Forbes estimates that ordinary investors have accumulated unrealized losses of about 500 million dollars, but Eric's personal wealth has grown from 190 million dollars to 280 million dollars.

Written by: Bibi News

In February 2026, Eric Trump appeared on a conference call for the financial report of American Bitcoin. He told investors that the company was mining Bitcoin every day, with costs maintained at 57,000 to 58,000 dollars per coin, while the market price at that time was almost double that number.

Eight months earlier, on September 3, 2025, American Bitcoin went public on NASDAQ at a price of 9.22 dollars per share, reaching a peak intraday price of 14.52 dollars, with a market capitalization at one point pushed up to 13.2 billion dollars.

At that time, the company's on-paper Bitcoin valuation was only about 270 million dollars. By the end of April 2026, the stock price had dropped to around 1.14 dollars, a decline of 92% from its peak.

Forbes estimates that ordinary investors have accumulated unrealized losses of about 500 million dollars, but Eric's personal wealth has grown from 190 million dollars to 280 million dollars.

Almost No Actual Company

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

Initially, Eric and his brother Donald Trump Jr. targeted AI data centers, planning to establish a company named American Data Centers in an attempt to follow the AI infrastructure trend.

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

After Bitcoin halving and a 50% reduction in mining rewards, institutional shareholders continued to pressure the company to shift its computing resources to AI computing, making the mining business's position very awkward.

Thus, both parties reached a deal, with Hut 8 giving 20% equity of its mining equipment assets to the Trump family in exchange for them abandoning their original data center plans and jointly packaging this part of the assets into a new publicly listed company.

Two months later, the company was renamed American Bitcoin and announced its listing.

Eric later shared the story of the naming in an interview, mentioning that he requested the name must include America and Bitcoin, and the partner promptly stated that would be the name, with no other options.

Not Mining but Exchanging Coins

The mining costs publicly disclosed by Eric only covered electricity and direct operating expenses, without including equipment depreciation, marketing costs, and financing costs.

Forbes discovered that even if the company managed to reduce its adjusted direct operating costs to about 47,000 dollars per coin, the total costs still reached approximately 90,000 dollars. By the time of the article's publication, Bitcoin's price had already dropped about 31% compared to its first-day listing price, meaning that calculated on a full basis, mining itself was not profitable.

About 70% of the Bitcoin on the company's books did not come from its own mining but was purchased from the open market after raising additional capital through stock issuance.

Over the past eight months, the company completed this operation in four stages:

• In the first 27 days post-listing, selling 11 million shares, raising 90 million dollars, with an average price of about 8 dollars;
• From October to mid-November, selling an additional 7 million shares, raising 44 million dollars, with an average price exceeding 6 dollars;
• In late November, expanding the scale to sell 47 million shares, raising 106 million dollars, with an average price of about 2.25 dollars;
• From January to the end of March 2026, selling another 84 million shares, raising 111 million dollars.

The total from these four rounds was about 525 million dollars, all used to purchase Bitcoin. Due to the high purchase price at the time of acquisition, this batch of assets is currently incurring unrealized losses of about 135 million dollars, with a present value of about 390 million dollars.

In each round of substantial stock issuance, the average price was lower than the previous round, meaning the company was exchanging increasingly cheaper stocks for Bitcoin, while ordinary investors holding shares were progressively diluted in the process.

This company did not obtain Bitcoin through mining but by selling its valuation to acquire Bitcoin.

American Bitcoin, although dressed in the guise of a mining company, is in essence closer to an asset acquisition platform leveraging a high valuation.

The only thing the Trump family needs to do is sell the story and maintain the hype. This logic has already been validated in their previous hotel and golf course business, where they do not own assets but only export brand and management, leaving the risks to outsiders.

An Unexploded Structure

Between August and September 2025, the company spent about 330 million dollars to complete upgrades for the mining machines, but did not pay in cash.

The company opted for an option-style arrangement, using the held Bitcoin as collateral, retaining two payment options. If the Bitcoin price rises, the company can redeem the Bitcoin with cash at maturity; if the price falls, it will directly use the collateralized coins to repay the debt.

Since that procurement, Bitcoin's price has dropped about 30%. Based on the current trend, the company is likely to choose to hand over the Bitcoin when it matures in August 2027.

As of the end of March 2026, the company had pledged 3,090 Bitcoins for this batch of equipment, exceeding the total of 1,800 Bitcoins the company has ever obtained through mining. If the price does not rebound, all of the company's mining revenues will be used to repay the equipment costs at maturity, resulting in zero net profit.

Forbes' Follow-Up Investigation

About five hours after the publication of the Forbes article, Eric posted a photo of the mining site's equipment room on social media to counterattack.

He listed a series of data: holding over 7,000 Bitcoins, ranking 16th among publicly traded Bitcoin companies globally, nearly 90,000 mining machines, fourth-quarter revenue of 78.3 million dollars, mining costs 53% lower than the spot price, and a 58% increase in on-paper Bitcoin in Q4.

He then quickly shifted the focus to political attacks, accusing Forbes of being acquired and turned into a political weapon. This is the Trump family's standard operating procedure for handling criticism, turning media scrutiny into political opposition and shifting the issue of business structure to the credibility of the information sources.

The author of this report, Dan Alexander, has had a long history of interaction with the Trump family.

In June 2017, he published an investigation on Forbes, exposing that the Eric Trump Foundation paid over 1.2 million dollars to Trump-owned golf courses between 2012 and 2015 and donated over 500,000 dollars to entities related to family interests, contrasting sharply with the prior public commitment that nearly all donations would go directly to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Three days later, the New York Attorney General's office announced it was intervening in the investigation, and the foundation was subsequently restructured and renamed.

In February 2024, a judge in the New York commercial fraud case made a ruling. The court evidence showed that Eric personally instructed accountants to include seven unbuilt houses in the valuation of the Seven Springs property, inflating the property's valuation from about 25 million dollars to 101 million dollars.

The judge ruled that the Trump organization engaged in persistent fraud, and Eric was banned from serving as an executive or director in New York companies for two years and ordered to return about 4 million dollars of illegal gains.

American Bitcoin subsequently chose to register in Delaware and set its headquarters in Florida; this path has occurred more than once in the past.