The Truth About the TRUMP Meme Coin and the President’s Wealth
President Donald Trump is known for starting a variety of business ventures and, in many instances, earning substantial profits from those ventures. Earlier this year, only a few days before his inauguration, Trump turned heads and raised eyebrows when he jumped headfirst into a cryptocurrency business.
Unlike Trump’s Truth Social platform, this new business venture offers no clear product or service beyond the tradable asset itself. Nonetheless, it offers profit potential to the President as well as to the asset’s investors – though apparently, there are some misconceptions surrounding just how much Trump’s crypto coin will actually add to his wealth.
What the TRUMP Coin Is, and What It Isn’t
On January 17, 2024, President-elect Trump announced on the X social media platform, “My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE!” He added, “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
Thus, the TRUMP Coin was officially launched and, as one might expect from a presidential cryptocurrency, it immediately surged in price, trading volume, and popularity. Indeed, after initially being priced at $0.18, the TRUMP token briefly catapulted to $73.69 on January 19th according to Binance. Moreover, the coin’s trading volume nearly hit $1 billion within the first hour after its launch.
The TRUMP token is still heavily traded today and as of January 29 per Binance, it was number 26 in terms of popularity based on the relative market cap of assets. The token’s price has declined substantially from its peak of more than $7, but plenty of commentators are still chattering about the TRUMP Coin – and in some instances, there’s an evident misunderstanding of what this asset is and what it isn’t.
In his announcement of the cryptocurrency on X, Trump emphasized “fun” and “community.” He also explicitly stated that TRUMP is a meme coin, which financial traders should understand as a speculative, volatile asset with no clear, real-world utility.
In other words, the TRUMP coin’s main purpose, beyond community-building and having fun with a small-sized, speculative position, is to enrich well-timed investors and, without a doubt, Trump himself. Even when commentators understand this much, though, they often overestimate how much the President can and will financially benefit from the TRUMP token.
Miscalculating and Misleading
As of January 29, Trump’s estimated net worth stood at $5.5 billion; much of his fortune was built on real estate ventures. As for the TRUMP Coin, 80% of its supply is owned by Trump Organization affiliate CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC, the ownership of which is unclear; furthermore, the split of that 80% between CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight is currently undetermined.
Hence, anyone who declares that Trump owns 80% of his meme coin’s supply is already making an unsubstantiated assumption. Just to simplify the debate, though, one can start off with the premise (even if it’s not necessarily accurate) that the President controls 80% of all TRUMP tokens.
Even after allowing this assumption, some folks will still overstep the bounds of reason when calculating Trump’s potential windfall. Talk of the President adding as much as $58 billion to his wealth from his meme coin simply doesn’t pass the common sense test.
Currently, there are 200 million TRUMP tokens in existence; over the next three years, CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight will unlock their 800 million TRUMP Coins, thereby significantly increasing the asset’s supply. Surely, this will have an impact on the token’s price and, therefore, what Trump stands to gain in terms of profits.
And of course, there’s no way to know what the TRUMP Coin’s price will be in the near and long terms. For the argument’s sake, one might use the token’s price of $27.60 on January 29.
So, working under the unsubstantiated assumptions that Trump personally controls 800 million TRUMP tokens, and that their value won’t be diluted when those 800 million coins are unlocked, and that the price will somehow remain at $27.60… that would be 800 million times $27.60 per coin, or slightly more than $22 billion in all.
That $22 billion figure required a whole lot of mental gymnastics, best-case-scenario assumptions for Trump, and predictive powers that no one actually possesses. Consequently, it’s best to sidestep misleading arguments about Trump’s potential windfall from the TRUMP token – a meme coin which, by definition, was never meant to be taken too seriously in the first place.
