I remember first seeing Steve Witkoff in person in May 2024, when he was spending a disproportionate amount of time in a criminal courtroom in Lower Manhattan that had seen better days. Like many of us, he was there to watch then-former President Donald Trump stand trial on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, in the so-called hush money trial. Witkoff sat in a row of hard wooden benches often occupied by people aiming to make public displays of support for Trump—J.D. Vance, Douglas Burgum, Pam Bondi‍—who were then all vying for the vice presidency or the Cabinet. Donald Trump Jr. attended, as did Eric Trump and his wife Lara, who was then co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

For the Trump VIPs, being seen by both the packed rows of reporters with coveted courtroom passes and Trump himself was a key part of the ritual. Each day, there was a little flurry of figuring out who had come to watch. To the side of all of this was Witkoff. He is short compared to Trump, his hair gray. He looks like a grandpa, and sounds a little like a Jewish sidekick in a Pixar movie. I’d known of him as a New York real estate mogul from covering Trump’s first presidency, and New York politics and real estate before that, but only vaguely.

One day, I leaned forward to ask Witkoff what brought him to the courtroom that day. He told me he’d come for his friend. That word stuck with me: friend.

In New York, former employees and real estate execs and politicians and people in Trump’s orbit have told me again and again that Trump doesn’t really have friends. He has his family, and also a rotating cast of people who are in his favor at any given moment. And then there is Witkoff, who turned up on even the days that were supposed to be dull, like May 30, 2024, when the jury wasn’t expected to reach a verdict, but then, suddenly, did.

After the jury foreman, when asked “How say you?” answered “Guilty,” 34 times, Trump turned to face the back of the room, looking uncharacteristically stricken. He grabbed his son Eric’s hand to shake it and walked out to trash the judge and the proceedings, which he’d soon appeal. Behind him, to the right, barely visible, was Witkoff.

Then Trump’s entourage left in a convoy of black SUVs headed for a Midtown fundraiser, where Trump raised $50 million for his campaign. Neck and neck with Joe Biden in the polls, Trump’s campaign needed the money. What’s more: Beset with legal bills, he’d been pressed to come up with the cash for three civil judgments against him, and now was convicted of 34 felonies.

Exactly two years and one month later, in the miasma of a baking afternoon just days before the July 4 weekend, we all would learn how astonishingly successful President Donald J. Trump has been in his moneymaking endeavors. The White House released form 278e, his annual ethics disclosure, a normally nerds-only affair. Joe Biden’s final disclosure was 11 pages long. Trump’s was 927 pages, up from 234 last year.

Everything else about it was bigger too, most astonishingly the bottom line revealed by the document. In 2025, Trump made at least $2.2 billion while also serving as president, making it arguably his most profitable year ever. Even the notoriously conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page was upset with Trump and his family. “They are profiting off the Presidency in ways that demean the office,” it declared. (In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “All of the President’s assets are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions. There are no conflicts of interest.”)

The biggest chunk of Trump’s 2025 haul came from his recently founded cryptocurrency enterprise, World Liberty Financial. This was the venture he had set up just before the 2024 election with his three sons—and with Steve Witkoff and his two sons. Witkoff’s son Zach is currently the company’s CEO.

Today, Witkoff is Trump’s “Special Envoy for Peace Missions” in the world’s hottest hot spots.

On the surface, Witkoff seems like Trump, a New York real estate developer turned world dealmaker. But in an administration that privileges snarling visages, Witkoff is nearly universally described as “kind,” or “nice,” a quality he has used to good diplomatic effect.

He is currently involved with the tattered negotiations with Iran, when he is not meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or sitting across the table from Russian President Vladimir Putin, or their emissaries, like Kirill Dmitriev, who runs the Russian sovereign wealth fund—a giant pool of money that can be spent to advance Putin’s priorities. Once, diplomatic counterparts who controlled huge sums were regarded warily by U.S. diplomats. But for Witkoff, like his boss, they are like magnetite.

As Witkoff presided over a tenuous ceasefire deal with Hamas and Israel, he surrounded those talks with meetings with big-name Gulf leaders, like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Emirati Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Tahnoon—who oversees the United Arab Emirates’ sprawling spying operation and has been called the “Spy Sheikh”—is brother to the Emirati president, that country’s national security adviser, and controls, according to the Wall Street Journal, “more money than almost anyone on the planet,” an estimated $1.4 trillion.

It is no accident that Witkoff’s counterparts, such as Dmitriev and Tahnoon, are—like Witkoff—extremely tight with their countries’ leaders, deeply implicated in foreign negotiations, and steeped in an image of the world as a set of business transactions. Donald Trump has created a new operating system for U.S. foreign policy, one with business deals at the center, one from which he and his family profit, and one that relies in large part on his trusted friend, Steve Witkoff, to pull off. When asked about this, the White House said in an email, “the center of the President’s foreign policy is ‘America First.’ ”

Last year, for example, at his Miami waterfront estate, Witkoff hammered out a plan with Russia’s Dmitriev for $300 billion in joint Russia–U.S. investment projects—which would come to fruition after some possible future peace. Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. could all become business partners, Witkoff told the Wall Street Journal, which has broken a stunning series of stories on the envoy: “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”

With the UAE, such relationships have moved far beyond the hypothetical. For the entire first year of the Trump administration, the “Spy Sheikh” was a secret 49 percent equity partner in World Liberty Financial, a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump and Witkoff families. This was while the sheikh wanted the Trump administration’s approval for access to sensitive A.I. chips. Which he got. (The UAE Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. The White House, responding on behalf of Witkoff, said that he was not involved in the chip negotiations. World Liberty did not respond to detailed questions, but has said that Trump and Steve Witkoff were not involved in the deal for the equity stake.)

There’s more: In the early days of the Trump administration, Zach Witkoff negotiated a business deal where a Tahnoon-led firm deposited $2 billion into World Liberty, rocketing the currency to superstar status in the crypto world. All these transactions took place before Steve Witkoff had fully divested from World Liberty, his own disclosure form shows.

On the World Liberty “Gold Paper,” a document describing the company for potential investors, Witkoff and Trump are each listed as “co-founder emeritus.” “Even if legitimately neither Trump nor Witkoff are involved hands-on in any of the crypto activity, they see the money come in,” Corey Frayer, the senior advisor on crypto at Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission, told me.

The White House scoffed at this. “All of the President’s assets are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions. Special Envoy Witkoff has divested from World Liberty Financial,” Kelly said in a statement. But Frayer says the baked-in business model of World Liberty Financial is paying money to be close to the president, with Steve Witkoff playing the functional, if not literal, role of what Frayer calls “chief salesman.”

The White House said, of Frayer, that he “is not involved in the United States’ diplomatic discussions and has no idea what they are talking about.”

To be sure, Witkoff has amassed enormous power, visible in his proximity to the president. To understand how he did that, I spoke with dozens of former Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump administration officials, as well as academics, cryptocurrency and foreign policy experts, real estate moguls, and politicians. Many did not want to speak at all; one developer mistakenly sent me an email that said, “steer clear..do not want to engage.” The White House did not make Witkoff available for an interview, despite repeated........

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