First lady’s documentary deal with Amazon, president’s legal settlements and other transactions near $80 million so far; Trump library a major beneficiary

When Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos dined with Donald Trump and his wife Melania at Mar-a-Lago in December, there was a lot at stake for both men: Bezos, a titan of industry whose company is crucial to the U.S. economy, was rebuilding his relationship with a resurgent and powerful soon-to-be president.

A lot was at stake for Melania, too: She was looking for a buyer for a documentary about her transition back to first lady. Her agent had pitched the film, which she would executive produce, to a number of studios, including the one owned by Amazon.

As the meeting approached, Melania consulted with director Brett Ratner on how to sell her idea to the world’s third-richest man. Melania regaled Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, with the project’s details at dinner.

Just over two weeks later, Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay $40 million to license the film—the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary and nearly three times the next-closest offer.

Netflix and Apple declined even to bid. Paramount made a lowball $4 million distribution-rights offer. Disney, the most interested studio besides Amazon, offered $14 million.

“We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only—because we think customers are going to love it,” said an Amazon spokesman.

The first lady’s cut is more than 70% of the $40 million, according to people familiar with the matter. And they’re still looking for more: Melania’s agent has been trying to sell “sponsorships” for the film—starting at $10 million—to prominent CEOs and billionaires who were at the inauguration, according to people familiar with the matter. Buyers would get thanked at the end of the credits and be invited to the premiere. These overtures were made independently of the deal with Amazon, which was unaware of the outreach, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Amazon deal is just one of the ways the new first family has benefited from its return to the White House. Companies have directed about $80 million to members of the Trump family and the Trump presidential library so far, as defendants settle lawsuits the president previously filed against them and corporations enter into new business ventures, including the documentary. This figure doesn’t include potential gains from crypto pursuits.

Much of the legal settlement money will go to a fund for the president’s library, a not-for-profit whose mission is to “preserve and steward” Trump’s legacy. But Trump’s share of a $10 million settlementElon Musk’s X agreed to this week is expected to go to him directly, according to people familiar with the matter.

The pace and volume of the family’s moneymaking efforts so far are unprecedented, surpassing even the activity of Trump’s first term, which drew condemnation from ethics watchdogs and congressional Democrats.

Ty Cobb, who served as a top White House lawyer in Trump’s first administration and has since emerged as a critic, said the president’s efforts to profit this time are far bolder. “Everything he does is either to be vengeful or to accumulate wealth, power and adulation,” Cobb said. Trump sees an opportunity, he said, because “all these people want a piece of him.”

A spokesman for the first lady directed questions to the Trump Organization, which said it couldn’t comment on her behalf. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Trump Organization, Trump’s main real-estate and licensing company, last month said the president wouldn’t be involved in the day-to-day management once he took office and that the company wouldn’t enter into new contracts with foreign governments during his presidency.

As part of an ethics plan, the company also hired an external lawyer to assist in developing internal policies to avoid perceived conflicts, and said it would donate to the U.S. Treasury profits it receives from foreign government officials it can identify at its hotels and other businesses. Trump’s investments and assets will remain in a trust managed by his children, and Trump will have “limited access” to the company’s financial information, the plan said.

As president, Trump is exempt from conflict-of-interest rules that apply to other administration members. He is, however, subject to a provision of the Constitution that bars officeholders from receiving payments from foreign governments.

“The Trump Organization is dedicated to not just meeting but vastly exceeding its legal and ethical obligations during my father’s presidency,” Eric Trump, the company’s executive vice president and Trump’s son, said last month.

That plan falls short of how most modern presidents have handled their finances. Previous presidents typically sold off their assets or placed them in blind trusts, which put the assets under the control of a third party and prevent the owner from knowing how they are managed.

And unlike in 2017, when Trump said his company would forgo foreign deals with both government and private partners, the Trump Organization remains open for business with foreign companies. The top of the Trump Organization website currently reads: “Coming soon: A preview of Trump Organization global portfolio expansion.”

Eric Trump has signaled he is less open to reining in the company’s business deals to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest this time around. “I tried to do everything right in 2016 and I got very little credit for it,” he told the Journal a month before the election.

On Monday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency that oversees ethics issues across the executive branch and had been working closely with the White House vetting nominees that require Senate confirmation. The director, David Huitema, had been appointed by President Joe Biden and was less than two months into a five-year term.

Huitema said that the president appears to have dispensed with the pretense of guardrails in his second term. “Recognizing that these kinds of questions will come up over the next four years, the president just didn’t want an OGE with the independence and status to raise the importance of these issues and insist on adherence to the law,” he said in an interview. “It seems like he’s a lot more casual and kind of brazen this time around.”

Trump has also ramped up his retail efforts since eight years ago. The Trump Organization sells merchandise including a $95 ornament with a 3-D depiction of Mar-a-Lago and a $550 gold Trump-branded “bling clutch.” Trump also licenses his name to companies selling, for example, a $100,000 18-carat-gold tourbillon watch. There are no requirements that those businesses disclose who is making purchases.

