For a year, the White House wouldn’t say who paid for President Trump’s new ballroom or how much. Now The Washington Post has the list. An internal spreadsheet shows $333 million from private donors, most of it from companies and wealthy people with business before the federal government, including a $2.5 million pledge from the daughter of a banker Trump later pardoned.
The biggest gifts, $25 million each, came from Nvidia, Apple, the Adelson family and Dish Network chairman Charles Ergen. Trump himself isn’t on the list, even though he has said the project is “being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine,” the Post reported.
Who paid for Trump’s White House ballroom?
- $25 million each: Nvidia, Apple, the Adelson family and Charles Ergen of Dish Network.
- $5 million or more: Amazon, Caterpillar, Comcast, Microsoft and T-Mobile were among the big corporate donors. Cisco and ServiceNow confirmed $5 million each to CNBC.
- Administration figures: Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler and her husband pledged $5 million. Brandon Lutnick, son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, gave stock worth more than $2.5 million.
- Crypto: crypto firms and investors, now under looser rules, pledged more than $18 million, led by the Winklevoss twins’ roughly $5 million in bitcoin.
- Anonymous: at least $77 million came from donors who asked not to be named, including Nvidia, which requested anonymity for its $25 million.
Did ballroom donors get anything from the government?
The Post says its reporting doesn’t establish a connection between the gifts and favorable government actions. But it found that companies or executives with federal contracts during Trump’s second term gave about half of the total. Nvidia became a top donor in October 2025, nearly three months after its deal with Trump to sell advanced chips to China. “As an American company, our support for the United States is paramount, and independent of any business interests,” an Nvidia spokesperson said.
The most striking entry: in September 2025, Isabela Herrera committed $2.5 million. Her father, international banker Julio Herrera Velutini, had been indicted in 2022 on charges of bribing Puerto Rico’s governor to get rid of a regulator investigating his bank. His charges were reduced to a misdemeanor a month before her pledge, and Trump pardoned him in January. The White House says those prosecutions were politically motivated.
Why does it matter how the ballroom is paid for?
Because this money isn’t like campaign donations, which have to be disclosed. It goes to a nonprofit, then to a White House account Trump controls. The project’s cost has grown to an estimated $600 million, and taxpayers have covered some of it. White House spokesman Davis Ingle called the donors “a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals” and said the administration will “relentlessly pursue those responsible for this cowardly leak,” CNBC reported.
The BeezLoop Take
If a company with billions in government business hands the president’s pet project $25 million, voters deserve to know about it the day it happens, not a year later from a leaked spreadsheet. The White House’s answer to the leak is to hunt the leaker. That tells you which part it thinks is the problem.
None of this proves anyone bought anything. But a pardoned banker’s daughter, a Cabinet member, a Cabinet member’s son, and companies chasing federal contracts and export deals all writing checks to a fund the president controls is exactly the kind of arrangement disclosure laws were written to prevent.
The open question: will Congress require the ballroom fund to disclose donors and amounts publicly, or does this stay secret until the next leak?
Also on BeezLoop: the White House pushed out Kimberly Guilfoyle over a donor’s $100,000 Amex bill.
Sources: The Washington Post, via The Spokesman-Review · CNBC · Forbes Breaking News (video)
