an immediate impact on Trump's fortune. Because "the value of his public stock and private holdings fall in tandem with the broader market," Trump's net worth fell to an estimated $4.2 billion, an enormous loss sustained in less than a week, said Forbes on April 8. "The greatest threat to Trump is not direct tariffs on products he imports," but rather "the loss of investor confidence around the world." A decline in trust in the reliability of the U.S. market and economy, therefore, could continue to affect the president's bottom line even once he reverses or softens those tariffs.

Trump's crypto schemes boost his fortune

On January 17, 2025, days before being sworn in for his second term as president, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency, a meme coin, "sparking a feverish buying that apparently sent its market capitalization soaring to several billion dollars," said CBS News. His wife, Melania Trump, also launched a currency the same day. The decision to launch Trump-branded cryptocurrency on the eve of his presidency created a "mind-boggling number of potential conflicts of interest" and "aligns with the interests of rich crypto bros who want to seize the reins of government to make themselves even richer," said Rolling Stone. In addition, "President Donald Trump’s family took control of the crypto venture" World Liberty Financial in January 2025 and "grabbed the lion’s share" of funds the enterprise had raised," said The Associated Press. "It's as if a new bank had opened under the sitting President's name, and it was being sent large quantities of funds by various foreign businesses and political elites," said The New Yorker.

But as markets rallied during the 90-day tariff pause, the president's net worth grew rapidly again, "mostly thanks to his crypto investments, suggesting that he might now be worth $10 billion or more," said The New York Times. Complicating estimates is the reality that a "massive portion of Mr. Trump’s wealth is only six months old," in the form of his cryptocurrency holdings, and that no one really knows "how much belongs to Mr. Trump versus his partners." Very quickly, crypto came to constitute a substantial portion of Trump's financial portfolio. "A majority of his fortune, an estimated $3.3 billion of his total $5.5 billion, lies in the buzzy" crypto industry, said Forbes in an updated net worth appraisal in June 2025. That may help explain his administration's crypto-friendly policies, including appointing a "pro-crypto businessperson, Paul Atkins, to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission," and the creation of a federal Bitcoin reserve. Taken together, these developments suggest that even one of the world's richest men can, in fact, be bought — it just costs a lot.