When Trump won the 2024 election, Tahnoon saw his opportunity to influence the U.S. government.
When Trump won the 2024 election, Tahnoon saw his opportunity to influence the U.S. government.
Author’s note: This is the third in a series of five posts on the financial ties that have publicly emerged between President Trump and the regime of the United Arab Emirates. See part 1 and part 2.
T he United Arab Emirates is an absolute monarchy, rooted in Islamic law (although sharia is more loosely applied, especially to foreigners, than it is in more fundamentalist Arab societies). It is a tiny nation, smaller geographically than West Virginia, comprising seven emirates, the most notable of which are Abu Dhabi — where the dominant royal family is anchored, along with 95 percent of the country’s oil reserves — and Dubai, an ambitious center of finance, luxury, and conspicuous consumption. There are more than 10 million residents of the UAE, and only about a million of them are Emirati citizens. The nation’s oil wealth is phenomenal: It is the sixth or seventh largest producer in the world, churning out over 3 million barrels a day. Its GDP of nearly $540 billion is just amazing for a country of its size.
The UAE wants to be a player. It aspires to be a global hub of AI and quantum computing, as well as the world’s crypto capital.
As we’ve detailed in the previous posts, Dubai is now the home of Changpeng Zhao, the Chinese-born Canadian billionaire pardoned by President Trump after 2023 felony convictions stemming from his running of Binance — the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — and his role as a facilitator of serious criminal transactions.
Zhao turns out to be pals with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan.
Sheikh Tahnoon is the second-most powerful member of the royal family that runs the UAE — he is the brother of the monarch, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. Until very recently, Tahnoon also oversaw both of the nation’s sovereign wealth funds (and put a pin in that “until very recently” — we’ll be coming back to it in the last post of this series). Between his personal wealth and the government-backed treasure chests he oversees, Tahnoon is said to control about $1.3 trillion (yes, trillion) in investment funds.
His is often referred to as the “Spy Sheikh” because he runs the UAE’s intelligence apparatus as the regime’s national security adviser. It can be dark work. There are whispers in the international press that he had a hand in orchestrating the so-called Qatargate bribery scandal that has ensnared a number of European politicians. More consequentially, as we shall see, his business empire has been enmeshed with businesses controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
And he, a high-ranking official of a foreign regime, is heavily invested in World Liberty Financial (WLF), making him the business partner of its so-called emeritus founders, President Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff, the latter of whom implements American policy on the UAE as the president’s Middle East envoy. Tahnoon is also heavily invested in the private equity fund known as Affinity Partners, making him the business partner of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and oft-time Middle East envoy (including as this is being written).
As is the wont of wealthy, surreptitious operators, Tahnoon conducts business through various corporate entities; he and his interchangeable board members are the common threads. One of these is an investment firm called MGX. As I’ve recounted in the prior posts, on May 1, 2025, when WLF’s stablecoin, USD1, was still just getting off the ground, WLF announced that Tahnoon’s MGX would buy $2 billion worth of USD1 and then invest it on Zhou’s Binance exchange.
It was an astonishing purchase: USD1 had no history, and there were several established stablecoins to choose from. But somehow, someway, the UAE’s top security official decided that the Trump-Witkoff cryptocurrency was the right one for him. And he decided that Binance, its criminal history notwithstanding, was the right exchange — indeed, an exchange he was hoping would relocate its headquarters to the UAE.
The $2 billion purchase by Tahnoon’s MGX outpaced WLF’s capital investment in stablecoin by a factor of nearly 20. The resulting reserves would enable WLF to generate about $80 million a year in investment income — most of which goes to the Trump and Witkoff families.
When Tahnoon’s MGX purchased the USD1 stablecoin, it was unknown how deeply enmeshed he was in the Trump-Witkoff WLF venture. It was assumed that he was a natural facilitator because, besides being friendly with Zhao, he was (as just noted) already in business with Kushner. After the tumultuous final weeks of Trump’s first term, which included a pardon for Kushner’s father, who’d been convicted in 2005 on various felony charges, the president’s son-in-law leveraged contacts from his forays as Trump’s first-term Middle East emissary to start Affinity Partners. Billions of investment dollars poured in from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and . . . yes . . . the UAE (its Lunate investment fund, which is overseen by Tahnoon through yet another entity, Chimera).
During the same Biden era, the UAE’s ruler, Sheikh Mohamed, wanted his country transformed into a global center for advanced microchip development, AI, and the immense power generation necessary to undergird such ambitions. He put his brother, Tahnoon, in charge of developing the UAE’s tech sector.
Alas, Tahnoon had a problem: the aforementioned extensive ties to the CCP and the regime of Xi Jinping.
In early 2024, while he still headed the House Select Committee on the CCP, the estimable former congressman Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) asked the Biden Commerce Department to investigate one of Tahnoon’s companies, Group 42 Holdings (G42), for export control risks arising out of its business relationships with Chinese companies tied to the Xi regime — particularly China’s military and intelligence services. The troubling affiliations uncovered by the investigation included a Chinese scientist who, according to the committee, “stole millions of dollars of American military-funded research from UCLA in order to create a new [Chinese] government laboratory in Beijing.
Concluding it was likely that U.S. technology shared with the UAE would be transferred to China, the Biden administration blocked Tahnoon’s efforts to acquire top-grade American chips. Like Gallagher’s committee, it was not impressed by G42’s claim to have halted business with Beijing, given that Tahnoon’s empire still maintained various China connections.
When Trump won the 2024 election, Tahnoon saw his opportunity to reverse the U.S. government’s position. The best way to achieve that outcome, he calculated, was to shovel money into WLF.
That brings us to the blockbuster Wall Street Journal report from two Fridays ago, on which we’ll linger in the next post.
Author’s note: This post has been corrected to reflect that the UAE has two sovereign wealth funds; the original post incorrectly suggested that there was only one.