Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The past year has been very good to President Donald Trump financially. Thanks to the many cryptocurrency projects his companies and sons have launched, he’s gained well over $1 billion of wealth on paper. Crypto has been booming since Trump came back into office by virtue of his administration’s friendly approach to the sector — and a general sense that it’s good for business to have an executive who understands little about the coin economy aside from its ability to inflate his assets or get controversial cash injections from abroad.

But this positive-feedback loop under Trump is faltering now that crypto is down amid questions about the size of the AI bubble and the greater health of the economy. Bitcoin’s had its worst month since an extremely messy year in 2022, dropping from $110,000 to as low as $84,000 since November 1. In total, over $1 trillion in value has been wiped out this month.

Trump is not immune to the megadip. A Bloomberg analysis found that the president’s net worth has dropped $1 billion following a recent high of $7.7 billion in September. His stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind social-media platform Truth Social, has fallen $800 million in the last three months alone. (This is likely because it bought $2 billion worth of Bitcoin this spring, joining a fad that’s seen businesses put the coin on their balance sheet to inflate their assets’ value.) The company remains unprofitable.

Other Trump crypto assets weren’t even accounted for in the losses. The value of the family’s holdings of its $WLFI coin has collapsed by around $3 billion since the token’s September launch. Bloomberg did not include the value of the coin in the loss calculation because the Trump family’s holdings can’t be traded right now.

Trump is not the only billionaire who has taken a hit. Michael Saylor, whose company Strategy is the driving force behind the businesses buying bitcoin, must be a little stressed at the moment. Strategy’s stock has lost 43 percent of its value in recent days. On Friday, Saylor posted a presumably AI-generated photo of himself as Ernest Shackleton, the stranded polar-exhibition leader, with the caption: “Endure.”

But Trump — unlike his billionaire crypto allies or even the small-time investors getting smoked — has the ability to mint more coins to make more paper money. Perhaps this is why Eric Trump seemed so upbeat in his comments to Bloomberg. “What a great buying opportunity,” he said in a statement. “People who buy dips and embrace volatility will be the ultimate winners.”

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