Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. The Gulf of Mexico
Speaker 1: has been renamed the Gulf of Amara.
Speaker 2: Now to Elon Muskin what's being described as a hostile
Speaker 2: takeover of a government landmark decisions impacting the future of
Speaker 2: birthright citizenship game. The President says he wants friendship with
Speaker 2: our northern neighbor despite trade tensions, but won't give up
Speaker 2: by the idea of turning Canada into the fifty first state.
Speaker 2: It's been about six months since President Trump started his
Speaker 2: second term, and if you're having a hard time keeping
Speaker 2: track of everything that's happened since then, you're not alone.
Speaker 2: The President has imposed eye popping tariffs on our largest
Speaker 2: trading partners.
Speaker 1: She's calling the beginning of a new system of.
Speaker 2: Trade, ramped up border enforcement and mass deportations, deploy about
Speaker 2: seven hundred marines to the LA area in response to
Speaker 2: the protests over ice raids, and overhauled large parts of
Speaker 2: the federal government. Trump has also ordered military strikes on Iran.
Speaker 1: His massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities.
Speaker 2: Engaged in legal battles with universities in the media, and
Speaker 2: signed a massive tax and spending bill into law. Passing
Speaker 2: in the Senate, it was very close. Vice President jd
Speaker 2: Vance with the tie breaking vote. The White House has
Speaker 2: celebrated the last six months. The administration has argued the
Speaker 2: president has delivered on campaign promises. He's cracked down on
Speaker 2: illegal border crossings, reduced the trade deficit, and delivered tax
Speaker 2: cuts to working class Americans. But during that time and
Speaker 2: in the months leading up to his reelection, something else
Speaker 2: has also happened. President Trump and his family have made
Speaker 2: a lot of money.
Speaker 3: The way that his wealth looks now in his second
Speaker 3: term versus his first term is very different.
Speaker 2: Annie Massa covers wealth for Bloomberg.
Speaker 3: In Trump's first term, I would say there were already
Speaker 3: calls and protests over potential for conflicts of interest because
Speaker 3: he was a businessman. He has the Trump organization. But
Speaker 3: now as we come into the second term, it's just
Speaker 3: a much more complex picture.
Speaker 2: Today, President Trump's assets are in a trust controlled by
Speaker 2: his oldest son, Donald Trump Junior, and his family says
Speaker 2: they aren't doing any business with governments. Critics of the
Speaker 2: president would argue it falls short of separating him from
Speaker 2: his business interests, and he spent months working with a
Speaker 2: team of reporters at Bloomberg crunching the numbers on how
Speaker 2: the assets in that trust and the Trump family's wealth
Speaker 2: have ballooned since the early days of his campaign for reelection.
Speaker 2: In that time, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, President
Speaker 2: Trump's net worth has more than doubled to about six
Speaker 2: point four billion dollars.
Speaker 3: He now has a publicly traded company that was not
Speaker 3: true last time around, and that's Trump Media, which is
Speaker 3: the parent company of Truth Social, making up a huge
Speaker 3: portion of that wealth. The other really big thing to
Speaker 3: zero in on is crypto and so you have the
Speaker 3: these branches that simply weren't there in Trump's first term
Speaker 3: at all. He didn't have these crypto ventures, he didn't
Speaker 3: have a publicly traded company. His sons are now adding
Speaker 3: themselves to advisory boards of various companies that are regulated
Speaker 3: by the government in certain ways. So it's an even
Speaker 3: more intricate picture and ballooning wealth.
Speaker 2: I'm David Gerret, and this is the big take from
Speaker 2: Bloomberg News today on the show, the Trump Family's money
Speaker 2: making machine. Where's their wealth coming from? And how is
Speaker 2: Donald Trump's second presidency benefiting his family. Donald Trump is
Speaker 2: certainly not the first president to profit from the presidency.
Speaker 2: Presidents often have their windfall after leaving office, with multimillion
Speaker 2: dollar book deals and speaking engagements, but Trump has seen
Speaker 2: his net worth soar, so much so that when Bloomberg
Speaker 2: wealth reporter Annie Massa and finance reporter Max Abelson were
Speaker 2: trying to tallly the president's net worth, they kept having
Speaker 2: to update their estimates as new projects were announced. Max says,
Speaker 2: it's a remarkable transformation when you think of where Trump
Speaker 2: was five years ago.
Speaker 1: I mean, it is not exaggerating to say that Donald
Speaker 1: Trump as a person, as a brand, as a businessman,
Speaker 1: as the head of a company, was facing some serious
Speaker 1: headwinds just a few years ago. I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties. In the wake of his first presidency.
Speaker 1: He left Washington with debts coming due, a lot of
Speaker 1: money coming due. At the same time. Then he also
Speaker 1: had a lot of legal trouble, not just because of
Speaker 1: that four hundred and fifty four million dollar civil fraud judgment.
