Decades before landing in Washington, Melania Trump modeled in Milan, Paris and New York, where she met her husband.
A Drago/Bloomberg
Donald Trump has long mixed business and family. He grew up that way, learning real estate at the foot of his father, before building his own household and leaning on those closest to him. Ivana, his first wife, became an executive at his casino. Marla, his second, hosted the Miss Universe pageant. Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric, his three oldest offspring, took leading roles in his real estate firm. As for Melania, his third wife? She barely dipped a toe in the family business.
That may have been just how Donald Trump wanted it. “I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing,” he said in 1994, blaming his first divorce on Ivana’s role in his empire. “A softness disappeared. There was a great softness to Ivana. And she still has that softness. But during this period of time, she became an executive—not a wife.” In the same interview, conducted four years before he met Melania, Trump added, “I love creating stars, and to a certain extent, I’ve done that with Ivana. To a certain extent, I’ve done that with Marla. … Unfortunately, after they’re a star, the fun is over for me. It’s like the creation process. It’s almost like creating a building. It’s pretty said.” No wonder Melania ceded the floor almost entirely to her larger-than-life husband during his first term.
This time, though, Melania is taking a slightly different approach, copying his moneymaking formula, which requires a bit more airtime. In October, she released “Melania,” a self-titled memoir that came out 37 years after “The Art of the Deal.” Melania’s book quickly landed atop the New York Times bestseller list, where it remains today. One detail may have served as a teaser to filmmakers—Melania’s father, she said, recorded her childhood from birth, creating a stockpile of tape of the future First Lady. Reports emerged earlier this month that Amazon agreed to pay $40 million to license a movie and docuseries about Melania.
Then came the crypto craze. Donald Trump released a digital meme going into inauguration weekend, and Melania followed with one of her own. Traders went wild, bidding up the price of both. The structure of the ventures—especially Melania’s—remain incredibly murky, making it impossible to pinpoint how much she has earned so far, if anything. But there is a chance, if the bulk of the initial-sale proceeds accrued to her, and the 250 million circulating tokens went for roughly $3 on average, that she could have walked away with $400 million or more, which would likely qualify as the largest windfall for any political figure in American history not named Donald Trump.
As if to commemorate the moment, Melania released her official White House portrait on Monday, standing at the end of a table, hands braced on its surface, a knowing smirk on her face, staring straight into the camera. The picture looks less like a traditional portrait of a First Lady and more like a power shot of a business mogul. Not just any mogul, either. It turns out that Donald Trump posed for Forbes with a nearly mirror image—same stance, same reflection, same grin—in September 2015, at the outset of his decade-long journey straddling business and politics.
Copy cat: Melania Trump's official White House portrait looks just like the sort of photo her husband would take.
Régine Mahaux-The White House (left); Jamel Toppin for forbes
The First Lady has been attracted to flashy things since her childhood. Melania Trump grew up in Sevnica, Slovenia, a town of roughly 20,000 people. Her mother worked in the design studio of a children’s clothing factory, and her father earned a living as a driver, then a salesman, then a business owner. They lived in a three-bedroom apartment, with enough spare money for a private nanny and a collection of Ford Mustangs, BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, even a Maserati.
The younger of two girls, Melania got an early start in modeling at age 6, when her mother asked her and her sister to wear some of her creations on a runway in Belgrade. Melania continued modeling in high school, where she studied industrial design, before shifting to architecture in college. Modeling ultimately took over, as she rose to more prestigious roles—and locations, living in Milan, then Paris, then New York. She landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1996 at 26 years old with a pair of suitcases, a carry-on and dreams of a new world.
Melania settled into a one-bedroom apartment near 30th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. Then, two years after arriving, a man greeted her at a party. “Hi. I’m Donald Trump.” Later that month, he picked her up in a black Mercedes and drove upstate to Seven Springs, a 1919 mansion set on more than 200 acres in Westchester County, New York. “It’s like a French chateau,” Melania marveled at the time (and later recounted in her memoir). “Do you live here?”
