President Trump has insisted there is a simple explanation for him becoming more than $3 billion richer on paper since the start of his second term.
“You should’ve had stock,” Trump told “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat in an interview broadcast Sunday evening.
The president added that “I devote almost no time to my net worth. I don’t care. I make, I have a lot of money. Far more than I ever thought I’d have. And, I guess it’s gone up. I don’t even know.
“I have a son [Don Jr.] who’s a very straight, good guy. He watches over money. I don’t even talk to him about it. He watches. He gives, they gave my money — I have a lot of cash. I’ve had a lot of cash, long before I came in here. I don’t take a salary, you know.”
Trump, 80, is estimated by Forbes to be worth about $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.
The president’s financial disclosures for 2025, released this past June, indicate that he made more than $1 billion in cryptocurrency income and tens of millions from new foreign real estate deals last year.
That figure includes a staggering $635 million from sales of his free-floating $Trump meme coin — launched three days before he took office — via his company CIC Digital LLC, as well as more than $236 million in additional income from selling cryptocurrency tokens through World Liberty Financial, the company founded by Trump, special envoy Steve Witkoff and their sons in 2024.
The files listed $65.6 million from a sale of equity in World Liberty — a likely reference to the reported sale of part of the company last January to companies associated with United Arab Emirates national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
Trump reported a further $205 million in proceeds from stablecoin investments, including by selling part of Stablecoin Holdco, which is associated with World Liberty and its issuance of the USD1 stablecoin.
The forms also listed major foreign revenue from licensing fees on building and golf course projects, including $5.25 million from a forthcoming golf club in Doha, Qatar, as part of a deal signed in April 2025, and $5 million from a Bucharest Trump Tower project in Romania announced that July.
Other major foreign revenue streams included nearly $8.5 million in licensing fee income from four Indian construction projects — in Delhi, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Noida — and $5 million from a resort in Vietnam that local officials approved last year.
About $13 million in licensing and management fees are reported from Dubai, where Trump is building an 80-story skyscraper announced in April 2025.
Another $10 million flowed to Trump from Abu Dhabi licensing fees and $9.2 million from Saudi Arabia, where luxury projects in Riyadh and Jeddah are currently under construction.
“I have a company. My sons run the company. It’s hard to say to them, ‘Don’t do anything anymore for four years because I’m president,’” Trump told Douthat, a conservative former New York Times columnist hired by new CBS News boss Bari Weiss for the venerable news magazine over the summer.
Trump added that “every president has had this problem.”
“Every president that there’s ever been, they have people, many people, I watch it all the time, every time you have a president, their top people, sometimes they stay,” he said. “I mean, I have some that will stay right till the last second. Other– but after they leave they go crazy. They go crazy. It’s true for every president.”
“I feel like– there have been more people doing things like that while serving in the administration,” Douthat responded.
“Well, I’m a bigger name than other presidents, whether we like it or not,” Trump shot back.
The “60 Minutes” sit-down, recorded Friday at the White House, was Trump’s first long-form interview since Republicans were trounced in Tuesday’s midterms, losing both the House and Senate.
Democrats have promised to make the Trump family’s overseas business interests a focus of oversight investigations once the new Congress is sworn in Jan. 3.
Additional reporting by Steven Nelson and Emily Goodin
