The Trumps’ Companies Are Losing Millions of Dollars on Bitcoin – Mother Jones

Donald Trump and his family have added billions to their net worth since Inauguration Day, with much of that new wealth coming from a dizzying array of crypto projects. But some of those gains are under threat, thanks to the crypto sector’s recent struggles. The latest blow is a second consecutive reported loss for Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin Corp, a wind-powered bitcoin mining company. The $82 million loss, from the first quarter of 2026, is largely due to the continued slump in bitcoin prices. It follows the same pattern as Trump Media and Technology Group—the parent company of the president’s Truth Social platform—which has lost $1.1 billion since its founding, almost entirely due to losses on bitcoin.

Both companies are using what’s known as a bitcoin treasury strategy—a relatively simple business plan wherein a firm just acquires as much bitcoin as possible. As long as the price of bitcoin goes up, the company gets more valuable. The problem is, the plan only works if the price of bitcoin goes up, and for the last seven months, the price of Bitcoin has mostly been down. The price of one bitcoin peaked late last year at $126,198, then collapsed all the way to $64,856 in February. Since the end of the first quarter, it has partially rebounded to around $80,000.

The strategy was first pioneered by investor Michael Saylor, who has used his company Strategy to acquire more than 813,000 bitcoins. It was a system that served his company’s stock price well, helping it rocket from around $50 in January 2024, to more than $405 a share last July. Saylor has been something of an evangelist for this strategy, and for bitcoin generally; Eric Trump has repeatedly cited Saylor as a model for his own ambitions.

But Saylor’s stock price has crashed, its down to around $181, and the company’s bitcoin supply has plummeted in value as well. Saylor’s company posted a $12.5 billion loss in the first quarter, and he has suggested he will begin “actively managing” the company’s bitcoin hoard, rather than simply accumulating more and more.

The good news for Eric Trump and his father is that if the price of bitcoin continues to bounce back, the strategy can become highly profitable again. And the federal government, a branch of which Donald Trump controls, may soon be stepping in to give the price of bitcoin a nice goose.

There are two major opportunities for the Trump administration to do something positive for the price of bitcoin in the coming weeks:

• Passage of the CLARITY Act: One of the most unsettling things about crypto for a lot of investors is the lack of regulatory certainty. Trump has vowed to make the United States the “crypto capital” by passing landmark legislation, the CLARITY Act, which is supposed to establish cryptocurrency as a legitimate, if somewhat lightly-regulated, investment tool. The legislation has been stalled in Congress for much of the last year, in part due to Democratic opposition over conflict-of-interest concerns involving Trump. But a compromise was reached this week in the House, and now the bill needs to pass the Senate; Trump is aiming to sign it by July 4. Just based on the news that it had passed the House, the price of bitcoin jumped over $80,000 for the first time in months this week.
• US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: The US government already owns a lot of bitcoin, mainly thanks to the seizure of digital currency in criminal cases. Last March, Trump issued an executive order directing the US government to do essentially what Trump Media and Technology Group and American Bitcoin are doing: intentionally build as big a pile of bitcoin as possible. Trump hasn’t given any real specific reasons why the US government should do this—he has generally alluded to the need to beat China—but it would be a boon for bitcoin, a full-throated endorsement by the US government of the idea that bitcoin is a valuable thing that should be accumulated. There hasn’t been a ton of action on this plan, but in late April, an administration crypto adviser said that a “big announcement” is coming soon.

Neither move would necessarily return bitcoin’s price to last year’s stratospheric levels. But if the Trump administration’s efforts boost the price even a little, it will be a major win for the First Family’s bottom line.