- In December 2025, the Trump administration launched a $1 million “Trump Gold Card” that promised “U.S. residency in record time.” The administration also teased a “Trump Platinum Card,” a $5 million investment that would allow the buyer “the ability to spend up to 270 days in the United States without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income.”
- Trump said during a Dec. 10 news conference that he expected the “gold card” visas would make the U.S. Treasury “billions” of dollars, appearing to adjust down earning expectations from February.
- Trump introduced the idea of a $5 million “gold card” visa during a news conference on Feb. 25, 2025. At the time, Trump said that visa would give buyers a path to U.S. citizenship, though the $5 million “platinum card” Trump teased in December did not appear to have this feature.
- Trump posited in February that the $5 million visa might make a lot of money, saying, “If you sell 10 million of the cards that’s a total of $50 trillion.” Claims online at that time said sums like Trump’s estimate wouldn’t be possible due to the limited number of high-net-worth individuals outside the U.S. capable of buying such a visa.
- Estimates for the number of millionaires outside the U.S. with a net worth more than $5 million fluctuate depending on reports from 1.5 million to 3.3 million, while estimates of people with a net worth above $1 million are significantly higher, from 15 million to 33.1 million.
In December 2025, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump launched a $1 million “Trump Gold Card” visa that promised “U.S. residency in record time” and said it also planned to launch a “Trump Platinum Card” that would allow the buyer “the ability to spend up to 270 days in the United States without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income.”
The administration first introduced the idea of the “gold card” visa during a news conference on Feb. 25, 2025. At the time, Trump said the proposed visa would cost $5 million and give the buyer a path to U.S. citizenship.Â
Trump said in February that sales of the proposed visas could bring in profits of $50 trillion. On Dec. 10, Trump said the sale of the “gold card” $1 million visas could bring in “billions.”
Of course, Trump’s plan hinges on buyers for the visas. Following the announcement in February, social (archived) media posts circulated claiming that the visas would not bring in $50 trillion because there were not enough people outside the U.S. who could afford to buy them. In December, after Trump announced the visas, Snopes readers searched our site to find out more about the new initiative.
There are varying estimates of how many people in the world have a net worth — the value of assets owned minus liabilities — high enough to buy the “gold” or “platinum” visas at the $1 million or $5 million asking prices. Publicly available figures for high-net-worth people often do not break down the data enough to be useful for this kind of calculation, as detailed below.
Additionally, Trump’s visas could potentially make it more difficult for high-net-worth people to gain citizenship in the U.S. During the Feb. 25 news conference, Trump officials said the “gold card” visa would replace the existing EB-5 visa.
That visa offered people who made “necessary” investments (generally, more than $1 million) in a “commercial enterprise” in the U.S. and planned to create or preserve 10 permanent jobs for U.S. workers a path to citizenship, usually starting with a green card.
Many countries, including Canada, also offer an investment visa similar to the EB-5. At least 15 other countries have such “golden visas,” according to La Vida Golden Visas, a company that advises people on residency and citizenship through investment.
Uncertainty over how profitable visas could be
Whether Trump’s “platinum” card could make $50 trillion across 10 million sales, as Trump claimed in February, or whether the Treasury could make “billions” from the $1 million “gold” card remained unclear at the time of this writing.
UBS, a multinational investment bank based in Switzerland, said in its Global Wealth Report 2025 that in 2024, 60 million people worldwide had a “total wealth” of more than $1 million (Page 24, “The Global Wealth Pyramid 2024”). According to the report, 55.2% of those people — 33.1 million — were located outside the Americas, which would also include South America and Canada, whose citizens can apply for U.S. citizenship.
UBS said in response to a previous request for clarification of an earlier version of the report that it could not provide a further breakdown of the figures. According to the 2025 report, UBS’s sources included the International Monetary Fund, OECD and the World Bank.
It was not possible based on UBS’s figures to say how many of the 33.1 million people with a total wealth above $1 million also had a total wealth of $5 million or more — the price of Trump’s proposed “platinum” visa.
Another report, titled “Intelligent Strategies for Winning with the Ultra-Wealthy,” gave somewhat lower numbers for worldwide millionaires. According to Figure 3 in the report, in December 2024, 23.4 million people had a net worth of more than $1 million. Capgemini, a French consulting firm, produced the report.
Of those 23.4 million people, 15 million lived outside the U.S., per the report’s Figure 2. Also according to Figure 3 in the report, people with a net worth over $5 million made up 10.2% of the total number of millionaires. Using these figures, the report estimated about 1.5 million people living outside North America had a net worth higher than $5 million.
It was possible to find only one breakdown of wealth by country — a 2021 report from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse titled “Global Wealth Databook 2022.” One table in the report, Table 3-6, listed how many people in each country fell into different wealth brackets.
Subtracting the U.S. figures from brackets covering ranges of 5-10, 10-50, 50-100, 100-500 and 500+ million, the total number of people with a net worth of $5 million or higher outside the U.S. in 2021 was 3.3 million — roughly twice Capgemini’s estimate for 2024.
The total number of people with a net worth from $1 million to $5 million, meaning they could afford the “gold” card but likely not the “platinum,” living outside the U.S. was 32.5 million — again roughly twice Capgemini’s estimate.
Capgemini said it used figures from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to estimate accumulated market wealth. It then established how the wealth was distributed using figures from the World Bank, the Economist Intelligence Unit and national government statistics.
Credit Suisse said it compiled its data from household balance sheets reported for specific countries, “standard econometric techniques” used to estimate net wealth levels and wealth/GDP ratios. GDP, or gross domestic product, is the value of goods and services produced in a country during a specific time period. The wealth distribution of countries in the databook was either directly reported or extrapolated from other directly reported data for the region.
It was not clear how the differing methodologies affected Capgemini and Credit Suisse’s results, nor how they accounted for their differences.
In sum …
Given the above, there appears to be no clear answer to the question of exactly how much money Trump’s “gold” and “platinum” visas could make.
According to estimates from three reports, anywhere from 15 million to 33.1 million people outside North America could afford the $1 million “gold” card, meaning the visa had the potential to generate “billions” in profit, as Trump said in December 2025.
Between 1.5 million and 3.3 million people would be able to afford the more expensive “Platinum” card, according to the reports, meaning it also had the potential to generate “trillions.” The Trump administration had not officially launched this program at the time of this writing.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik claimed in March that the U.S. government already sold 1,000 $5 million visas, worth a total of $5 billion. Snopes has not independently verified this claim.
