Trump and family made $2.3 billion from crypto; guess how much investors made?
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If you guessed NEGATIVE $2.3 billion you have a real nose for sniffing out opportunities in matters of, um, “business:”
And if you think this is all a bunch of plutocrats paying crypto-bribes (DYSWIDT?) and laundering money, guess again:
I know there’s a temptation to write these people off as getting what they deserve, but on the other hand [can’t come up with something at the moment though I know I should].
Back in August, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were all smiles. They showed up at the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York to celebrate a new business partnership with a little-known publicly traded company, then called Alt5 Sigma, to give investors easier access to a cryptocurrency backed by the Trump family.
Less than 10 months later, the company has warned investors it may not be able to stay in business much longer. Its share price has fallen more than 90%, and a rebranding hasn’t revived investor interest. If the company, now called AI Financial Corp., can’t sustainably raise its share price out of penny-stock levels in the next 15 trading days, it faces the prospect of being delisted by the Nasdaq.
One of the few parties who benefited from the Alt5 Sigma transaction is the Trump family. As part of the August deal, Alt5 acquired $1.5 billion worth of crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, the crypto company co-founded by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., among others, in 2024. The president and undisclosed members of his family were entitled to roughly $500 million in proceeds from the crypto sale, according to disclosures by World Liberty Financial.
Alt5 closed at $8.97 on Aug. 8, the last trading day before the World Liberty deal was announced. Since then, AI Financial’s stock — originally trading under the ticker ALTS, now AIFC — fell to 66 cents a share at the June 8 close, a 93% loss, according to FactSet data.
Attorneys for Democracy Defenders Fund told the Securities and Exchange Commission in an April letter that the regulator needs to “commence an independent investigation into ALTS without delay.” The nonpartisan group has sharply criticized the Trump administration over allegations of ethics issues. They didn’t receive a response to their letter. “The question now is: What happened to all that money?” Virginia Canter, chief anti-corruption counsel for the group, said in an interview.
The SEC declined to comment on whether it has looked at AI Financial since its involvement with the Trumps.
AI Financial has become a cautionary tale for investors who saw a Trump-linked deal as a natural winner in a Trump presidency. The company is on its third CEO and third outside auditor since Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. celebrated the World Liberty partnership at the Nasdaq in August. In January, it turned to World Liberty for a loan, then used some of the proceeds to try to lift its own share price. The effort failed. What looked to some like a public-market entry point into the Trump family’s expanding business empire has instead left investors with steep losses.
When I ponder the question of whether Trump is going to try to remain in office beyond January 2029, what I keep coming back to is, why wouldn’t he? He’s stumbled onto the greatest political grift in world history, he’s never suffered any real consequences for his crimes, he has an utterly feckless SCOTUS majority almost completely on his side, he must be addicted to an extent that’s barely conceivable to the attention and adulation being injected minute by minute into the nervous system of the most extreme imaginable case of malignant narcissism, and of course on top of all that are all those ill-gotten billions, which will stop rolling in as soon as he’s no longer in a position to employ the entire apparatus of the federal government as his own personal Donzi scheme. WHY WOULD HE STEP AWAY VOLUNTARILY?
. . . Commenter Chris lays down the fire:
Everyone Knows that “the business of America is business” and what we need is someone in there who’s Not A Politician, who will runthecountrylikeabidness: fleece investors, partners, etc, engage in a little “creative accounting”, loot all the valuable stuff into your own pockets, when things get hot fuck off to Fiji or wherever and leave others holding the bag
It’s a marker of, many things, that Very Serious People can’t even bring themselves to say things like “The ‘Trump Organization’ is mainly a real estate scam/money laundering operation and the guy and his spawn care mainly about politics as a vehicle for further self-enrichment and empowerment”, in favor of What The President’s Strategy For Iran Might Entail.
One of those things is the semi-mystic/religious reverence that inheres to capital-B Business in the US. I’m afraid you naive folk just don’t understand Business and what it entails. Don’t question or doubt the Business Gods lest they decide not to bless us with prosperity and Nice Things.
Many of the Founding Fathers™ were pathological land speculators so this is nothing new in The Greatest Country On God’s Green Earth. Which, relatedly, this fact being something rarely mentioned in polite company except in hushed tones, in favor of Founding Fathers as superhuman demigods, is another aspect of the US national mythology and foolishness. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and sometimes those stories are real whoppers.