Mined for Suckers: Eric Trump's Bitcoin Bet and the 70% Faceplant
American Bitcoin made Eric Trump a paper fortune at the opening bell — then handed ordinary shareholders a brutal lesson.
Eric Trump rang the Nasdaq bell in September 2025 and pocketed the applause. Ordinary investors who believed the hype rang up losses. That, in miniature, is the story of American Bitcoin.
The venture was founded in March 2025 by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., per Axios, with mining giant Hut 8 supplying the computing muscle and owning the lion's share — 80% — of the operation, as Fortune reported. Eric took the co-founder title and the megaphone, declaring the goal was to build, in his words, the most investable Bitcoin accumulation platform in the market. Big words for a company that had barely started mining.
The money arrived fast. Per CBS News, American Bitcoin went public by merging into Nasdaq-listed Gryphon Digital Mining, giving the Trump brothers a stock-ticker platform without the scrutiny of a traditional IPO. Bloomberg pegged Eric's stake at as much as $367 million by mid-2025. When the shares debuted, he celebrated a windfall reported north of half a billion dollars.
Then physics reasserted itself. Per the Detroit News, the stock cratered roughly 70% within three months of that triumphant debut. The paper fortune that made headlines evaporated for the retail investors who bought in near the top — the people who saw the Trump name, heard the "most investable" pitch, and trusted it.
Here is why this matters beyond one bad quarter. American Bitcoin was engineered as a hype vehicle. It fused two things the modern grift loves: the mania of crypto and the magnetism of the Trump brand. The founders got their stake early and cheap. The public got a volatile penny-adjacent miner riding a famous surname. When a company's chief selling point is proximity to the president rather than the fundamentals of joules-per-terahash, the downside always lands on whoever came last.
And the timing, again, stinks. The Trump family is mining Bitcoin and hawking a stablecoin and running a DeFi platform, all while the patriarch's administration steers crypto policy in the industry's favor. Every regulatory tailwind that lifts Bitcoin lifts the family's mining margins. That is not a hedge. It is a bet placed by people who help set the odds.
Eric will point to volatility as the culprit — crypto goes up, crypto goes down, nobody's fault. But that dodge ignores who was insulated and who was exposed. Insiders who got in at founding valuations can survive a 70% drop and still be ahead. The Nasdaq day-traders who bought the debut cannot. The structure decided the outcome before the market ever opened.
There's a grim irony in "American Bitcoin." The name wraps a speculative mining play in the flag, as if buying the dip were an act of patriotism. It wasn't. It was a transfer — from the many who believed the pitch to the few who wrote it. Eric Trump got his bell-ringing photo. Everyone else got the receipt.
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