In another departure from his first term, companies and individuals can now buy shares in Trump Media & Technology, the publicly traded holding company that includes the president’s social media business. Trump transferred his shares in the company to a trust run by his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr.

The Trump Organization, meanwhile, has been in talks to reclaim its hotel in D.C., the lease for which the Trumps sold in 2022 for $375 million. The price of a membership initiation fee at Trump’s Florida resort hit $1 million in the months before the election—up from $200,000 in 2017. Days before taking office, the president and his family began selling $TRUMP and $MELANIA crypto tokens. The market cap of $TRUMP quickly climbed to nearly $15 billion, though it has since fallen off significantly.

Don Jr. joined a series of corporate boards, which sent those companies’ stocks soaring. Even Trump’s youngest son, Barron, has shown interest in following in his father’s dealmaking footsteps. The 18-year-old and two others registered an entity in Wyoming last year called Trump, Fulcher & Roxburgh, which one of the partners described as a high-end real-estate development company. The entity was dissolved in November after much press attention.

About half of the postelection windfall has come from leaning on old adversaries in Silicon Valley and the press to settle censorship and defamation lawsuits Trump had previously filed against them. Most of the cases had been languishing.

The election changed things.

The president feels he now has considerable leverage over former adversaries, according to people familiar with his thinking. “When we won the election, it was time to go,” said John Coale, one of Trump’s outside lawyers who brought the suits against the social-media companies with another lawyer, John Q. Kelly.

Coale strategized with the president-elect about bringing up their lawsuit against Meta ahead of a visit Mark Zuckerberg made to Mar-a-Lago in November, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The suit, filed more than three years earlier, had accused Meta of violating Trump’s right to free speech when it suspended his Facebook account after the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Over dinner, Trump made it clear that the lawsuit needed to be resolved if the Meta founder wanted everything to be “kumbaya going forward,” the person familiar with the conversation said.

Settlement talks began soon after. Meta eventually agreed to pay $25 million, with $22 million going to the Trump library fund. The move also had an upside for the social-media billionaire: better relations with the new president, whom he met with in the White House two weeks after his swearing in. Meta declined to comment.

ABC News also paid up: The Disney company paid $15 million weeks after the election to resolve a defamation suit the president filed in federal court in March.

The settlement talks with X began after the election and were more informal, with both Trump and Musk personally involved in hammering out the $10 million number, people familiar with the matter said. X didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In recent months, Trump’s lawyers have pursued settlements with Paramount Global over a CBS News interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris and with publisher Simon & Schuster and author Bob Woodward. They are also expected to push for a settlement in a lawsuit against Google over deplatforming Trump’s YouTube account in 2021. The companies all declined to comment.

The president’s eldest son, Don Jr., has been particularly active in lining up business deals that could benefit from his proximity to power.

Don Jr. has been in high demand since the election. Casting himself as a champion of the anti-woke, he has pursued a series of business ventures that are looking to capitalize on the conservative cultural shift driven by his father’s administration. “While establishment investors shut out companies that refuse to go woke, I want to lift these companies up,” he posted on X last month.

Days after his father won, he announced he would become a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture-capital firm that invests in conservative companies. Its investments include Tucker Carlson’s media company, Last Country. A spokesman for 1789 declined to comment.

He also took on roles at several companies that could stand to gain from federal policies, ranging from Pentagon spending to regulations for online-betting marketplaces to tariffs on China.

In the past month, he has joined the board of the prescription access platform BlinkRx and become a strategic adviser to Kalshi, a prediction-market startup. “As a longstanding advocate for media accountability, Donald Trump Jr. was a natural fit,” Kalshi said. BlinkRx declined to comment.

A spokesman for Don Jr. said he isn’t involved in government lobbying or influence-peddling and that he typically works with companies that reflect his conservative worldview.

Announcements of Don Jr.’s involvement have sent some companies’ stock soaring—along with his potential earnings.

After drone manufacturer Unusual Machines named him an adviser on Nov. 27, the firm’s shares skyrocketed 249% over the next two days. His 331,000 shares in the company as of Dec. 5 were worth roughly $1.6 million more than they were the day before his advisory role was announced.

Allan Evans, chief executive of Unusual Machines, said Don Jr. has lent the drone-parts maker valuable business acumen rather than political influence. “He’s got really good insights to different types of investors,” said Evans, adding that he recently visited Mar-a-Lago to eat breakfast with Don. Jr. “He definitely understands this segment.”

Shares in PublicSquare Holdings, which bills itself as a conservative Amazon, shot up 270% after Don Jr. joined its board last year. As part of a consulting deal signed in August, Don Jr. was awarded restricted shares that were worth around $386,000 as of Thursday, in addition to a $42,000 monthly advisory fee.

A representative for Don Jr. said he had invested in the company before the election and helped take it public in 2023.