The real estate mogul explained that it was a spare property, one he was considering turning into a golf club. Eventually, Melania moved into his main residence, a three-story apartment atop Trump Tower. It was there that the real estate mogul proposed in April 2004, on Melania’s 34th birthday, as they were about to leave for the Met Gala. Trump, by then 57, had concluded that prenuptial agreements were a “modern-day necessity.” The exact structure of his deal with Melania remains unclear, but his deals with Trump’s previous wives offer some clues.
Ivana, who died in 2022 with $34 million in her estate, reportedly walked away from her marriage with $14 million, a mansion, an apartment and $650,000 of annual child support. Trump hesitated to marry Marla Maples, even after she became pregnant with his fourth child, while she avoided signing a prenup. Trump insisted, offering to pay $1 million if they split. “I think a million dollars is a lot of money,” he told ABC News at the time, before correcting himself. “No I don’t, actually.”
Melania Trump has always insisted she’s not in it for the money, identifying financial independence as a “core value.” But, once married, it became hard to separate her career from her marriage. She appeared on the cover of Vogue in 2005 in a bridal dress to celebrate her Mar-a-Lago wedding, where the guest list included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Shaquille O’Neal, Anna Wintour and Billy Joel. Melania posed for the magazine again a year later, fully pregnant and barely clothed, boarding her husband’s jet. “I think it’s very sexy for a woman to be pregnant,” she told the magazine. Barron arrived in March 2006.
Melania set her career aside for a few years, but by 2009, with Barron in preschool, she prepared to relaunch. Personnel inside the Trump Organization helped Melania follow her husband into product licensing. She got into jewelry, coming up with three collections that represented different parts of her life. A Paris line focused on glamor, a New York collection centered on business, and a Palm Beach one leaned more sporty. She went to market on QVC with two hour-long segments, selling out in just 45 minutes. It’s unclear how much she earned at the outset, but it’s quite apparent that the high didn’t last. By 2014, Melania’s jewelry earnings amounted to less than $15,000 annually.
She tried another product line, agreeing to a licensing deal that promised her a $1 million advance against royalties for selling skincare products with Indiana businessman Stephen Hilbert, who had worked with her husband on the General Motors Building in New York (and later sold Trump a mansion in St. Martin). Melania claimed she came up with the product after researching with chemists—really the person who gave her facials at Mar-a-Lago’s spa, she conceded in court testimony. The product was set to land in early 2013, with a featured spot on the Celebrity Apprentice, followed by an exclusive launch in Lord & Taylor, then a wider push into other department stores. But her partner ran into problems, and the products barely went anywhere. Stiffed $750,000 of her $1 million deal, Melania protested in court. “They didn’t honor the contract. They didn’t pay me. They didn’t promote the product. They didn’t do anything,” she testified, ending up with a settlement.
That was pretty much it for her business career pre-politics. Melania flirted with the idea of launching other product lines—in children’s clothing, furniture and linens. But then, in June 2015, she accompanied her husband down the escalator inside Trump Tower, where he announced his candidacy for president and upended everything. Midway through the campaign, in January 2016, Melania paid $1.5 million for a 1,052-square-foot condo 33 floors below her husband’s penthouse. The race got brutal as Election Day approached, with reports of marital infidelity and the emergence of a tape featuring Trump talking about grabbing women’s genitals.
He won and headed to Washington, but Melania spent many of her early days as First Lady in New York, where Barron remained in school. The distance reportedly gave Melania leverage over her husband. In a book titled “The Art of Her Deal,” a Washington Post journalist said Melania worked to secure a more favorable financial arrangement for both her and her son, Barron. A spokesperson for Melania derided the book when it came out, saying it belonged in the “fiction genre.”
