Investors lost 500 million, he made 90 million: Eric Trump’s Bitcoin business

February 2026, Eric Trump appeared on the earnings call for American Bitcoin. He told investors that the company was mining Bitcoin daily, with costs maintained at $57k to $58k per coin, while the market price at the time was nearly double that number.

Eight months earlier, on September 3, 2025, American Bitcoin listed on NASDAQ at $9.22 per share, with an intraday high of $14.52, pushing its market value up to $13.2 billion.

At that time, the Bitcoin valuation on the company’s books was only about $270 million. By the end of April 2026, the stock price had fallen to around $1.14, a 92% decline from the peak.

Forbes estimated that the average investor had an unrealized loss of about $500 million, but Eric’s personal wealth had increased from $190 million to $280 million.

Almost a Company Without Physical Assets

In November 2024, two weeks after Trump won the presidential election, the company was registered in Delaware.

Initially, Eric and his brother Donald Trump Jr. focused on artificial intelligence data centers, planning to establish a company called American Data Centers, trying to ride the wave of AI infrastructure hype.

At that time, two entrepreneurs with backgrounds in brand management and arbitrage, Asher Genoot and Mike Ho, were operating Hut 8, a company involved in both AI data centers and Bitcoin mining.

After Bitcoin halving and the mining reward being cut in half, institutional shareholders continued to pressure the company to shift its computing power resources to AI computing, making the mining business increasingly awkward.

So, the two sides reached an agreement: Hut 8 would give 20% equity of its mining equipment assets to the Trump family in exchange for them abandoning their original data center plans, jointly packaging this part of the assets into a new publicly listed company.

Two months later, the company renamed itself American Bitcoin and announced its IPO.

Eric later recounted the story of the name in an interview, saying he insisted that the name must include “America” and “Bitcoin,” and his partner immediately agreed, saying that was the name—no other options.

It’s Not Mining, It’s Token Swapping

Eric publicly disclosed that the mining costs only covered electricity and direct operating expenses, excluding depreciation of mining machines, marketing costs, and financing costs.

Forbes found that after accounting for these costs, even with refined adjustments, the direct operating costs dropped to about $47k per Bitcoin, but the total cost still reached about $90k. When the article was published, Bitcoin’s price had already fallen about 31% from the first day of trading, meaning that, on a full-cost basis, mining itself was not profitable.

About 70% of the Bitcoin on the company’s books did not come from self-mining but was bought on the open market after raising funds through stock issuance.

Over the past eight months, the company completed this process in four phases:

• After going public, sold 11 million shares in the first 27 days, raising $90 million at an average price of about $8;
• From October to mid-November, sold another 7 million shares, raising $44 million at an average price over $6;
• In late November, scaled up the sale to 47 million shares, raising $106 million at an average price of about $2.25;
• From January to the end of March 2026, sold another 84 million shares, raising $111 million.

A total of about $525 million was raised across four rounds, all used to buy Bitcoin. Because the purchase prices were relatively high, this batch of assets currently has an unrealized loss of about $135 million, with a current value of approximately $390 million.

In each round of large-scale issuance, the average price was lower than the previous round, meaning the company was exchanging increasingly cheaper stock for Bitcoin, while ordinary investors holding shares were being diluted step by step.

This company is not earning Bitcoin through mining but is instead exchanging its valuation for Bitcoin by selling itself.

Although American Bitcoin appears to be a mining company on the surface, it is essentially a leveraged asset acquisition platform with a high valuation.

The Trump family’s only task is to sell the story and maintain hype. This logic has already been proven in their previous hotel and golf course businesses, where they do not own assets but only output brands and management, leaving the risks to external parties.

Unexploded Structure

Between August and September 2025, the company spent about $330 million on upgrading mining equipment but did not pay cash.

The company chose an options-like arrangement, using Bitcoin as collateral, retaining two payment options: if Bitcoin prices rise, they can redeem Bitcoin with cash at maturity; if prices fall, they can settle directly with the collateral coins.

Since that purchase, Bitcoin prices have fallen about 30%. Based on current trends, the company is likely to choose to surrender the Bitcoin at the maturity date in August 2027.

As of the end of March 2026, the company had collateralized 3,090 Bitcoin for this equipment, exceeding the total of 1,800 Bitcoin it had accumulated through mining so far. If prices do not rebound, all mining profits will be used to repay the equipment costs at maturity, resulting in zero net profit.

Forbes’ Follow-up Investigation

About five hours after Forbes published the article, Eric posted photos of the mining farm’s server room on social media to counterattack.

He listed a series of data: holding over 7,000 Bitcoin, ranking 16th among publicly listed Bitcoin companies worldwide, nearly 90k mining machines, Q4 revenue of $78.3 million, mining costs 53% below spot prices, and a 58% increase in book Bitcoin in Q4.

He then quickly shifted to political attacks, accusing Forbes of being bought and turned into a political weapon. This is the standard approach for the Trump family when dealing with criticism: turning media oversight into political confrontation and shifting the blame for structural issues onto the credibility of information sources.

The author of this report, Dan Alexander, has long been in conflict with the Trump family.

In June 2017, he published an investigation in Forbes revealing that Eric Trump’s charity foundation paid over $1.2 million to Trump’s golf courses from 2012 to 2015, and transferred more than $50,000 to organizations related to the family’s interests, which was vastly different from the previous claim that almost all donations directly went to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Three days later, the New York Attorney General’s Office announced an investigation, and the foundation was subsequently reorganized and renamed.

In February 2024, a judge in a New York commercial fraud case issued a ruling. Evidence showed that Eric personally instructed accountants to include seven unbuilt houses on the Seven Springs estate in the valuation, inflating the estate’s value from about $25 million to $101 million.

The judge ruled that the Trump Organization engaged in ongoing fraud, and Eric was barred from serving as an executive or director of a New York company for two years, and ordered to return about $4 million in illegal gains.

American Bitcoin then chose to register in Delaware and establish its headquarters in Florida, a path that has been taken more than once before.