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reuters
Entities Behind Trump Crypto Coin Made Up to $100 Million in Trading Fees in Under 2 Weeks
"Trump and his cronies get rich while the little guy gets fucked," said one critic.
Feb 03, 2025
Reutersreported Monday that the entities behind U.S. President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency token "generated between $86 million and $100 million in trading fees" from the mid-January launch to the end of the month, sparking a fresh flood of criticism and accusations of grift.
Trump announced the $TRUMP meme coin on the Friday night of the first-ever Crypto Ball in Washington, D.C., ahead of his Monday inauguration. Its market value swiftly soared that weekend, but has since dropped dramatically. Reuters had Chainalysis, Merkle Science, and a third blockchain analytics firm whose founder requested that it not be identified review the blockchain, a public ledger that shows transactions involving the coin.
Merkle Science estimated that three crypto wallets earned $86 million in trading fees from January 17 to January 30, while Chainalysis put it at about $94 million for the same period. The third firm found that by January 29, it was roughly $100 million.
According to Reuters:
One of the entities behind the crypto coin is a company owned by Trump, called CIC Digital. The official website for $TRUMP says CIC Digital will "receive trading revenue derived from trading activities" of the meme coin. Reuters could not determine what portion of the fees so far, if any, had accrued to Trump personally, nor the ownership of the other entities behind the coin.
The creators of the meme coin receive a share of the trading fees from Meteora, a little-known crypto exchange where the $TRUMP coins were first sold, the blockchain analyses showed.
At least 50 of the largest investors in the coin have made profits in excess of $10 million each on the $Trump coin, according to Chainalysis. At the same time, some 200,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money on $Trump on the exchange, it said.
Responding to the reporting on the social media platform Bluesky, an account called Trumpflation Tracker declared that "Trump and his cronies get rich while the little guy gets fucked, same story different year."
Software engineer Jonathan McHugh similarly said, "His entire life is one giant grift, most often of people who can least afford it."
Rodrigo Fernandez, a senior researcher at the Amsterdam-based Center for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), said that "the conflict of interest if obvious—but he managed to flood the zone to such an extend that this detail will go unnoticed."
The White House did not address Reuters' questions about the trading fees; instead, it sent a fact sheet about Trump's executive order on digital financial technology. The news agency noted that the president "has pledged to put his assets in a trust managed by his children on entering the White House" and his son Eric Trump did respond on behalf of the Trump Organization.
Eric Trump told Reuters that he is proud of what "we continue to accomplish in crypto. $TRUMP is currently the hottest digital meme on Earth." Echoing his previous comments on the coin, the president's son added that "we are just getting started."
Late last month, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Reich wrote about the $TRUMP coin—as well as the first lady's $MELANIA coin that soon followed—and tied both to the president's related executive order "protecting and promoting" the crypto industry.
"In effect, Trump is writing the rules for a business venture from which he and his family are personally profiting. It could earn them hundreds of billions of dollars," he stressed. "The real significance of such blatant profiteering off the highest office in the land is what it reveals—not just about Trump but about the entire oligarchic enterprise he fronts for. It is likely to contribute to a vast wave of public alarm and disgust."
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The NYT Finds US Complicity in Genocide Unremarkable
By refusing to cover a new U.S. shipment of vast quantities of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, the Times gave a boost to the process of normalizing the slaughter in Gaza, as if this was unnewsworthy.
Apr 02, 2024
When The Washington Post revealed Friday afternoon that “the Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel,” a lot of people cared. Readers of the story posted more than 10,000 comments on its webpage. A leading progressive site for breaking news, Common Dreams, quickly followed up with coverage under a headline that began with the word “obscene.” Responses on social media were swift and strong; a tweet about the Post scoop from our team at RootsAction received more than 600,000 views.
But at The New York Times—the nation’s purported newspaper of record—one day after another went by as the editors determined that the story about the massive new transfer of weaponry to Israel wasn’t worth reporting on at all. Yet it was solid. A Reutersdispatch said that two sources “confirmed” the Post’s report.
By omission, The New York Times gave a boost to a process of normalizing the slaughter in Gaza, as if shipping vast quantities of 2,000-pound bombs for use to take the lives of Palestinian civilians is unremarkable and unnewsworthy. Just another day at the genocide office.
The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.
The intentional failure of the Times to report the profoundly important news of the huge new shipments of armaments was a tacit signal that the flagrant willingness of Uncle Sam to talk out of both sides of his mouth—assisting with further carnage on a soul-corrupting scale—was no big deal.
