Screenshot via CBS News.
Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander, who calculates wealthy individuals’ net worth for the business magazine’s regular rankings, bashed President Donald Trump’s attempt to explain the spike in his personal wealth during his second term as “nonsense.”
Alexander was reacting to a clip from Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes that was posted on social media, showing correspondent Ross Douthat questioning the president about a recent Forbes story that reported Trump’s “net worth went up by $3 billion.”
Trump’s first reaction was to cut off Douthat and insist, “Well, so did everyone’s.”
“My net worth did not go up by three billion dollars, for the record,” Douthat declared.
“Well, you should have had stock,” said Trump.
“I should have had stock,” Douthat replied, somewhat dryly, before asking Trump again, how his net worth went up $3 billion.
Trump’s response was to say he didn’t really follow his money and that it is managed by his son (presumably referring to the eldest Trump scion Donald Trump Jr.):
Well, let me explain. I devote almost no time to my net worth. I don’t care. I make — I have a lot of money, far more than I ever thought I’d have. And, I guess it’s gone up. I don’t even know. I have a son who’s a very straight, good guy. He watches over money. I don’t even talk to him about it. He watches. He gives — they gave my money — I have a lot of cash, I’ve had a lot of cash, long before I came in here. I don’t take a salary, you know?
Alexander pounced on the clip a few hours after it was posted, sharing a long thread of comments on X. At the time of publication, he had written over thirty tweets and was still posting every few minutes.
“I’ll explain exactly how this happened because I’m the person at Forbes who calculates these numbers,” Alexander introduced himself. “This is going to take some unraveling, but here’s a spoiler: The president’s answer here is nonsense.”
Alexander’s subsequent tweets were chock-full of citations and links, including referring back to what he had written just a few days into Trump’s second term, noting that he had “I’ve covered Trump’s finances for 8 years and wrote a book about conflicts of interest during his first term,” but had “never seen anything quite like the profiteering that occurred over the last few days.”
Selected quotes from Alexander’s tweets are below (the entire thread can be viewed on X).
According to Alexander, from the time Trump was re-elected in the fall of 2024 to the fall of 2025, Forbes “estimated his fortune increased from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion, a jump of $3 billion.”
“But that timeframe actually *minimizes* the extent of Trump’s political profiteering,” Alexander wrote, and the “full picture” was best viewed by starting at March 8, 2024, “when Forbes estimated Trump’s net worth at $2.3 billion, or FIVE BILLION less than he would be worth about a year and a half later.”
“What happened between early March 2024 and the fall of 2024 that drove his net worth up by $2 billion in a matter of months?” Alexander continued. “The president brought the Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that operates Truth Social, to the public markets. Trump fans went nuts.”
About $1.8 billion of the $2 billion in wealth Trump gained from March to fall 2024 was from Trump Media, according to Alexander, who framed it as “the first American ever to create billions from his politics,” because the Trump Media company “was not really valued on business fundamentals but on political enthusiasm, of which Trump had plenty.”
“I explained all of this in a cover story for Forbes that fall,” wrote Alexander. “The quote on the cover was from Trump himself: ‘Politics is great because you don’t spend any money. You can’t make a bad deal.’”
Alexander then turned to the “starting point” of Douthat’s question from the 60 Minutes clip, fall 2024, when Trump “was worth $4.3 billion, having just made a historic fortune while running for president.”
And Trump “was only barely getting started,” launching a venture called World Liberty Financial right before the election that functioned with “brutal economics” by “selling a crypto token and offering vague promises of a ‘financial revolution’” — but “[f]or Trump, the proposition was clearer: a 52.5% cut of every dollar investors put in after the initial $30M,” plus “22.5% to his family members,” and “12.5% to a family affiliate of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s soon-to-be ambassador at large.”
