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The president’s eldest sons have taken time out of their busy schedules promoting questionable crypto companies on behalf of their dad to launch a crypto-mining company of their very own.
On Monday, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. announced the launch of a firm called American Bitcoin. Coming soon, the Trump sons will be getting into the business of using ridiculous amounts of energy to feed computers so they can do complex math problems and eventually pop out coins. But if you think the Trumps will be learning the zeros and ones of crypto supercomputing, the deal will look a little different from that. They’ve really just taken one of their many business entities — a company you’ve definitely heard of called American Data Centers, Inc. — and merged it with an already-functioning crypto-mining firm. The Trumps and their fellow investors will get 20 percent of the profits moving forward, with Eric serving as strategy officer.
“From the start, we’ve backed our conviction in bitcoin, personally and through our businesses,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement. “From the start” may be a stretch, considering his father was calling cryptocurrency a scam as recently as 2021. But ever since Trump Jr. helped convince the family head that cryptocurrency was a great way to monetize the family name, Team Trump has been all in on bitcoin and other, lesser coins. Since he was elected for the second time, the Trump crypto rush has been nonstop.
There was Donald Trump’s meme coin, $Trump, which earned more than $100 million in trading fees alone in January before plummeting in value. Then people in the know made millions on Melania before it immediately tanked. As Trump has pushed for an end to enforcement by regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, he has continued with his crypto plans and glaring conflicts of interest. Last week, Trump launched a crypto investment fund two days after the SEC killed its probe into the company Trump teamed up with. Also last week, a company run by Trump’s eldest sons announced the launch of a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged to treasuries and the U.S. dollar to help provide liquidity for trades. They did so the day before Republicans in Congress put forward a new bill on how to regulate such tokens.
At a crypto conference last week, Trump Jr. had high expectations for how much money he intends to make in the new crypto era ushered in by his father. “The sky is the limit for this,” he said.
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