The Unprecedented Profiteering Revealed by Donald Trump’s Financial Disclosure
Key takeaways
- The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.
- Sun, who was thirty-four years old at the time, was facing federal criminal charges for fraud and market manipulation.
- Yet the story of Sun’s business with Trump has not ended happily.
Photograph by Samuel Corum / Bloomberg / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In late November, 2024, when the Chinese-born billionaire Justin Sun first invested thirty million dollars in a speculative crypto venture linked to Donald J. Trump, then the President-elect, it looked more or less like a bribe. Shortly before winning the election, Trump had begun selling crypto tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, a company that he had founded with his friend Steve Witkoff and their respective sons. It promised an ill-defined platform to borrow and lend digital money; the tokens carried no promise of ownership in anything, could not be resold or traded, and entitled owners only to some vote at an unspecified future date on what the company would actually do. The fine print revealed that seventy-five per cent of proceeds from token sales went into the pockets of Trump and his family.
The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.
Sun, who was thirty-four years old at the time, was facing federal criminal charges for fraud and market manipulation. Among other offenses, several celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, the rapper Lil Yachty, and the porn star Kendra Lust, had acknowledged receiving undisclosed payments from Sun to promote a cryptocurrency that he was selling, at a time when its sale in the U.S. was illegal. But he was also revered as an idol by crypto investors for the vast wealth he had accumulated. Sun purchased a total of seventy-five million dollars’ worth of World Liberty tokens, and signed on as an adviser to the company. He spent another two hundred million dollars on $TRUMP, an even goofier digital token, known as a memecoin, that the President had begun selling in the days before his Inauguration, purely for his own profit, without the pretense of any connection to a business venture (the way a rock star might sell a souvenir T-shirt, but without any actual shirt). Then, soon after Trump took office, federal securities regulators announced that they were negotiating a settlement with Sun. Although his fraudulent crypto schemes had allegedly netted him thirty-one million dollars, the regulators, in March, dropped the charges in exchange for a relatively minor fine of ten million dollars, raising questions about a potential quid pro quo.