Speaker 1: There was a conviction, talking criminal conviction. So I think
Speaker 1: it's helpful to keep in mind when we talk about
Speaker 1: this Trump money making machine, it's not just different from
Speaker 1: the first Trump presidency. It's different from where we last
Speaker 1: saw him in the wake of his first administration.
Speaker 2: Annie mad This says, one good example is truth Socials
Speaker 2: parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group.
Speaker 3: Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. For the full name.
Speaker 3: And that's an example where okay, so that platform really
Speaker 3: flourishes based on the President of the United States posting
Speaker 3: on there, Donald Trump posting on there. He is the
Speaker 3: largest shareholder. His shares are in a trust. The trust
Speaker 3: is overseen by Donald Trump Junior, but Donald Trump Junior
Speaker 3: is also part of the company, so it can be
Speaker 3: very hard to untangle than not.
Speaker 1: I think there is just nothing nottier than the real
Speaker 1: estate you've got, not like a nod not notier like
Speaker 1: an untied knot because you know, you look at the
Speaker 1: Middle East especially. Trump Organization has licensed its name to
Speaker 1: brand new skyscrapers that are worth I think half a
Speaker 1: billion each. Sometimes that total project cost reaches into the billions.
Speaker 1: You've got them and cutter in Dubai and oman riodd
Speaker 1: and it's not having in a vacuum.
Speaker 2: You look at this money making machine and divide it
Speaker 2: into four parts. Can you just run through kind of
Speaker 2: what the four categories are of the way in which
Speaker 2: Donald Trump and his family make money.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. You have real estate. I mean that is the
Speaker 3: original Trump family money making endeavor. But now you have
Speaker 3: these new pieces. You have corporate connections, which include the
Speaker 3: memberships on advisory boards and other kind of relationships that
Speaker 3: his sons have. And you also have other ventures, which
Speaker 3: is really just a grab bad that kind of defy
Speaker 3: a categorization.
Speaker 2: And you also have crypto, which includes the Trump family's
Speaker 2: meme coins and a crypto platform. Trump was a crypto skeptic,
Speaker 2: going so far as to call bitcoin a scam. More
Speaker 2: recently he's embraced it, calling it amazing and great for
Speaker 2: our country. I asked Danny to explain that about face.
Speaker 3: Well, we can't one hundred percent get in side Trump's head.
Speaker 3: We do know that he loves an opportunity to put
Speaker 3: the Trump brand on something, and crypto has a lot
Speaker 3: to do with branding and the kind of the attention
Speaker 3: economy that Trump is such a master of. So he
Speaker 3: did transform really in the past year into a crypto
Speaker 3: entrepreneur of sorts. So he and his family promote a
Speaker 3: platform called World Liberty Financial. So that's one piece, and
Speaker 3: they earn money from this endeavor. It has something called
Speaker 3: a stable coin affiliated with it. It's a crypto platform
Speaker 3: that hasn't done all that much yet, but there's an
Speaker 3: affiliated token you can buy, so that's one piece. There's
Speaker 3: also a meme coin that was unveiled on his inauguration
Speaker 3: weekend to much fanfare when everyone was paying attention to
Speaker 3: Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: I want to pick up on something you said, and
Speaker 1: I think that one of the great geniuses or evil
Speaker 1: of bitcoin, depending on how you want to look at it,
Speaker 1: is that it is certainly, among other things, a new
Speaker 1: and potentially very lucrative way of turning attention into cash.
Speaker 1: It financializes attention, and Trump is, I think it's fair
Speaker 1: to say, at the forefront of figuring out how to
Speaker 1: financialize attention. And it came from to refer to an
Speaker 1: earlier story I wrote. This was many years ago. It
Speaker 1: came from essentially a crisis in his career where things
Speaker 1: were not going well for him in the late eighties
Speaker 1: and the very early nineties. He was overlevered, companies were
Speaker 1: going bankrupt, things were not looking good, and he really
Speaker 1: rebuilt his career in the nineteen nineties and then into
Speaker 1: the aughts as someone who would use other people's capital
Speaker 1: and sell his name. It was a savvy move, and
Speaker 1: now we're seeing versions of that now. As for what
Speaker 1: the family's doing while he's in the White House.
Speaker 2: Let's look at real estate, which for so many years
Speaker 2: has been the bread and butter of the Trump organization.
Speaker 2: How has the approach evolved or changed from the Trumps
Speaker 2: to real estate. We see a lot of deals being
Speaker 2: announced in the Balkans, in the Middle East. What's different
Speaker 2: this time, it's black and white.