The company’s chief executive praised him in a statement at the time he joined the board: “Don’s passion for creating a ‘cancel-proof’ economy, his years of strategic business experience, and his leadership within the shooting sports industry offer important expertise at the board level.”

Some of President Trump’s most audacious moves have been in crypto, where he has invested heavily while at the same time boosting the larger industry. After once denouncing crypto as a “disaster waiting to happen,” Trump shifted his views on the campaign trail last year, pronouncing himself the “crypto president” and talking of turning America into the “crypto capital.”

Around the same time, Trump and his sons Eric and Don Jr. helped launch World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm that has raised more than $300 million selling its digital token, $WLFI.

The venture offers an avenue for foreign entities and those with business before the federal government to increase the Trump family’s wealth. People who purchase the tokens aren’t visible to the public unless they disclose it.

In the months after the election, Justin Sun, a Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur, disclosed on social media that he bought $75 million of the token. Sun, who is battling a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission over alleged market manipulation, is now an adviser to World Liberty Financial. He has called the SEC lawsuit meritless and sought to dismiss it.

“Justin’s stated investment decisions are not politically motivated. Assertions implying ulterior motives are unfounded and misrepresent his intentions,” said a Sun spokesperson.

Just three days before his inauguration, Trump officially endorsed the launch of his own meme coin, a type of digital token that’s essentially just a collectible with no underlying value. Following wild price volatility, the total value of all $TRUMP coins in circulation is now $3.3 billion. A similar coin launched on Jan. 19 by Melania has a market cap of about $210 million.

On paper, the Trump coin launch appears to have been lucrative for the family, although the financial connections are opaque. CIC Digital, described on the Trump meme-coin website as an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and an LLC called Fight Fight Fight own 80% of the supply of $TRUMP, though they are subject to lockups preventing them from selling immediately, according to the coin’s official website. Fight Fight Fight was registered in Delaware by Bill Zanker, a longtime Trump ally who has previously worked with Trump to launch digital assets. Its ownership hasn’t been disclosed.

In one of his first moves as president, Trump signed an executive order boosting the cryptocurrency industry, including creating a group to evaluate the creation of a national “digital asset” stockpile—which many in the industry hope would amount to a government stamp of approval.

Melania has also ramped up her moneymaking efforts in recent years, charging six-figure fees for speaking engagements, including two speeches for the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative group that promotes LGBTQ rights.

It is unusual for a presidential candidate’s spouse to be paid to speak at a fundraiser in an election year.

The month before the election, Melania published a memoir. When CNN requested an interview with her, her book publisher said it would cost $250,000, CNN reported. CNN didn’t pursue the interview further, and the publisher later said the request was the result of a miscommunication. She also sells signed versions of the book for $250 and “Vote Freedom” gold vermeil necklaces for $600.

The Amazon deal for the first lady’s documentary came as Bezos was ingratiating himself to Trump, who once treated him as an enemy.

Amazon donated $1 million to the president’s inaugural fund, plus a $1 million in-kind contribution to stream the event, and Bezos earlier killed an editorial at the Washington Post, which he owns, that endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

Ratner, the director, had known Trump for years when Melania’s team approached him about the film. Their relationship dated back to 2011, when Ratner shot the movie “Tower Heist”—a movie about a group of disgruntled employees who plan a robbery—in the Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York. The director appealed to the incoming first lady because of his outsider status in Hollywood in addition to his feature-film experience, people familiar with the discussions said.

Ratner had been blacklisted in Hollywood years earlier when in 2017, at the height of the Me Too movement, multiple women accused him of sexual harassment or misconduct. Ratner disputed the allegations.

Ratner spent the weeks before the 2025 inauguration at a beachfront house next door to Mar-a-Lago, mingling with Musk and other prominent supporters who traveled to the Palm Beach resort to meet with the president-elect.

At the same time, Ratner’s phone was blowing up with interest from companies that wanted to talk about the documentary. “People who would never speak to Brett—all of a sudden his phone was ringing off the hook,” said Todd Glaser, a Palm Beach real-estate developer and longtime friend of Ratner’s. Glaser called the $40 million “a world-record price,” particularly for a documentary that hadn’t been made yet.

Ratner has gotten unprecedented access to the first couple, including filming in the presidential bedroom on the evening of the inauguration, according to people familiar with the matter. Since then, Ratner has continued to spend time with the Trumps, flying on Air Force One to North Carolina and Los Angeles and posing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who met with the president earlier this month.

“This deal is probably the most expensive documentary ever paid for in history,” said Alex Holder, who directed a docuseries detailing the 2020 election from Trump’s view. “Unless you are making a Nat Geo series on elephants and need crazy expensive equipment to film night vision et cetera, it wouldn’t cost anywhere near that kind of money.”

In 2021, the docuseries—“Unprecedented”—sold in the low millions to Discovery Plus, and studios were very wary of being attached to it given Trump’s election denial. The Trumps weren’t paid for their participation.

Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com, Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com and Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com