Alexander then spelled out how Trump managed to create a “frenzy around two Trump crypto assets,” timed to his inauguration, by launching a memecoin around the same time that billionaire investor Justin Sun got involved in WLF:
But 20 days after the election, a crypto entrepreneur named Justin Sun, whom the SEC had accused of fraud, announced a $30M investment, single-handedly wiping out the $30M threshold and ensuring that Trump, his family, and the Witkoffs would collect.
The crypto community went wild, and money started pouring in, especially as the inauguration approached. One day before Trump took office, Sun announced another $45 million investment.
This “was a tone-setter for the second term,” wrote Alexander. “The next four years were going to make the ethics scandals of the first term, about which I wrote an entire book, look like small potatoes.”
Other examples of Trump’s profiteering “bonanza” Alexander mentioned were how money was pouring in from the United Arab Emirates, with a firm that had recently relocated there buying $25 million of tokens from WLF and an Abu Dhabi-linked nonprofit scooping up $100 million more.
Trump “never divested” his interest in WLF, wrote Alexander, and he got his cut from all this money flowing in.
As all this was going on, Alexander continued, “everything is murky, in part because — as Forbes reports first — Trump strikes a secretive deal to sell a stake in one of his crypto ventures.”
Alexander admitted his reporting had not gained much notice at the time, but Trump certainly seemed to, going on a “Truth Social tangent” a few days later, blasting Alexander as “a terribly untalented writer” who had “evil intentions” and had “written so inaccurately about me that it is ridiculous.”
Screenshot via X.
The Wall Street Journal later filled in the details, Alexander wrote, about “who bought the stake and for how much,” reporting that associates of a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family had “secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for [$500 million].”
There was “another wild deal,” Alexander wrote, when a “tiny, publicly traded healthcare company” bought about $700 million in tokens from WLF.
“Remember, Trump still hasn’t divested, so he keeps getting his cut, even though he’s president,” Alexander emphasized. “All this dealmaking leads to staggering amounts of cash by the end of 2025,” totaling “$1,425,000,000 of liquidity” from WLF and the memecoin in just one year. Plus, Alexander wrote, “[w]hen Trump created his crypto ventures, he hung onto a lot of tokens for himself,” which Forbes reported unlocked over time and estimated their worth as “about $1B by the fall of 2025,” up from being worth literally nothing a year before that.
Trump was also raking in the dough from overseas licensing deals, Alexander wrote, largely reversing the seemingly “ruinous” damage to his brand after January 6. This included “a new licensing deal to put his name on a hotel-and-golf project in Oman,” launched just one day before Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and several other deals that “often took place in master developments tied to Gulf state rulers.”
The president’s overseas licensing income “exploded” during this period, wrote Alexander, going from $6 million in 2023, to $46 million in 2024, to $61 million in 2025, according to Forbes estimates.
And even those whopping figures didn’t tell the whole story, Alexander added, because that was “just the income.”
“The value of the licensing business went up far more,” he wrote. “In the fall of 2024, when we knew Trump’s licensing business was growing but not how dramatically, we estimated it was worth about $100 million. One year later, when size of the expansion became clear, that number jumped to $500 million.”
Alexander also noted that “a big chunk” of the growth in Trump’s net worth came from his successful appeal in his New York fraud case. The appeals court had affirmed that Trump had committed the fraud, “[b]ut, in an unusual twist, the court simultaneously threw out the entire penalty given to Trump,” and so “[w]ith the obligation to pay gone, his net worth instantly shot up by about a half-billion dollars.”
To sum up, Alexander wrote, “the main reasons why Trump’s net worth increased by $3 billion” in one year were $1 billion-plus of crypto earnings, $1 billion of “crypto tokens created out of thin air,” $400 million expansion of his branding ventures, and the nearly $500 million fine wiped out by the appeal — not, as Trump had claimed on 60 Minutes, that he had just done well in the stock market.
The post Forbes Senior Editor Shreds Trump’s Explanation for How His Net Worth Went Up $3 Billion: ‘Nonsense’ first appeared on Mediaite.
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