Trump’s ballroom blitz: Leaked donor list reveals Apple, Nvidia gave $25M each — but the president's name is missing

Google, meanwhile, donated $22 million in “settlement funds from Trump’s lawsuit against YouTube” while Microsoft pledged $10 million. Moneywise sought comment from all six donors and only Microsoft replied to say that they have no comment.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle, meanwhile, told Moneywise the White House would pursue the perpetrators of the “cowardly leak,” adding that the White House doesn’t “discuss or disclose personal information about individuals’ private donations they may or may not have been given to nonprofit organizations.”

He added that “the donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals” and that “critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill”

While some reports do, in fact, suggest taxpayers are footing a large part of the bill, the White House didn’t address another concern that Moneywise raised: President Trump, who has long touted his intention to pay for the ballroom, is not on the donor’s list.

Ballroom bill donations coming under scrutiny

The White House didn’t answer Moneywise’s question about how much Trump has personally paid toward the ballroom.

In July 2025, for example, Trump said he would pay for the project, adding “I’ll do it, and we’ll probably have some donors.” Two months later, in September 2025, Trump declared “I’m paying for it. I’m paying for it. The country is not.” In October, he reiterated, “it’s being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine” and that “I’ll donate whatever is needed.”

Critics have noted that Trump’s ballroom has ballooned in cost since it was announced in July 2025, with the official price tag jumping from $200 million to $300 million and then $400 million. A Washington Post investigation later uncovered contractor estimates putting it at $600 million — with taxpayers footing half of the bill.

Critics have also questioned the donation process and whether it could serve other interests.

Moneywise previously reported that a lawsuit by oversight watchdog group Public Citizen revealed that ballroom donations were being directed through the non-profit Trust for the National Mall, which keeps 2.5% of the first $200 million in donations and allows for anonymous giving “to a sitting president’s signature project while avoiding the conflict-of-interest checks that would apply to virtually any other federal initiative.”

Public Citizen noted this week that many of the top donors “are weapons manufacturers, AI and data companies, or tech giants who have received billions of dollars in government contracts.”

And the Washington Post leaked list story added that Trump pardoned Venezuelan-Italian billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini — who’d been charged by the Justice Department with bribery related to a Puerto Rican governor’s campaign — a few months after Velutini’s daughter, Isabela Herrera, made the first of two payments of a $2.5 million ballroom donation.

“These new revelations raise the most troubling questions yet about whether the whole ballroom fundraising operation was nothing but a massive pay to play scheme,” Public Citizen Democracy Advocate Jon Golinger told Moneywise. “ Why did all of these companies and corporate executives ask for their millions in ballroom funding to be kept secret if they had nothing to hide?”

He added that “This casts a very dark cloud over every government contract, regulatory action, pardon and dropped enforcement case these ballroom donors have received from the Trump Administration.”

Democratic Representatives Jared Huffman and Maxine Dexter also sent a joint letter to the U.S. National Park Service in April, warning about the lack of transparency around the donations.

A representative for Huffman sent a statement from the Congressman to Moneywise, explaining that he’s been trying to uncover “who’s bankrolling Trump’s gilded ballroom” for almost a year, and that “it should never have taken leaked documents for Americans to find out who exactly was paying: Big Tech, defense contractors, crypto companies, and billionaire allies with business before his administration.”

He went on to demand “a full accounting of who paid and what they were promised” while accusing the Trump administration of going “out of its way at every step to serve these billionaire donors instead of the American people.”

Dancing around ongoing ballroom controversy

The leaked list is just the latest controversy surrounding Trump’s ballroom.

The project itself unleashed a flurry of litigation about the legality of the Trump administration destroying the White House’s East Wing to build the ballroom in the first place, with the Supreme Court giving the go-ahead despite Congress never having approved it.