Kleptocracy Is Trump’s Most Lucrative Business Venture

His investments make money even when his ventures fail!

Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered a slump last year and that investors in Trump’s crypto ventures who were not members of the Trump family lost $2.3 billion, according to a June 9 investigation by Tom Bergin of Reuters. It’s almost as if Trump’s ability to draw income from business ventures did not depend on those ventures being successful!

A cynic might observe that Trump’s special treatment is no different from that of American chief executives in the private sector who are similarly insulated from failure. But Trump’s payday puts theirs in the shade. The only CEO whose compensation exceeded Trump’s last year was Elon Musk, who (for now) is a category of one. Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla last year was more than 15 times larger than the combined pay packages of the other 391 chief executives surveyed in late June by The Wall Street Journal.

If we set Musk aside, the highest-paid chief executive in the Journal’s ranking was Shankh Mitra, chief executive of Welltower, “a real estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare.” Let’s leave for another day the ethics of harvesting a vast personal fortune from the physical and mental decline of one’s fellow human beings. My point here is that Mitra’s obscene pay package last year of $821 million was less than........

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