1/ I'll explain exactly how this happened because I'm the person at Forbes who calculates these numbers. This is going to take some unraveling, but here's a spoiler: The president's answer here is nonsense.
Ross Douthat asks the President how his net worth rose by nearly $3 billion, according to a Forbes estimate, since he returned to office. Watch the interview Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.
2/ This question appears to be based on the change in Trump's net worth increase from the fall of 2024, when he was elected, to the fall of 2025. Over that year, we estimated his fortune increased from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion, a jump of $3 billion. 3/ But that timeframe actually *minimizes* the extent of Trump's political profiteering. To get the full picture, we'l start on 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. 4/ 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? The president brought the Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that operates Truth Social, to the public markets. Trump fans went nuts. 5/ Of the $2B increase from early March '24 to the fall of '24, $1.8B of it came from Trump Media. The company was not really valued on business fundamentals but on political enthusiasm, of which Trump had plenty. It made him the first US politician to make $1B on politics. 6/ I explained all of this in a cover story for Forbes that fall. 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."
7/ That takes us to the *starting point* of the "60 Minutes" question. It was the fall of 2024, and Trump was worth $4.3 billion, having just made a historic fortune while running for president. He was only barely getting started. 8/ Just before the election, Trump kicked off a venture named World Liberty Financial, selling a crypto token and offering vague promises of a "financial revolution." For Trump, the proposition was clearer: a 52.5% cut of every dollar investors put in after the initial $30M. 9/ No one paid much attention to World Liberty at first. It had brutal economics, laid out in a proposal as a funnel after the first $30M: -52.5% to Trump -22.5% to his family members -12.5% to a family affiliate of Steve Witkoff, Trump's soon-to-be ambassador at large. 10/ 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. x.com
x.com
11/ 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. x.com
x.com
12/ Around the same time, Trump launched a memecoin. Now there was a frenzy around two Trump crypto assets, timed to his inauguration. Robinhood notifications lit up investors' phones. "I was like, 'Oh, let me buy some of this," one told me. "Never know what's going to happen." 13/ It was a tone-setter for the second term. 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. forbes.com
www.forbes.com
14/ Once Trump's in office, the bonanza continues, as money pours in, especially from the UAE. -Firm that had just relocated there purchases $25M of tokens -Abu Dhabi-tied nonprofit buys $100M Trump, who never divested World Liberty, gets a cut. 15/ As it's happening, 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. forbes.com
www.forbes.com
16/ That story and a follow-up don't generate a ton of attention at the time, but there is one person who may have noticed: the president. Days later, he goes on this Truth Social tangent.
17/ The WSJ later answers the big questions--who bought the stake and for how much. Opening line: "Lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for" $500M. wsj.com
www.wsj.com
18/ Then comes another wild deal. A tiny, publicly traded healthcare company says it's going to convert into a stockpile of World Liberty tokens and purchase about $700M of them. Remember, Trump still hasn't divested, so he keeps getting his cut, even though he's president. 19/ All this dealmaking leads to staggering amounts of cash by the end of 2025. -World Liberty kicks of $789M of earnings -The memecoin supplies another $636M Total: $1,425,000,000 of liquidity from those two ventures in one year. 20/ There's more. When Trump created his crypto ventures, he hung onto a lot of tokens for himself. Those holdings unlock over time, and we discount them in our numbers. Even with the discounts, we estimated they were worth about $1B by the fall of 2025, up from ~$0 in a year. 21/ It's not all crypto, though. Another big factor: Trump's overseas licensing deals. January 6th once looked ruinous for the Trump brand. “He has done permanent damage to the Trump name and image,” real-estate analyst Kevin Brown told me after the riot on the Capitol. 22/ But Trump does not just go away. In 2022, *one day* before Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, he finalized a new licensing deal to put his name on a hotel-and-golf project in Oman. forbes.com
www.forbes.com
23/ The dealmaker on the other side of the table from Trump was a guy named Ziad El Chaar. Years ago, he worked for a Dubai-based billionaire named Hussain Sajwani, who once partnered with Trump. When El Chaar moved to a Saudi developer, he maintained his Trump connection. 24/ As Trump got closer to the presidency in 2024, Ziad El Chaar's new firm, Dar Al Arkan, went on a deal rampage, striking agreements all over the Middle East. There was a pattern with these deals. They often took place in master developments tied to Gulf state rulers. 25/ Trump's overseas licensing empire exploded. Here's the trajectory of Trump's annual licensing income, according to our estimates. -2023: $6 million -2024: $46 million -2025: $61 million That's just the income. The value of the licensing business went up far more. 26/ 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. forbes.com
www.forbes.com
27/ Another big chunk of that $3 billion jump that "60 Minutes" comes from something that happened in court. The New York attorney general had sued Trump for lying about his net worth for years. In February 2024, a judge ruled that Trump had to pay $454M. Trump appealed. 28/ In August 2025, an appeals court agreed that Donald Trump had committed fraud. But, in an unusual twist, the court simultaneously threw out the entire penalty given to Trump. With the obligation to pay gone, his net worth instantly shot up by about a half-billion dollars. 29/ These are the main reasons why Trump's net worth increased by $3 billion from the fall of 2024 to the fall of 2025, in rounded numbers: -$1B+ of crypto earnings -$1B of crypto tokens created out of thin air -$400M expansion of branding business -$500M fine wiped out 30/ Let's look at every way Trump tried to answer why his net worth went up $3B. "Well, so did everyone's," was his first response. "My net worth did not go up by $3 billion," responds Ross Douthat. "Well, you should have had stock." bsky.app
Ross Douthat asks the President how his net worth rose by nearly $3 billion, according to a Forbes estimate, since he returned to office. Watch the interview Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.
