Warren Says Trump Made $1.4 Billion From Crypto While Investors Sit on $4.7 Billion in Paper Losses

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been hammering Trump's crypto fortune for weeks. On Thursday, she took another swing on X: "Trump owns ~$1 billion in cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, his administration shapes crypto policy. The President shouldn't be getting rich off his own policy decisions."

Warren did not explain how she calculated the roughly $1 billion figure. But Trump's own 2025 financial disclosure, cited by Reuters and reviewed by Benzinga, TradingView and KuCoin, puts different numbers on the table: more than $1.4 billion in total crypto-related income for Trump's businesses last year.

Where the Money Came From

The disclosure breaks down to more than $520 million from World Liberty Financial token sales and over $635 million in royalties from the Official Trump memecoin. Trump also retained 15.75 billion World Liberty governance tokens valued above $50 million, and Trump-affiliated companies held as much as $160 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum at the end of 2025, according to the filing. CNN reported separately that Trump earned more than $526 million from World Liberty token sales alone last year, and about $263 million from selling equity in World Liberty to a group of investors led by a royal from the United Arab Emirates, per the Wall Street Journal.

Trump has defended the windfall bluntly. "There's nothing illegal, there's nothing wrong with it," he said in July. The White House did not respond to Benzinga's request for comment on Warren's latest post.

Investors Are Underwater, Watchdog Says

Warren's post landed the same week Public Citizen put out figures estimating that investors in Trump-linked crypto products are at least $4.7 billion underwater, even as Trump personally made at least $1.4 billion off the same products in 2025.

The watchdog broke that down further: about $3.2 billion in losses tied to the TRUMP memecoin, at least $1 billion tied to World Liberty's WLFI token, and roughly $450 million in paper losses on Trump Media and Technology Group's Bitcoin holdings. Public Citizen stressed most of those losses are unrealized, meaning holders who haven't sold haven't locked in the loss, and prices could recover or fall further.

Trump's revenue from token sales and royalties is money that's already been collected, independent of what happens to the tokens next. Investor losses on paper are a different animal, tied to whatever the market does going forward.

The Bank Charter Adds a New Wrinkle

Separately, World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm Trump and his sons launched in 2024, received preliminary conditional approval from banking regulators to become a trust bank, according to CNN. Final approval still hinges on conditions being met, and the charter wouldn't let World Liberty take deposits or make loans. But it would let the firm cut out middlemen currently used to safeguard and issue its USD1 stablecoin, which has more than $4 billion in circulation.

Richard Painter, the top ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told CNN the arrangement is risky by design. "Bank failures can be catastrophic, as we found out in 1929 and again in 2008," Painter said. "It is quite precarious to have the president and his family invested heavily in one of our most important regulated industries at the same time as he has the power to hire and fire the regulators."

Warren, ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, called it "the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen," per CNN, and said she and other Senate Democrats plan to introduce a bill banning federal regulators from approving bank applications for institutions owned or controlled by the president, vice president, their families, or members of Congress.

The White House's Defense

The administration has consistently pushed back on conflict-of-interest claims. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told Reuters in June, "Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest," adding that Trump made the U.S. "the crypto capital of the world." Kelly separately told CNN that Trump's investment holdings are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions and that "there are no conflicts of interest." That's the administration's core argument: that Trump's crypto holdings are disclosed, legal under current rules, and part of a broader policy push, not a special carve-out.

No formal ethics investigation, criminal charge, or SEC enforcement action against Trump's crypto ventures has been announced. Warren's bill is proposed legislation, not law, and would need to pass a Republican-controlled Congress that has shown little appetite for restricting the industry Trump has championed. Whether it gets a vote, let alone survives one, is the open question hanging over all of this.