As First Lady, Melania did not do much to make money. Her biggest paycheck came in 2017, when Getty Images paid somewhere between $100,000 and $1 million in royalties. Financial disclosure reports that Donald Trump filed as president, which required him to list employment earnings for the First Lady, show no other income over four years, with the exception of several thousand in residual earnings from Getty.
Presidents and First Ladies tend to make more money after leaving office than they do while in charge. Like Michelle Obama and Laura Bush, Melania published a book. Like Hillary Clinton, she joined her husband on the speaking circuit, earning more than $1 million talking to Trump-friendly organizations. But like her husband, she also explored new ways of making money, such as selling NFTs, including one that featured a broad-brimmed hat much like the one she wore at the inauguration. Such efforts provided an estimated $700,000—a nice payday, but not nearly as significant as what was to come.
The Jan. 19 release of her meme tokens amounted to something of a precision strike on the MAGA faithful. Many of the gamblers who bought in, purchasing an asset that comes with a disclaimer that it is not an investment product, have already lost big, with the tokens down more than 80%. But Melania appears to still have good times ahead, positioned to receive piles of additional tokens every month for the next year, which may allow her to cash out tens of millions more. Her husband’s followers, in the end, could end up handing her more money than her husband.
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Melania Trump Never Had A Big Business. Until Now
Donald Trump has long mixed business and family. He grew up that way, learning real estate at the foot of his father, before building his own household and leaning on those closest to him. Ivana, his first wife, became an executive at his casinos. Marla, his second, hosted the Miss Universe pageants. Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric, his three oldest kids, took leading roles in his real estate firm. As for Melania, his third wife? She never had any role was
She took no role in the Trump Organization, perhaps aware of the fate of her predecessors. That may have been quite intentional on Trump’s part. “I think putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing,” Donald Trump said in 1994, blaming his first divorce on Ivana’s role in his empire. “A softness disappeared. There was a great softness to Ivana. And she still has that softness. But during this period of time, she became an executive—not a wife.” In the same interview, conducted four years before he met Melania, Trump added,Melania dabbled a bit in licensing ventures, but never got too serious about it. “I love creating stars, and to a certain extent, I’ve done that with Ivana. To a certain extent, I’ve done that with Marla,” Trump added in the same interview, conducted four years before he met Melania. “Unfortunately, after they’re stars, the fun is over for me. It’s like the creation process. It’s like creating a building. It’s pretty sad.”
No wonder Melania appeared to cede the floor to her larger-than-life husband and often disappeared from view during her husband’s first presidency. That plus the fact that she was busy raising her son Baron.
Melania dabbled a bit in licensing ventures, but never got too serious about it.
So Melania blended into the background, as much as someone can as Donald Trump’s wife.
But that began to change a few months ago, with the October release of “Melania,” a self-titled memoir released 29 years after Ivana’s, 25 years after Marla’s and seven years after Ivana’s sequel. Melania’s book immediately landed on the New York Times bestseller list, where it has remained for the last 15 weeks. One detail in the pages served as a teaser to filmmakers—Melania’s father, she said, obsessively recorded her childhood, creating a stockpile of unseen tape of the future First Lady. Two months after the book’s release—and one month after her husband won the election—Amazon announced a deal to release a movie about Melania’s life, paying her a reported $40 million to be a producer on the filmCK.
Then came the crypto craze. Donald Trump released a digital meme on inauguration weekend, and Melania followed with one of her own. Traders went wild, betting up the price of both. The structure of her memecoin is murky, but it seems possible that Melania could come away with as much asCK, say, $400 million. That would amount to a massive windfall, even inside the Trump family, where the patriarch has refused to hand off significant chunks of his assets for years, leaving his heirs with less than $100 million apiece. Even her new official portrait suggests a new era for this new boss lady.
Melania—after biding her time for decades, then striking at exactly the right moment—may wind up with a larger personal fortune than all of them.
