UAE Sheikh secretly acquired 49% of Trump’s World Liberty Financial days before inauguration: WSJ

An investment vehicle backed by Emirati Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan secretly acquired a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for $500 million just days before President Donald Trump's inauguration, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published Saturday.

The deal, signed by Eric Trump on behalf of the project four days before the January 2025 inauguration, was never publicly disclosed. The buyer was Aryam Investment 1, an Abu Dhabi entity backed by Tahnoon, the UAE's national security adviser and brother to UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed, the Journal reported.

Under the agreement, half of the $500 million was paid upfront, with $187 million flowing to Trump family-controlled entities and at least $31 million going to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, the real estate magnate who co-founded World Liberty and was later named U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff's son Zach is the current CEO of the project. 

G42 executives helped manage Aryam Investment 1 and took board seats at World Liberty as part of the transaction, making Tahnoon's vehicle the crypto venture's largest outside shareholder, the Journal reported.

The disclosure helps explain a previously unexplained shift in World Liberty's ownership structure. As The Block reported in June 2025, DT Marks DeFi LLC, the Trump-linked firm behind World Liberty Financial, had quietly reduced its equity interest in the project's holding company from 60% to 40%, down from 75% in December 2024. The company did not explain at the time who had acquired the stake.

The math roughly tracks if Aryam's 49% stake came proportionally from all existing shareholders: a 75% stake diluted by a 49% outside investment would leave DT Marks with approximately 38%, close to the figure now disclosed on World Liberty's website.

Sheikh secures AI chips months after deal

The revelation intensifies scrutiny around World Liberty's deepening financial ties to UAE interests. Weeks before the Trump administration announced a framework allowing the UAE access to hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips annually, another Tahnoon-led firm, MGX, used World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin to complete a $2 billion investment into crypto exchange Binance. That transaction helped establish USD1 as one of the fastest-growing stablecoins by market capitalization, with over $5 billion now in circulation.

The overlapping timelines have drawn concern from Democrats. In September 2025, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Elissa Slotkin called for investigations into potential conflicts of interest involving Witkoff and White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, citing a New York Times investigation that documented the proximity between World Liberty's UAE deals and the administration's chip export negotiations.

World Liberty Financial and the White House denied any wrongdoing in response to the Journal's reporting. Spokespeople told the outlet that Trump was not involved in the deal and that it did not influence U.S. policy decisions. The project has previously maintained that Trump and his family are not involved in day-to-day management, with operations handled by crypto-native executives including CEO Zach Witkoff and co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro.

Tahnoon has been central to the UAE's push to become a global AI and technology hub. G42, the AI conglomerate he chairs, had previously faced Biden-era restrictions on advanced chip access due to national security concerns about the company's past ties to Chinese firms. Those restrictions were reversed under the Trump administration, which in November 2025 approved sales of computing power equivalent to 35,000 of Nvidia's most advanced GB300 processors to G42.

World Liberty Financial launched in October 2024 and has since expanded into stablecoin issuance, DeFi lending, and is pursuing a national trust bank charter to formalize its USD1 operations under federal supervision. The project lists President Trump and his sons Eric, Donald Jr., and Barron as co-founders.

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