Early into Trump’s second term as US president, the CEO of energy infrastructure company Hut 8 Asher Genoot and Hut 8 chief strategy officer Michael Ho shared thin crust pizza with Eric Trump at the Trump golf club in Jupiter, Florida. They talked for hours, says Genoot, and tabled a business venture that greatly interested Trump: a bitcoin mining alliance.
They first met through mutual friends in late 2024: Genoot says he’d shown Eric photos of their “beautiful, liquid cool data center” in Amarillo, Texas. Genoot says Eric was intrigued, and told Genoot stories of growing up with his dad on construction sites. The pizza night invite evolved, per Genoot, into almost daily meetings. The result? A company called American Bitcoin (ABTC), which launched on April 1. Hut 8, which reports having “1,020 megawatts of energy capacity under management across 15 sites in the US and Canada,” owns 80 percent of the company, while Trump, his brother Donald Jr., and legacy shareholders of their former data center business, American Data Centers, own the other 20 percent. Eric is a cofounder and chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin.
ABTC’s CEO Matt Prusak (who is also the former CEO of Hut 8-affiliated bitcoin mining company Ionic Digital) says the Trump brothers brought “two things to the table.” One was access to capital markets, through the Trumps’ international business connections, while the second and arguably more compelling value add was, per Prusak, “narrative”—the one that comes with the Trump family name.
Though Prusak says Eric is “one phone call away from a wide variety of people with whom we can collaborate,” he and Genoot both insist Eric’s position on the team doesn’t give them a direct line to the president. Rather, they emphasize Eric’s connections to large family offices and institutions. “Institutions in Europe, Canada, now increasingly the Middle East, are all interested in the strategic alignment with American Bitcoin,” Prusak says.
In March, crypto exchange Binance announced a $2 billion investment from a fund backed by Abu Dhabi’s government. Two months later, the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin, USD1, was chosen for the transaction. On July 18, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which regulates stablecoins, into law. The House passed legislation laying out rules for the crypto market the day prior, which the president has requested land on his desk by August.
“We’re able to tap into the American energy story,” Prusak says, noting Eric and Donald Jr.’s large and increasingly bitcoin-interested audiences. Sean Glennan, Hut 8’s chief financial officer who previously worked at Citi, calls his current industry “mimetic”— having a public facing executive from one of the world’s most meme-able families doesn’t hurt.
“American Bitcoin is uniquely positioned to scale faster and operate leaner than anyone in the space,” Eric said in a written statement to WIRED, citing Hut8’s track record, infrastructure and energy expertise as “unmatched”.
Will Foxley, cofounder of the bitcoin mining-focused Blockspace Media, puts it more bluntly. In the crowded mining industry, he says, “there's only a few ways to stand out—one of those ways can be getting the president's son to help found the company.”