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President Donald Trump reported a $10.71 million licensing fee as income as part of his 2025 financial disclosure report for “Melania,” the Amazon MGM Studios documentary about the First Lady.
Amazon MGM Studios reportedly
paid $40 million to acquire “Melania” and spent $35 million to market the movie . The documentary took in about $16.6 million at the theatrical box office worldwide.
Trump’s financial disclosure statement also listed a $521,161 licensing payment for the First Lady’s “Melania” memoir from Skyhorse Publishing as well as $6 million in net proceeds from “NFTs and other collectibles” associated with Melania Trump.
The president’s mandatory financial disclosure statement, released Tuesday, showed Trump reported a total of at least $2.2 billion in revenue for 2025, more than double from a minimum of $622 million the year prior. Last year Trump earned roughly $1.4 billion from his family’s crypto businesses, including World Liberty Financial, as reported by the New York Times. An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates government bought a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial in January 2025, “raising a slew of ethical concerns,” per the Times report.
Trump also owns a diverse portfolio of stocks and bonds, including in media companies Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Skydance and Fox Corp. and tech companies like Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle. The shares Trump owns in Trump Media & Technology Group, parent of Truth Social, are worth around $900 million, after the company’s stock price has fallen more than 40% this year.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said, “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”
Regarding the crypto income Trump reported for 2025, Kelly said, “President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world through executive actions, supporting legislation like the GENIUS Act, and other commonsense policies to drive innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans. All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people – and any so-called ‘reporters’ pushing otherwise are recycling the same, tired, false narrative that Democrats and the legacy media have been pushing for a decade.”
On the “Melania” front, Democrats have accused Amazon of trying to curry favor with the Trump administration by acquiring and distributing the film, with Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calling the studio’s $40 million acquisition price tag “bribery in plain sight.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has said that it’s “just not correct” to say Amazon’s deal for “Melania” was “a way of buying influence” with Trump and said the acquisition of the film “appears it was a good business decision.”
Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said on Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast that there was a “very competitive bidding process” for “Melania” and that the movie did very well at the box office and has performed “really well” on Prime Video.
Amazon MGM Studios expects to release a companion docuseries for “Melania” later this year.
