Bitcoin sell-off halts Trump family's crypto windfall
President Donald Trump and his family have boasted of going "all in" on cryptocurrencies -- but a recent downturn in bitcoin has pummeled digital asset investors, including the Trumps, who by one estimate have had roughly a billion dollars of their net worth erased in just a matter of weeks.
Bitcoin dropped as much as 8% in trading on Monday, at one point falling below $85,000 -- shedding 30% from its all-time high in early October, when bitcoin was trading at more than $125,000.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank said last week that $1 trillion in value has been wiped out of the crypto market globally since early October. The analysts said traders dumped riskier assets in the crypto sector amid questions about the strength of the economy and stalled momentum on digital asset regulation.
The crypto sell-off is a stark reminder to investors about how volatile assets can drop in value just as quickly as they go up.
The Trump family has launched a soup-to-nuts crypto empire over the past year, including a meme coin, a bitcoin mining firm, and a digital asset company called World Liberty Financial that has issued multiple tokens.
Fueled by the Trump administration's abandonment of several high-profile regulatory challenges to the industry, the price of bitcoin and other digital assets soared in the months following Trump's inauguration, bolstering the Trump family's net worth by hundreds of millions of dollars, according to an ABC News analysis.
But their fortunes have shifted, for now, beneath the weight of a market-wide downturn.
Shares of Trump Media and Technology, the family's media firm that has recently waded deeper into the crypto space, tumbled 5% on Monday. The stock is down about 70% since President Trump's inauguration earlier this year.
The $TRUMP meme coin is now trading near an all-time low of $5.73, according to crypto trading platform CoinMarketCap. The digital token peaked at about $45 just ahead of inauguration. That's a loss of nearly 90% since the start of the year.
And World Liberty's digital governance token is down about 50% since its September launch.
All told, the Trump's family fortune has dropped by about $1 billion -- from $7.7 billion to $6.7 billion -- since early September, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires' Index.
The family, however, appears undeterred. Eric Trump, the president's son, has been touting his crypto companies on social media and in emails to supporters.
He told Bloomberg the bitcoin dip is nothing more than a "great buying opportunity."
