On January 31, the Wall Street Journal reported that Tahnoon had secretly agreed to purchase a 49 percent stake in WLF for $500 million—paying $250 million upfront—a year earlier. At least $187 million of that went to entities tied to the Trump family, while more than $30 million went to the family of U.S. envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who helped found WLF in 2024. Tahnoon is also the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
And the relationship runs deeper. Weeks before the administration secured the chips deal, WLF co-founder Zach Witkoff—Steve Witkoff’s son—announced during a crypto conference in Dubai that the Emirati state-backed investment firm MGX, chaired by Tahnoon, would use one of WLF’s products, a stablecoin called USD1, to make a $2 billion investment in the cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
The deal catapulted USD1 from a fringe crypto product to a major player in the stablecoin space, enriching the Trump family. Binance still holds around 85 percent of all circulating USD1 tokens—holdings that likely generate tens of millions of dollars in interest for the Trump family.
In October, Trump pardoned Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, who had served a four-month prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2023 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act. Binance itself pleaded guilty to broader charges, including violating U.S. sanctions laws, and paid $4.3 billion in penalties after the DOJ alleged the platform had facilitated transactions linked to Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other designated terrorist organizations. Tahnoon is reportedly personally close with Zhao, who became an Emirati citizen several years ago and lives in Abu Dhabi.
MGX, which focuses on investments in frontier technologies like AI and semiconductors, is also one of three managing investors in the recently announced joint venture that will own and operate TikTok’s U.S. business.
Months after investing in the Trump family’s crypto venture, Tahnoon also became a key player in securing the deal that allowed the UAE to purchase around 500,000 advanced NVIDIA chips that power frontier AI models. Senior administration officials had held up the deal over concerns that chips sent to the Gulf state—particularly those destined for G42, which has close ties to Beijing—could end up in Chinese hands.
In a January 2024 letter to then-Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, former Rep. Mike Gallagher, who chaired a House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, wrote that G42 CEO Peng Xiao “operates and is affiliated with an expansive network of UAE and [China]-based companies that develop dual-use technologies and materially support [China’s] military-civil fusion and human rights abuses.”
Xiao is reportedly now serving on WLF’s board.
Trump’s link to Xiao and G42 presents a serious risk, according to Jodi Vittori, a Georgetown University professor who studies corruption and illicit finance. “The whole thing is just a national security nightmare,” Vittori told TMD. “If AI really is the future of U.S. national security, and we hand the keys to these actors that have very close ties to China and engage in a variety of activities that deeply undermine U.S. national security across multiple areas, there’s just no way this is a good idea.”
WLF denies that Trump and Steve Witkoff were involved in Tahnoon’s decision to invest in the company. “Neither President Trump nor Steve Witkoff had any involvement whatsoever in this transaction and have had no involvement in World Liberty Financial since taking office,” David Wachsman, a spokesman for WLF, told TMD in an emailed statement. The White House also denied that Trump was involved. “The President has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities,” White House counsel David Warrington told TMD in a statement. “President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner, and to suggest so otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious.”
Still, ethics experts are skeptical. “When you have this kind of structural connection between the president and his family on the one hand, and a foreign power on the other, there’s reason to be concerned that government actions might be influenced by the president’s financial interests,” Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School and expert on government ethics, told TMD.
The WLF investment was never publicly disclosed—but, legally, it didn’t need to be.
In the U.K. and Canada, the financial filings of private companies are relatively accessible to the public. But that’s not the case here. “The U.S., historically, has relied on confidential, regulator-facing reporting, rather than public registries,” Peter Murphy, a Delaware lawyer who advises private companies and families on governance and compliance, told TMD.
Some foreign investments in U.S. companies are subject to review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), particularly those involving sensitive technology or extensive data on U.S. citizens. But most deals fall under discretionary jurisdiction, and filings are voluntary.
A former CFIUS official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told TMD that CFIUS could choose to review a deal involving a foreign official investing in a company partially owned by an American government official. “CFIUS is effectively unlimited in terms of what it can consider, so absolutely, those things can be a factor,” the former official said. But those reviews are confidential, and companies rarely choose to disclose them publicly. “This is a national security function, and national security deliberations, or even the subjects of those deliberations, should not happen in public, because that’s disclosure of sensitive information to parties that could harm the United States,” the former official said.
CFIUS is also governed largely by members of the president’s Cabinet, like the secretaries of State, Treasury, and Homeland Security—who, along with the president, could easily steer the committee away from reviewing a particular case.
It is unknown if WLF made a CFIUS filing related to Tahnoon’s investment. Brandi Reynolds, WLF’s chief compliance officer, did not respond to a request for comment from TMD.
Separate from corporate disclosure, Trump’s personal financial filings don’t capture deals with potentially compromising ties to foreign actors either. “Under Federal disclosure laws, the president is required to report where he has a financial interest … but he would not be required to disclose the other entities with stakes in the company,” Kedric Payne, the vice president, general counsel, and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, told TMD.
“Every modern president has divested his assets and either put them in non-conflicting assets or blind trusts,” Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics adviser to presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, told TMD. But Trump has done neither. Instead, his businesses are held in a revocable trust controlled by his children, meaning Trump retains full awareness of and control over the trust’s assets and transactions.
There is no evidence that Trump or other White House officials were influenced to approve chip exports to the UAE by Tahnoon’s investment in WLF. But as ethics experts note, conflicts of interest do not require proof of corruption to erode public confidence. “Legality is the floor, and ethics is the ceiling,” Davina Hurt, director of government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, told TMD.
“Ethics norms are typically enforced by public and political pressure,” Payne said. “The public has a right to know that their president is making decisions for the public interest and is not being distracted by his own financial interest.”