The First Lady has been attracted to wealth since her childhood. Melania Trump grew up in Sevnica, Slovenia, a town of roughly 20,000 people, where her mother worked in a children’s clothing factory and her father earned a living as a driver, then a salesman, then a business owner. They lived comfortably in a three-bedroom apartment, with enough spare money for a private nanny and a collection of Ford Mustangs, BMWs, Mercedes Benzes, even a Maserati.
The younger of two girls, Melania got her start in modeling at age 6, when her mother asked her and her sister to wear some of her creations on a runway in Belgrade. Melania continued modeling in high school, where she studied industrial design, before getting a two-year architecture degree in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital. She ultimately abandoned architecture to focus on modeling full-time, climbing to more prestigious roles—and locations, living in Milan, then Paris, then New York. She landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1996 at 26 years old with a pair of suitcases, a carry-on and dreams of making it big.
She landed in a one-bedroom apartment near 30th Street and Park Avenue. Then, two years after arriving in America, a man at a party approached her. “Hi, I’m Donald Trump,” he said. He picked her up in a black Mercedes a couple of weeks later and drove upstate to Seven Springs, a 1919 mansion set on 213 acres in Bedford, New York. “It’s like a French chateau,” Melania marveled at the time (and later recounted in her memoir). “Do you live here?”
Trump explained that it was more of his weekend getaway. Before long, she lived with him inside his main residence, a three-story apartment atop Trump Tower. It was there that the real estate mogul proposed in April 2004, on Melania’s 34th birthday, as she was getting ready to go to the Met Gala. Trump, by then 58, had concluded that prenuptial agreements were a “modern-day necessity” by that point. The exact structure of the deal with Melania remains unclear, but agreements with Trump’s previous wives offer some clues.
Ivana, who passed away last year with $33 million to her name, reportedly walked away from her marriage to Trump with a mansion in Greenwich and $14 million. Trump left her for Marla Maples but hesitated to marry her, even after Maples became pregnant with his fourth child. She protested signing a prenup, but Trump insisted, agreeing to hand her $1 million if they split. “I think a million dollars is a lot of money,” he told ABC News at the time, before correcting himself. “No I don’t, actually.”
Melania Trump said from the outset that she wasn’t in it for the money, identifying financial independence as a “core value.” But even her modeling took on a Trumpian twist. When she appeared on the cover of Vogue in 2005ck, it was in celebration of her Mar-a-Lago wedding, where the guest list included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Shaquille O’Neal, Anna Wintour and Billy Joel. She posed for the magazine again a couple of years later, fully pregnant and barely clothed, boarding a private jet. “I think it’s very sexy for a woman to be pregnant,” she told the magazine. Barron arrived in March 2006, and Melania put her modeling career on hold.
By 2009, with Barron in preschool, Melania launched a new phase of her career, leaning on personnel inside the Trump Organization to launch a licensing ventures, similar to the deals her husband had signed to hawk shirts, cologne, mattresses, you name it. She started with jewelry, coming up with three collections that represented her recent homes. A Paris line one focused on glamor, a New York collectionone centered on business, and a Palm Beach one leaned more sporty. She launched on QVC with an hour-long advertisement, selling out within 45 minutes. It’s not clear how much she earned, but it’s quite apparent that the high didn’t last. By 2014, Melania’s jewelry earnings amounted to less than $15,000 a year.
She tried another product line, agreeing to a $1 million licensing deal for skincare products with Indiana businessman Steve Hilbert, who had worked with her husband on the General Motors Building in New York (and later sold Trump a mansion in St. Martin). Melania said she came up with everything from the packaging to the creams, claiming she perfected the ingredients alongside chemists—really just the person who gave her facials at Mar-a-Lago’s spa, she later conceded in court testimony. The product was set to land in early 2013, with a featured spot on the Celebrity Apprentice, followed by an exclusive launch in Lord & Taylor, then a wider push into other department stores. But her partner ran into problems, and the creams never really went anywhere. Stiffed $750,000 of her $1 million deal, Melania sued. “They didn’t honor the contract. They didn’t pay me. They didn’t promote the product. They didn’t do anything,” she testified, ending up with an undisclosedCK settlement.