Speaker 1: What we're seeing now is a willingness for the Trump
Speaker 1: family to partner quite literally around the world, sometimes in
Speaker 1: ways where arms of the deals touch arms of foreign governments.
Speaker 1: And that's just simply not something we saw. I think
Speaker 1: in the first administration. The rule that Trump put on
Speaker 1: his company was no new deals around the world. This
Speaker 1: time around, the white paper that was a sort of
Speaker 1: ethics plan that he put out was no new deals
Speaker 1: with foreign governments, h directly with foreign governments. That opened
Speaker 1: the door to deals from Vietnam to Serbia.
Speaker 2: In some cases, investment in a Trump affiliated property can
Speaker 2: get you significant perks. According to a website for the
Speaker 2: Trump International Hotel and Tower in Dubai, investors who spend
Speaker 2: roughly five hundred and forty five thousand US dollars can
Speaker 2: get a ten year Golden visa a Trump tower in Jetta,
Speaker 2: Saudi Arabia. Anyone who spends a million dollars is eligible
Speaker 2: for Saudi residency.
Speaker 1: And I want to be clear about what's happening, and
Speaker 1: I want to be clear about what's not happening. What's
Speaker 1: not happening is Donald J. Trump, the president, starting hotels himself, because,
Speaker 1: as he points out, his assets are in a trust
Speaker 1: that are run by his son. What is also not
Speaker 1: happening is the Trump organization getting into deals with the
Speaker 1: Japanese government, quad the Japanese government, or I just use
Speaker 1: that as an example. What they are doing now, because
Speaker 1: we've seen photos of it and we've seen press releases
Speaker 1: about it, is that they are working on deals where
Speaker 1: government officials are involved in the signing ceremony. It's new,
Speaker 1: and I think that the way we're figuring out how
Speaker 1: to cover this is by just being like very precise.
Speaker 2: Max and Any say that since the early days of
Speaker 2: Trump's reelection campaign, the Trump name has powered more than
Speaker 2: ten billion dollars of real estate projects coming up. Drones, sneakers,
Speaker 2: and the difficulty of separating the president's financial interests from
Speaker 2: his sons. We've talked about crypto, talked about real estate.
Speaker 2: Let's move into the corporate side of things. A few
Speaker 2: weeks ago, I was leaving the building Bloomberg Headquarters. In
Speaker 2: came Donald Trump Junior, the President's son with a really
Speaker 2: sized belentarage. He was here for an interview. We've talked
Speaker 2: about him here during the course of this conversation. What
Speaker 2: role is he playing now in this whole organization, the
Speaker 2: s apparatus Donald Trump Junior.
Speaker 3: Right, So we've talked about the Trump's affixing their names
Speaker 3: to buildings. Nothing new there, the president of fixing his
Speaker 3: name to a cryptocurrency. But you also have this phenomenon
Speaker 3: of Donald Trump Junior and Eric Trump affixing their names
Speaker 3: and their advisory services to various companies in all kinds
Speaker 3: of industries.
Speaker 2: Spell that out. What are we talking about.
Speaker 3: We're talking about drones. We're talking about a very small
Speaker 3: investment bank that's headquartered in Trump Tower. We're talking about
Speaker 3: a blank chech company that took an online gun retailer public,
Speaker 3: so really a huge number. I mean, Eric Trump is
Speaker 3: involved in a Japanese bitcoin stockpiling operation. There's really no
Speaker 3: limit to the different industries that they've become involved in.
Speaker 2: We've advanced beyond the Trump Winery, all these outside businesses.
Speaker 1: Exactly as the White House forwards this maga agenda. Donald
Speaker 1: Trump Junior is, I think, forwarding a certain kind of
Speaker 1: maga capitalism, and there once again is a certain kind
Speaker 1: of financial political loop that we see that. You know,
Speaker 1: if you want to be fair about it, Donald Trump
Speaker 1: Junior himself will say, look like, I'm a private citizen.
Speaker 1: That's what he told his first story. I'm a private citizen.
Speaker 1: I've been a businessman and I've a serial investor my
Speaker 1: entire life. It would be ridiculous to expect me to
Speaker 1: stop doing what I've always done to provide. I think
Speaker 1: he said to provide for my five children. And you know,
Speaker 1: you could take that idea and extend it and say like,
Speaker 1: it would be ridiculous to expect him to stop forwarding
Speaker 1: a kind of maga financialization agenda simply because his dad
Speaker 1: is doing the same.
Speaker 2: Andy if I were to draw a ven diagram, so
Speaker 2: it's like Donald Trump Junior's business interests and then President Trump,
Speaker 2: is there any intersection here? I imagine back in twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen twenty seventeen. You might have had a President Trump
Speaker 2: who is interested in the state of his real estate portfolio,
Speaker 2: for instance, any indication that he's taking a substantial interest
Speaker 2: in what his son, what his sons are doing when
Speaker 2: it comes to business, or is this very much their
Speaker 2: own venture, yes, built on their shared surname.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it can be hard to disentangle, and as Max mentioned,
Speaker 3: there's often a kind of virtuous circle at play where
Speaker 3: you have both the president and the activity of the
Speaker 3: president and his family, so it can be hard to
Speaker 3: fully disentangle.
