In brief
- President Trump sued the New York Times for $15 billion, claiming its 2024 reporting hurt his meme coin project and other business interests.
- The lawsuit alleges multiple news articles and a book damaged the project’s value, though the meme coin launched months later in January 2025.
- Trump’s token hit a $73 billion valuation before crashing 88%, even as his wider crypto ventures have boosted his net worth by billions.
President Donald Trump has brought his meme coin into a prominent legal dispute, alleging in a new $15 billion defamation suit against the New York Times that the publication harmed the reputation of his multibillion-dollar Solana token project.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in a federal court in Florida, claims that four Times reporters maliciously published false information about the president in multiple articles and a book, leading to “enormous” economic losses to the value of his brand, properties, and businesses.
The lawsuit specifically alleges that, among other ventures, the reputation of Trump’s Solana meme coin project was harmed in the minds of Florida residents due to the Times’ reporting.
The lawsuit does not list any other of Trump’s digital assets ventures, including his family’s crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, as businesses impacted by the alleged defamation.
It does, however, claim that the publication of a book by two of the named reporters—about the origins of Trump’s wealth—was intentionally timed to coincide with the debut of a trailer for “The Apprentice,” a movie about Trump’s rise to prominence in the 1980s. Together, the suit claims that those events together triggered a “precipitous” drop in the stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group.
The company, which is majority-owned by the president, runs his Truth Social social media platform, and has invested heavily in crypto in recent months.
The book and articles listed in Trump’s lawsuit all were published in the fall of 2024, months before the president launched his own meme coin this January just days before his inauguration.
Shortly after launch, the token soared to a fully diluted valuation in excess of $73 billion. It has since cratered in value by over 88%, to $8.6 billion.
The president’s wealth has increased dramatically since his return to office thanks to his crypto-related endeavors. Earlier this month, he and his sons saw their collective net worth increase by some $6 billion after trading launched for WLFI, World Liberty’s native governance token.
The president’s lawsuit against the Times on Monday came just hours after the paper published an investigation linking World Liberty’s business dealings and successes to a recent lucrative agreement between the U.S. government and the UAE regarding coveted AI chips.
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