That was pretty much it for her business career pre-presidency. Melania flirted with the idea of launching other product lines—in children’s clothing, furniture and linens. But then, in June 2015, she accompanied her husband down the escalator inside Trump Tower, where he announced his candidacy for president and upended everything. The campaign was brutal, featuring revelations about marital infidelity and a tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women’s genitals.
But it alsoIt also apparently gave Melania leverage. In a book titled “The Art of Her Deal,” a Washington Post reporter said Melania renegotiated her prenup in 2016 and 2017, securing a more favorable agreement for both her and her son, Barron. A spokesperson for Melania, who also paid $1.5 million for a 1,052 sq. footCK condo 35 floors below her husband’s penthouse in January 2016, denied the story at the time.
As First Lady, she did not do much to make money. Melania’s biggest paycheck came in 2017, when Getty Images paid her somewhere between $100,000 and $1 million in royalties, as her photos suddenly became more valuable. Financial disclosure reports that Donald Trump filed as president, which required him to list all employment income for the First Lady, show no other income over their four years, with the exception of several thousand in residual earnings from Getty.
Presidents and First Ladies tend to make more money after leaving office than they do while in charge. Like Hillary Clinton, Melania joined her husband on the speaking circuit, earning $1.2 million speaking to Trump-friendly organizations. Like Michelle Obama, she wrote a book. But like her husband, she also charted a new course, earning money in ways that no First Lady before her had even contemplated, mostly by following Donald’s lead.
SO THIS WAS WHEN. KIND OF GOES AGAINST THIS IDEA SHE IS NOW JUST DOING. She sold nonfungible tokens, or NFTs—digital images that fans could trade online. One showed a close-up of her eyes; another featured a broad-brimmed hat much like the one she wore at the inauguration. Such salesmanship yielded more than $650,000—a nice payday, but not really big business. WHO IS SOURCE OF THE TRUTH SOCIAL STUFF AND WHAT DID SHE SAY She allegedly tried to get in on the Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company to Twitter lookalike Truth Social, by moving to grab shares from one of Trump’s partners. It didn’t work, and Trump refused to hand over any of his majority stake.
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At 4:10 p.m. on Jan. 19, less than 24 hours before becoming First Lady for the second time, Melania Trump took to Truth Social to announce her crypto meme, $Melania. The associated token provides buyers with nothing but some digital artwork and a chance to gamble. That proved alluring enough to the crypto crowd that prices surged above $10 apiece, suggesting that the 250 million tokens in circulation were worth more than $2.5 billion at one point, even though no one really knew what they are buying—or how much Melania was earning.
A company named MKT World LLC, which Melania founded after leaving the White House in 2021, is behind the website for the venture. But nowhere on the website does it say that that entity held the initial batch of tokens offered to speculators, whether it has any partners, if it received a windfall for selling the initial batch, nor what percentage of the proceeds went back to the owners. In other words, it’s impossible to know how much Melania Trump earned off the venture at this point.
But playing with the numbers can lead to fantastical figures. If the 250 million tokens went for $3 apiece—the price they were fetching 35 minutes after Melania announced the coin—that could have generated $750 million. A chunk of that probably stayed in the liquidity pool for the token, which helps ensure smooth trading going forward. Maybe $700 million went back to the organizers, who after paying taxes, could walk away with $400 million or so. If Melania did the venture without any partners, she could have instantly made more money from politics than anyone in American history not named Donald Trump.
It was a precision strike on MAGA mania. Many of the gamblers who bought in have already lost most of their money, with the tokens now sitting at roughly $2.40, down more than 75% in about a week. The official website suggests that Melania and any other insiders will receive 30 million more tokens on February 19, with another 22.5 million coming every month thereafter for a year, further diluting the pot. But for Melania Trump, what happens from here may not matter much given that, in a few hours, she might have secured more money from her husband’s followers than her husband would have ever handed her on his own.
