Last night 220 of the top holders of the $Trump memecoin were invited to attend a special event with the president. Bloomberg’s Zeke Faux, who’s written about cryptocurrencies’ rise and fall, was there for the arrivals. Plus: The latest edition of the Everybody’s Business podcast, and 10 books that should be on your summer reading list.

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On a drizzly Thursday evening, President Donald Trump left the White House, saluted a waiting Marine, climbed into his presidential helicopter and took off for his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, for a dinner with wealthy crypto investors.

This wasn’t a political fundraiser. It was a reward for the biggest buyers of Trump’s memecoin, which he launched just before his inauguration. Like other memecoins, Trump’s didn’t purport to be some kind of financial innovation or do anything at all, other than serve as a vehicle for speculation. Nonetheless, it has made about $300 million in real profits for him and the others behind it, according to the crypto research firm Chainalysis. Some of the dinner’s attendees had bought more than $10 million worth.

Unsurprisingly, a US president having a side hustle in what is at best an unregulated gambling market has proved controversial. The price of Trump’s memecoin spiked immediately after its launch but then crashed about 80%, and so the dinner seemed like an effort to gin up interest from people who wanted to get close to him. At a White House news conference earlier in the day, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that was the case. “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” she protested.

I decided to see for myself. Press weren’t invited to the dinner, leaving me to stand outside in the rain where 100 or so protesters had gathered, carrying signs that said things like “Stop the crypto corruption.” Unfortunately for the attendees who’d paid to come, the security procedures meant that most of them had to get out of their cars at the bottom of the golf club’s driveway, giving the crowd a chance to taunt them.

Dinner guests arrive at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia on Thursday. Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images

“What’s for dinner, asshole?” screamed a 60-year-old who works at a nonprofit that helps the homeless as two men in tuxedos walked in. From across the street, a retired librarian pointed her finger and chanted, “Shame, shame, shame.”

Many attendees posted pictures of the event on social media. Among those inside were Jack Lu, the co-founder of an NFT trading site called Magic Eden, and Jeffrey Zirlin, part of the team behind the crypto game Axie Infinity. The game was popular in the Philippines before the price of its in-game cryptocurrency—which had the bizarre name of Smooth Love Potion—crashed.

Some seemed to be trying to draft off the attention generated by the Trump coin to promote themselves. After walking into the dinner, Lamar Odom, a retired NBA star, posted on Telegram to pitch his own memecoin: $odom. “Think about it—what meme coin has ever done this,” he wrote.

Inside, the attendees ate filet mignon and pan-seared halibut. The top buyers were presented with Trump-branded watches. The president delivered a brief and rambling speech, according to videos on social media, in which he complained about the “radical left” and “the whole autopen thing” and recounted all he’d already done for the crypto industry, which to be fair, was quite a lot—from having the Securities and Exchange Commission drop lawsuits against the biggest players, to signing an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

“You believe in the whole crypto thing,” Trump said. “A lot of people are starting to believe in it.”

After staying for just over an hour, the president climbed back into his helicopter and took off. Some attendees later told me they were disappointed Trump didn’t mingle more. A 27-year-old consultant, who’d spent more than $100,000 on Trump coins, told me no one spoke with him one-on-one. The price of Trump’s memecoin declined a bit afterward.

But no one seemed too worked up about the price. The president and his family have several other crypto ventures. (My colleagues Max Abelson and Annie Massa wrote an excellent piece breaking down all of them on Wednesday.) And the attendees I spoke with said they thought Trump’s deregulation meant the industry’s future was bright.

On the sidewalk nearby, I came across five middle-school boys, who said they’d happened on the scene while on their way to take advantage of the rain to slide down a nearby hill. They told me they traded memecoins too. Laughing, a 13-year-old with a wispy mustache recommended one called “Yo gurt.” (The joke is that the word “yogurt” sounds like someone saying “yo” to someone named “Gurt.”) I asked them how they got the money to trade.

“We steal our parents’ credit cards,” a 12-year-old with a mop of blond hair joked.

In Brief

• Trump rattled markets Friday with fresh tariff threats of 50% on goods from the EU and 25% on iPhones if Apple doesn’t move production.
• Bond investors are demanding more and more compensation to hold long-dated US debt, as global markets grow anxious about America’s widening fiscal deficit.
• Harvard University won a temporary court order blocking the Trump administration from preventing the school from enrolling international students.

For Your Podcast Queue

All the economy is a stage this week. The “big, beautiful” tax bill passed the US House of Representatives in the wee hours of Thursday morning, and millions of college graduates got their diplomas and set off into the job market, competing with an ever-growing army of robot workers.

Listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

10 Best Books of the Summer

Illustration: George Wylesol for Bloomberg Pursuits

The summer’s most gripping books excavate and enliven history. No matter if they are interrogating a century-old injustice or vivifying events so recent they feel current, the best fiction and nonfiction books take the past and run with it—so you can sit back and dig in. In case you missed James Tarmy’s list, here’s a sample.

The Great Mann: A Novel
By Kyra Davis Lurie (June 10, Crown)
Using F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as both an inspiration and a template, Davis Lurie, a novelist and screenwriter, moves the action from New York to Los Angeles and shifts its wealthy milieu from Waspy flappers to an elite group of 1940s Black professionals living in the city’s Sugar Hill neighborhood. In the original novel, tragedy remained on the margins until the book’s denouement, but Davis Lurie isn’t content to wait that long, lingering on racism’s looming threat on almost every page.

The Slip
By Lucas Schaefer (June 3, Simon & Schuster)
Set in pre-boom Austin in the late 1990s, this book essentially functions as a mystery about a teenage boy’s disappearance. The novel’s pace is blunted by the absence of any sturm und drang surrounding the event. Instead, Schaefer relies on his humor and punchy writing to propel the reader through a diverse, overlapping cast of characters whose major commonality is a connection to a boxing gym.

Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
By Megan Greenwell (June 10, Harpers Collins)
In one of the more devastating indictments of the business in recent memory, Greenwell depicts this class of investors (who buy existing companies with the aim of making them more profitable) as giant money vacuums, hoovering up the profits of small-town America. In a series of effective case studies, the longtime journalist and editor demonstrates how the interests of these private investors can be in direct opposition to those of the employees and customers of the companies in which they invest.

Keep reading: Thrillers, Histories and Capers: The 10 Best Books of Summer 2025

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