The Trump Organization

Overview

The Trump Organization spent most of a century as a real-estate business and most of the past decade in courtrooms. Then it became a crypto machine. In the first half of 2026 the company took in $864 million — seventeen times its prior comparable figure — with more than $802 million, over 90%, coming from cryptocurrency ventures: $463 million from sales of the WLFI token and $336 million from the $TRUMP memecoin, against just $33 million from golf and resorts and $23 million from licensing (Reuters). The organization is the family company of Donald Trump, and since his 2017 inauguration it has been run by two of his sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — as executive vice presidents, with Trump himself retaining ownership (EBSCO; Hotel Business).

What the company is

The Trump Organization is not a single corporation but a group of about 500 business entities of which Donald Trump is the sole or principal owner, around 250 of them carrying the Trump name (Arab News). Its roots go back to 1923, when Trump’s grandmother Elizabeth Trump and his father Fred Trump founded Elizabeth Trump & Son in New York City, building middle-class housing in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island; Fred expanded it after World War II with complexes for returning soldiers and their families (EBSCO). Donald J. Trump, Fred’s fourth child, began working in the family business while attending the Wharton School, took control in 1971 and eventually renamed the enterprise the Trump Organization, pivoting it from residential housing to high-profile Manhattan projects (EBSCO). Its headquarters sits at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the 68-story skyscraper the company built in the 1980s (EBSCO). The 1980s brought luxury hotels, casinos and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City — a $250 million project — followed in 1990 by a $5 billion debt crisis that forced the Trump Plaza and the Trump Taj Mahal into bankruptcy; the company recovered in the mid-1990s and expanded into golf, television production (including The Apprentice, 2004–2017) and winemaking (EBSCO).

The sons at the helm

Donald Trump Jr.’s position inside the company is what makes it, in practical terms, his and his brother’s operation. At the January 2017 press conference where the transfer was announced, Trump’s tax lawyer Sheri Dillon said the president-elect would put his business assets in a trust and cede control to his adult sons Eric and Donald Jr. plus a longtime executive, with Don and Eric holding “the authority to manage the Trump Organization without input from Donald Trump,” and an independent ethics adviser added to the management team (Hotel Business). Ivanka Trump resigned from all management and operational roles; 30 pending deals were terminated and only domestic contracts would be allowed during the presidency (Hotel Business). The day before he took office, Trump resigned from executive positions in more than 400 companies within the organization — while keeping his ownership stake (EBSCO).

The sons have since become the public face of the business. Don Jr. and Eric are presented as co-founders of World Liberty Financial alongside their father and younger brother Barron, and both have toured the world promoting it: Don Jr. appeared in Sofia on April 27, 2026 on a “Trump Business Vision 2025” tour backed by crypto firm Nexo, while Eric promoted the project at TOKEN2049 in Dubai on May 1, 2025 (Reuters). Eric is quoted as executive vice president in company deal announcements, such as the Oman resort agreement with Saudi developer Dar Al Arkan (Arab News). Both brothers were also swept into the fraud case: each received a two-year ban from serving as a director or officer of any New York company (Associated Press). Days before Trump’s second inauguration, the company’s ethics guidelines were changed — a shift Reuters flagged as weakening the conflict-of-interest guardrails that had been announced in 2017 (Reuters).

The fraud-case saga

The New York civil fraud case defined the company’s public image through 2024–2025. Attorney General Letitia James sued in 2022, alleging Trump padded his net worth on financial statements used to secure loans and deals, misrepresenting the value of golf courses, hotels, Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago (Associated Press). Justice Arthur Engoron ruled in February 2024 that the frauds “leap off the page and shock the conscience” and imposed a $355 million penalty that grew past $515 million with interest — over $527 million including co-defendants (Associated Press). Then, on August 21, 2025, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division threw out the penalty as an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment — cutting what Trump owed to $0 barring a Court of Appeals reversal — while upholding the underlying fraud finding (Associated Press). The 323-page ruling was badly split: the dissent from Justice Friedman accused the majority of “political hygiene,” and James appealed to the state’s highest court (Associated Press). Alongside the money, the judgment imposed a three-year ban on Trump leading the company and a three-year ban on New York bank loans; the $175 million appeal bond he posted became refundable (Associated Press).

A separate criminal case had already landed: New York indicted the organization in 2021 over tax benefits used by top executives, CFO Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty in August 2022, and that December a jury convicted the company on seventeen counts of tax fraud (EBSCO).

The crypto empire

The 2025–2026 pivot is the company’s most dramatic reinvention. World Liberty Financial’s website says a Trump Organization entity receives 75% of token-sale revenue, and Reuters found that of the $75 million crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun put into WLF, about $56 million flowed to the Trump family under the distribution agreement (Reuters). Other 2026 milestones included a $100 million token purchase by the Aqua1 Foundation, a USD1 affiliate 38%-owned by the Trump Organization generating roughly $80 million in annual interest, and — in the chain that began with USD1’s selection for Abu Dhabi’s MGX $2 billion investment in Binance — a presidential pardon for Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (Reuters). Trump placed his businesses in a trust managed by his children but remains the beneficiary, and former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter described the arrangement as “legal but unethical” (Reuters).

Global footprint

The company’s reach is worldwide. Its 2017 branded golf club in Dubai — a 7,205-yard, par-71 course in DAMAC Hills — opened the Middle East expansion; it later signed with Dar Al Arkan to develop a $4 billion resort at Aida in Oman, with residential villas, a hotel and a golf course, and planned an exclusive Sidra project in Bosnia (Arab News). Older holdings include the Turnberry golf course in Scotland, which hosted numerous PGA competitions, and properties across the US from New York to Florida to Nevada, plus projects in Canada, Turkey, South Korea and India (EBSCO). One widely cited size estimate — CNN’s 2016 report of $9.5 billion in 2015 revenue and more than 22,000 employees — came with the caveat that critics said Trump often inflated the company’s perceived wealth, and the organization’s private finances remain undisclosed (EBSCO).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state a single reliable revenue or headcount figure for the company: published estimates vary widely and the only fully-sourced numbers (CNN’s 2016 report via EBSCO) are explicitly disputed. It does not assert the company’s founding as 1927, a date some references use for the E. Trump & Son incorporation; the profile uses 1923 (Elizabeth Trump & Son) per the tier2 reference source read in full. It does not name a chief operating officer or other executives beyond the sons, because those roles were not confirmed to this site’s standard. And it does not assert crypto-payment terms for specific overseas developments, which were not verified from a source read in full.