Speaker 2: Amazon, for example, plays a role in several Trump family projects.
Speaker 2: It recently purchased the rights to Milania Trump's documentary, paying
Speaker 2: forty million dollars to license the film. According to The
Speaker 2: Wall Street Journal, that is almost tripled the next best offer.
Speaker 2: Max Andanny say Amazon falls into their fourth and final
Speaker 2: category of the Trump money making machine, what they call ventures.
Speaker 3: So one good example is Trump sneakers. You actually saw
Speaker 3: Trump when he was on the campaign trail stop by
Speaker 3: a sneaker head convention, and he's kind of hawking sneakers.
Speaker 3: There are perfumes that are branded in a forty five
Speaker 3: forty seven way, referring to the numbers of his presidencies,
Speaker 3: and it just captures the range of different kinds of
Speaker 3: material goods that he's applied his name to.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's only fair to point out
Speaker 1: that we're not talking about someone who was elected to
Speaker 1: the White House and then suddenly woke up and decided
Speaker 1: to become a global businessman. It's Donald Trump's m O.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm pretty sure it's sort of exactly what
Speaker 1: his fans and his voters and supporters are embracing, this
Speaker 1: idea of a savvy businessman who is not held back
Speaker 1: by the same standards of you know, for example, embarrassment.
Speaker 1: He's certainly unembarrassed about being a brand, although it does
Speaker 1: occur to me that I have never seen a picture
Speaker 1: of him wearing the Trump sneakers.
Speaker 3: True, we're going to need to request that from the
Speaker 3: White House.
Speaker 1: We're going to have to get to the bottom of that.
Speaker 2: Could I ask you about something that's in this venture's bucket,
Speaker 2: and that's settlements.
Speaker 3: Right, there's this piece again, a pretty new phenomenon in
Speaker 3: this second term, where various huge companies have come to
Speaker 3: multimillion dollar settlements with Trump.
Speaker 2: Law firms, media organizations.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's right, a media organizations, other social media platforms
Speaker 3: like Meta and x. And even if those dollars don't
Speaker 3: necessarily go into the pocket of the president, and they
Speaker 3: come in the form of a donation to the as
Speaker 3: yet to be created Presidential Library, that's also a way
Speaker 3: that the cash register rings.
Speaker 2: President Trump has said those settlements with law firms will
Speaker 2: go to pro bono legal services to causes he supports
Speaker 2: during his second term and beyond. He said the settlement
Speaker 2: with Paramount will go toward advertising and public service announcements.
Speaker 2: Let me end with a question I'd like both of
Speaker 2: you to answer, and that is sort of how much
Speaker 2: does this machine grow? Unconstrained at the top. We talked
Speaker 2: about the criticism and pressure that the president was under.
Speaker 2: What's your sense of where this goes from here?
Speaker 3: There's a sense that many are overwhelmed or kind of
Speaker 3: inured almost to the scale of the money making happening.
Speaker 3: And the question that I have is whether the resistance
Speaker 3: that's out there, and there is some There have been
Speaker 3: Democratic lawmakers who've for example, spoken out against the meme coin,
Speaker 3: but has there been a unified front to shut it
Speaker 3: down in some way? Would that even be viable. So
Speaker 3: I guess the lingering question is whether there's any force
Speaker 3: that could really resist a money making machine with this
Speaker 3: many different arms.
Speaker 1: My mind is going to the changes that are happening
Speaker 1: in the United States government, where a fellow billionaire, Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: was called in by Trump to appreciate the government. And
Speaker 1: that's like, it's not an abstract thing, and it includes
Speaker 1: the agencies and offices that oversee Trump's own public company,
Speaker 1: and it includes the agencies and offices that oversee his
Speaker 1: crypto projects. It even includes the people who will see
Speaker 1: the actual conflicts of interests themselves. So we're not necessarily
Speaker 1: in the business of like predicting the future. But I'm
Speaker 1: betting that it's going to become harder and not easier
Speaker 1: to understand what people in power are doing and how
Speaker 1: people in power are making money. And I am not
Speaker 1: specifically referring to Donald Trump. I think it's going to
Speaker 1: be true of Republicans and Democrats, and I think it
Speaker 1: will take a kind of concerted effort to reverse some
Speaker 1: of the things that have happened in these past few months.
Speaker 2: This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm David
Speaker 2: Gera to get more from The Big Take and unlimited
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Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow