A UAE royal takes a 49% stake in the family crypto firm
Four days before the inauguration, on Jan. 16, 2025, Aryam Investment 1, a vehicle backed by UAE national-security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, signed a deal to buy 49% of the Trump family's World Liberty Financial for $500M; of the first $250M installment, $187M went to Trump family entities.
What happened
The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 1, 2026, from company documents, that Aryam Investment 1 signed the $500M deal on Jan. 16, 2025, with half due up front. Of the first $250M, $187M was directed to Trump family entities DT Marks DEFI LLC and DT Marks SC LLC; Trump personally owned 70% of DT Marks DEFI at the end of 2024 by his own disclosure. At least $31M went to entities affiliated with Steve Witkoff's family and another $31M to an entity tied to co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro. The second half was due by July 15, 2025; the Journal could not determine how it was distributed. Two Aryam signatories who are G42 executives, Martin Edelman and Peng Xiao, joined World Liberty's five-person board without being listed on its site; the family's disclosed equity fell from 75% to 38% with no buyer named. In May 2025 MGX, another Tahnoon-led firm sharing directors with Aryam, used World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin to settle its $2B investment in Binance. After the Journal's report, Rep. Ro Khanna, ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on the CCP, wrote to World Liberty on Feb. 5, 2026 demanding ownership and payment records on the Aryam deal, its bearing on U.S. AI-chip export policy toward the UAE, and USD1's role in the Binance investment; 41 House Democrats asked Treasury to investigate on Feb. 19. The $500M is deal value, not income: logged, not counted. The $187M that reached Trump family entities is the family's realized share; whether it already sits inside the 2025 crypto income counted on money-2026-06-30-063 is decided there. money-2026-01-16-068 recorded the same deal a year late and has been withdrawn as a duplicate.
Why it matters
The Wall Street Journal called it "something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president's company." The buyer's principal was pressing Washington for access to restricted U.S. AI chips; the stake was never disclosed, and within months the administration committed to sell the UAE about 500,000 advanced chips a year, roughly a fifth of them to Tahnoon's G42.
Sources
The Wall Street Journal (2026-02-01); Benzinga via Yahoo Finance, relaying the Journal; House Select Committee on the CCP, Democrats (2026-02-06), finance.yahoo.com, democrats-selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov