The UAE Quietly Poured a Half-Billion Dollars into Trump’s Crypto Venture Four Days Before Inauguration

Timing is everything.

Author’s note: This is the fourth 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, part 2, and part 3.

I n the last post in this series, we looked at the background of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the fabulously wealthy UAE national security adviser and No. 2 to his brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan. We now pick up the story in January 2025, when Tahnoon began his quest to reverse the United States government’s long-standing opposition to the UAE’s acquisition of cutting-edge U.S. chip technology. The U.S. was concerned that the technology would be shared with China. The Wall Street Journal recently broke the story.

Tahnoon’s plan was straightforward. The UAE has money, and that money would be thrown at President Donald Trump in two forms: investment in the United States and, more immediately, investment in World Liberty Financial (WLF), a crypto enterprise founded by Trump, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and members of their respective families.

From Tahnoon’s worldview, this made perfect sense: The UAE is an absolute monarchy rooted in sharia — Islamic law that recognizes no boundary between the state and secular society. Allah’s law regulates both governance and private conduct. To the UAE regime, there is no difference between Trump and the United States. But the American constitutional order is different: We separate government from the private realm and strictly limit the former’s power to intrude on the latter. Our Constitution makes bribery an impeachable offense, and our criminal law makes public officials prosecutable in court for leveraging their positions of public trust for private gain.

Nevertheless, Trump accepted and rewarded the UAE’s stealthy capital infusion of a half-billion dollars in WLF. The deal was sealed just four days before Trump took the oath of office.

At the time, Trump’s impending presidency was all that could rationally have justified such an astronomical investment in WLF. As the Wall Street Journal relates, the Trump-Witkoff venture had no products, and though it had raised $82 million by selling a crypto token called WLFI, the Tahnoon entity’s agreement to pay WLF $500 million gave it no right to any future token sales. The $500 million was payment for a minority share of 49 percent and two seats on a five-member board controlled by the Trumps and Witkoffs.

Let’s explore the background of this transaction.

In late 2024, as the war between Israel and Hamas raged and Trump transitioned to the presidency, he announced that Steve Witkoff would be his Middle East envoy. Witkoff promptly traveled to the Middle East. Among his stops was a crypto conference in Abu Dhabi at which the keynote speaker was Eric Trump, the then president-elect’s son who sits on the WLF board with Witkoff’s son Zach. A featured speaker was Changpeng Zhao, the convicted Binance founder and Tahnoon’s friend who we discussed in part 2 of this series. Zhao was already contributing technical expertise to WLF and positioning himself to lobby President Trump for a pardon. Witkoff was another conference headliner, and while in the UAE he huddled with Tahnoon, Jared Kushner’s business partner.

A week after Witkoff returned to the U.S., two new business entities — both named Aryam Investment 1 — were registered two days apart in Delaware and Abu Dhabi, with no public disclosure of their ownership. This adds to our web of obscure corporate entities, but don’t let it confuse you. As I explained earlier in this series, it’s all Tahnoon. The UAE Aryam entity shares an office address with several Tahnoon companies. The Delaware Aryam entity is an investment arm of Tahnoon’s G42 AI development company, both of which share board members with MGX, Tahnoon’s AI investment firm. (As I explained in part 3, MGX is the Tahnoon entity that would later purchase $2 billion in WLF’s stablecoin, USD1, to be invested on Zhao’s Binance platform.)

Like Tahnoon, Trump and his business associates find it expedient to operate through a corporate labyrinth. Two entities in it get the lion’s share of WLF income: DT Marks DEFI LLC and DT Marks SC LLC. In crypto parlance, “DeFi” refers to decentralized finance (the industry term for blockchain-based financial services), and “SC” refers to stablecoin. The DT Marks DEFI entity, of which the president controls 70 percent and other Trump family members control 30 percent, appears to be a vehicle for revenue from diverse WLF crypto ventures. The DT Marks SC entity, meanwhile, seems geared for earnings on the investment of reserves generated by selling stablecoin (in part 2 of this series, we discussed how stablecoin operates similarly to a bank, investing reserves it generates from purchases in the same way a bank invests deposits). Reportedly, the ownership breakdown of DT Marks SC is not public.

On January 16, 2025, Tahnoon’s $500 million infusion into WLF was finalized, to be paid in two installments.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Eric Trump signed the deal on behalf of WLF. On Tahnoon’s side, it was signed by Martin Edelman, G42’s general counsel. The deal called for an initial $250 million payment, about $187 million of which went to the Trumps. Of the remainder, at least $31 million went to the Witkoff family, and another $31 million went to an account tied to Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, the Trump and Witkoff associates who were involved in WLF’s founding. (We discussed them in part 2 of this series.)

The arrangement is only emerging publicly now because it was kept on the down-low. In addition to taking 49 percent of WLF, Tahnoon’s G42 placed two of its executives on WLF’s board: Edelman and CEO Peng Xiao, both of whom are also on the board of MGX. At WLF, they now sit on the board alongside Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff; Zak Folkman is a board observer with limited participation.

Like his longtime friend Steve Witkoff, Edelman is a lawyer from the same sharp-elbowed world of New York real estate that gave us Donald Trump. Xiao is an interesting character: born in China and educated in America, he obtained American citizenship but renounced that status to become a citizen of the UAE. Along with Tahnoon, Xiao figured prominently in a letter that former Representative Mike Gallagher’s House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent to the Biden administration in 2024, which urged the government to investigate G42. The letter raised concerns about the Tahnoon/Xiao network of businesses based in the UAE and China that support the CCP’s “military-civil fusion and human rights abuses.” (I discussed the committee’s letter in part 3 of this series.)

While WLF’s website touts its leadership team, including the Trumps and Witkoffs, it somehow neglects to mention board members Edelman and Xiao, and that nearly half the venture is owned by entities controlled by Tahnoon, a top UAE government official.

It was also not disclosed until the publication of the Wall Street Journal’s report that another agent of the UAE government, Fiacc Larkin, joined WLF as its chief strategic adviser in January 2025. Larkin advises the UAE on economic development while serving as G42’s head of crypto and blockchain.

It’s a tangled web.

The second half of the $500 million was due to be paid on July 15. The Wall Street Journal’s reporters could not confirm whether that happened.

Tahnoon’s lavish investment in WLF paid instant dividends. On Trump’s first day in office, just five days after the deal, the new president announced that Tahnoon’s MGX would be a major equity partner in Stargate: a $500 billion joint venture to build an AI infrastructure, including major data centers and cutting-edge chip technology, in the U.S. — and the UAE.

In the final post in this series, we’ll lay out a timeline of this saga’s key events. It will show how the UAE has benefited from its investment in the president’s personal fortune — gaining sudden prominence in Middle East geopolitics, Trump administration authorization for fast-track UAE investment in the United States, a slice of the $14 billion TikTok pie, and its highest ambition: advanced American microchips.

Author’s note: This post has been edited to reflect that the ruler of the UAE is Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed al Nahyan, as I’ve noted previously in this series. This post erroneously referred to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who leads the UAE’s Emirate of Dubai.