At the end of the weekend, I sent an email to the Times managing editor Carolyn Ryan and asked why the newspaper wasn’t covering the story at all. She passed my question along to the Times public-relations manager, who provided only a non-answer on Monday night. Here it is in full: “The New York Times has invested more than any other U.S. newspaper over the past decade to help readers understand the complexities of the Israel-Hamas conflict. We continue to report on events as they develop, both in the region, internationally, and within the U.S. government.”
The complete evasion, laced with self-puffery, reflected the arrogance of media power from the single most influential and far-reaching news outlet in the United States. Rather than amplify the crucial story into the nation’s media echo chamber, the Times opted to quash it.
The saying that “justice delayed is justice denied” has a parallel for news media and war—journalism delayed is journalism denied. The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.
The Post article had laid bare, at a pivotal historic moment, a lethal contradiction within the behavior of top U.S. government official—directly aiding and abetting Israel’s methodical killing of civilians in Gaza while spouting facile platitudes about them.
In its lead sentence, the piece said that the White House had okayed the new shipments of bombs and jets “despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.” The juxtaposition showed just how phony “Washington’s concerns” actually are.
“The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter,” the Post reported. “The 2,000-pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.”
The piece quoted an unidentified White House official who, in effect, underscored that all the talk of President Joe Biden’s supposed distress about the ongoing massacres of civilians in Gaza has been a cruel exercise in PR smoke-blowing: “We have continued to support Israel’s right to defend itself. Conditioning aid has not been our policy.”
Translation: We continue to support, with massive military aid, Israel’s prerogative to keep slaughtering Palestinian civilians.
If the Times editors need to grasp just how significantly horrific the 2,000-pound bombs now en route to Israel really are, they could read some reporting from their own newspaper. In December, it described those bombs as “one of the most destructive munitions in Western military arsenals”—a weapon that “unleashes a blast wave and metal fragments thousands of feet in every direction.” Back then, the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times,” and those 2,000-pound bombs were “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.”
It’s a safe bet that the new transfer of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel would seem more newsworthy to the editors of The New York Times if the lives of their loved ones were at stake.
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Senators Demand Tesla Recalls After 'Alarming' Reuters Reporting
"Tesla must stop blaming customers and recall their malfunctioning vehicles," said Sen. Ed Markey.
Dec 27, 2023
A week after Reutersrevealed that "Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective," the news agency exclusively reported Wednesday that a pair of U.S. senators wrote to billionaire CEO Elon Musk to demand vehicle recalls.
Citing the "alarming" journalistic investigation into the electric vehicle (EV) company, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) expressed "extreme concern following recent reporting about Tesla's knowledge of safety flaws in its vehicles and concealment of the causes of these flaws from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration," or NHTSA.
Based on thousands of internal documents from 2016-22 as well as interviews with over 20 customers and nine former Tesla managers or service technicians, Reuters found that tens of thousands of buyers "have experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts" and "the chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, date back at least seven years and stretch across Tesla's model lineup and across the globe."
Reuters reported that the company, which sells directly to customers and controls many of its service centers, "has denied some of the suspension and steering problems in statements to U.S. regulators and the public—and, according to Tesla records, sought to shift some of the resulting repair costs to customers" with language like "driver abuse" and "vehicle misuse."
Blumenthal and Markey—who have previously written to Musk, the world's richest person, about issues at Tesla and publicly shared concerns about the company—wrote that "we are disturbed that you would blame your customers for these failures."
"It is unacceptable that Tesla would not only attempt to shift the responsibility for the substandard quality of its vehicles to the people purchasing them, but also make that same flawed argument to NHTSA," the pair added, calling on Musk to correct "apparent false and misleading representations" made to the federal agency.
While the CEO and company did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment about the initial findings or the senators' letter, the news agency noted that "Tesla's handling of suspension and steering complaints reflects a pattern across Musk's corporate empire of dismissing concerns about safety or other harms raised by customers, workers, and others as he rushes to roll out new products or expand sales."
Musk's other business ventures include Neuralink, OpenAI, SpaceX, the Boring Company, and X, formerly Twitter.
The senators' recall demand comes as both the Norwegian Public Roads Administration and the Swedish Transport Agency investigate issues with Tesla vehicles. Tesla is also facing further trouble across Scandinavia: Unoinized workers in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have made clear they won't help the company circumvent a work stoppage launched in October by Swedish service center mechanics.
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