31/ In fact, almost none of Trump's $3B in gains from the fall of 2024 to the fall of 2025 came from stock. In the fall of 2024, we estimated that the president's liquid assets totaled about $415M. After analyzing his financial disclosure, we pegged about 10% of that in stock. 32/ From the time we locked in the Forbes 400 list in 2024 to the one in 2025, the S&P 500 went up by 14%. By that measure, the market boosted Trump's fortune by $415M * 10% * 0.14 = $6M. Out of $3B. Oh, but that's excluding one stock in which he held a huge stake: Trump Media. 33/ From the time we locked in the Forbes 400 list in 2024 to the one in 2025, Trump Media stock *declined* 10%. That wiped $226M off Trump's fortune. So the stock market, which he tries to credit for his $3B of gains, apparently netted him somewhere around *negative* $220M. 34/ It's worth noting that, even if his fortune had tracked the stock market, that would have boosted his $4.3 billion fortune to about $4.3B * 1.14 (because of the 14% gain) = $4.9B. That's about or about $2.4B shy of where he actually ended up. 35/ After pointing to stocks, Trump then explains the $3B gain thusly. "I devote almost no time to my net worth -- I don't care. I have a lot of money. Far more than I ever thought I'd have. And I guess it has gone up. I don't even know." bsky.app
Ross Douthat asks the President how his net worth rose by nearly $3 billion, according to a Forbes estimate, since he returned to office. Watch the interview Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.
36/ The idea that Donald Trump doesn't pay attention to his net worth flies in the face of more than 40 years of Forbes reporting. There may be no one else in America who has cared more about where he or she ranks on the Forbes 400 since its inception in 1982 than Donald Trump. 37/ Trump's next line, when asked about his $3B gain, is just as hard to believe. "I have a son, who is a very straight, good guy," the president says. "He watches over money. I don't even talk to him about it." bsky.app
Ross Douthat asks the President how his net worth rose by nearly $3 billion, according to a Forbes estimate, since he returned to office. Watch the interview Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.
38/ I asked Trump's son, Eric, about how he would update his dad on the business during a 2017 interview in Trump Tower. Here's what he told me: "Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that's about it." forbes.com
www.forbes.com
39/ How often would the president receive updates on his finances, I wondered. Every quarter? "Depending, yeah, depending," Eric Trump said. Could be more? Could be less? "Yeah, probably quarterly," he told me. He also said, "I talk to him a lot. We're pretty inseparable." 40/ There is no question Trump is involved in his business. And it's not just in big-picture matters. He has gotten involved in details--like golf-course landscaping and product logos--while serving as president. I recently wrote a big story on this. forbes.com
www.forbes.com
41/ The "60 Minutes" clip closes with this line from Trump: "I don't take a salary, you know." The presidential salary is $400,000. If you make $3 billion a year, then you make $400,000 every 70 minutes. Including when you're sleeping. bsky.app
Ross Douthat asks the President how his net worth rose by nearly $3 billion, according to a Forbes estimate, since he returned to office. Watch the interview Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.
42/ That's all for now. Time for dinner. And my weekly date with @60minutes.bsky.social . I'll explain what has happened since the fall of 2025 in another thread later this week. Thanks for reading.