A New York Times investigation found that Michael Boulos and his family benefited financially from proximity to his in-laws for years.
Michael Boulos was an aspiring businessperson, just a few years out of college, when he knelt in the White House Rose Garden in January 2021 and asked President Donald Trump’s daughter Tiffany Trump to marry him.
Almost immediately after she said yes, Boulos, his family and their associates were benefiting financially from his proximity to his soon-to-be in-laws.
The first deal was a family affair. Boulos, working for his cousin’s international yacht brokerage, sold his future brother-in-law Jared Kushner on an investment in a roughly 160-foot superyacht. Unbeknown to Kushner, the firm overcharged him and worked to conceal the true price from him, contemporaneous text messages show. The exact amount is unclear but the messages and a lawyer’s written description of the deal say the overcharge was US$2.5 million ($4.3m).
The second arrangement involved something less tangible: access to the Trumps. Boulos’ cousin promised to get a Saudi businessperson invited to the Boulos-Trump wedding so the businessperson could pose for photographs with the Trumps and project a closeness with the family. “We want you to be at the top of the guest list,” the cousin, Jimmy Frangi, wrote.
Everyone involved denies wrongdoing, and both deals went bad. Kushner’s yacht sits unfinished in Greece. And the Saudi businessperson never got the access (or the wedding invitation) that he had been offered. But Boulos received about US$300,000 from the yacht sale, his cousin says, and US$100,000 from the Saudi businessperson.
A spokesperson for Boulos and Tiffany Trump said Boulos had received only a prenegotiated finder’s fee in the yacht deal and had since ended his business relationship with Frangi, the yacht broker. “Mr. Boulos is proud of and honoured by his close, familial relationship with Mr. Kushner,” the spokesperson said in an email.
As for the money from the Saudi businessperson, the spokesperson said it had nothing to do with access to the Trumps but was instead to settle an unrelated debt. He said Boulos had no involvement in the plan that his cousin had described in text messages.
The Trump administration has blurred the lines between family, business and Government, with the President conducting diplomacy with the same foreign governments that are negotiating cryptocurrency and real estate deals with his family.
The Bouloses are a variation on that theme. The previously unreported deals – which The New York Times pieced together through contracts, court records, contemporaneous text messages and interviews – show that Boulos, his family and his associates were in a position to benefit financially as soon as he became engaged to Trump, the only child of Donald Trump and his former wife Marla Maples.
The wedding, held at the President’s Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, raised the family’s profile and turned the patriarch, Massad Boulos, into an important Trump campaign surrogate. News coverage portrayed him as a billionaire business magnate, even though there is no evidence that he has significant wealth resulting from his own commercial activities. Massad Boulos’ stake in his in-laws’ Nigerian truck company was worth less than US$2, the Times found last year.
Trump’s election in 2024 propelled Massad Boulos into Government. He became a presidential adviser on the Middle East and then a senior State Department adviser on Africa.
And Michael Boulos is seeking business there, according to the former Prime Minister of Guinea.
“He is pursuing work,” the former Prime Minister, Lansana Kouyaté, said in an interview. He would not discuss details but said Boulos told him a few months ago that he was working to “put together some investors from the United States and some governments in Africa”.
Kouyaté said that, as far as he was concerned, the business of Michael Boulos and the political role of his father were inseparable.
The former Prime Minister recounted his conversation with Boulos in two separate interviews. But after Boulos was asked to comment, Kouyaté sent an unsolicited email suddenly denying knowing or speaking with him. Asked to explain the discrepancy, he blamed spotty cell service and said to rely on Boulos’ account of the events. He said that someone, whom he would not identify, had told him to email the Times.
A spokesperson for Boulos said he did not know Kouyaté and had never spoken to him.
Today, Boulos and Tiffany Trump are raising a family. They welcomed their first child, Alexander, in May. Trump has kept a low profile but this week shared photos on Instagram of the family boating and of scenes from the French Riviera.
With the Boulos family close to power, associates are also seeking their own opportunities. Around the time of the presidential inauguration, Habib Saidi, a businessperson and close friend of the Bouloses, was sitting with Boulos at Mar-a-Lago when he spotted Kacy Grine, a financier with deep ties in Saudi Arabia, dining on the terrace.
Saidi stepped away from Boulos and, in front of others, introduced himself to Grine. Saidi said he and his friends wanted to use the opportunity, while they were close to the centre of American power, to do business in the Middle East, according to a person who witnessed the conversation. Saidi mentioned construction projects in Saudi Arabia.
Saidi said he had no recollection of the conversation. Grine said he would not discuss his business interests.
The superyacht ‘Solstice’
As a young yacht broker, Boulos had a knack for business development, Frangi recalled.
Boulos identified his soon-to-be brother-in-law Jared Kushner as a potential client, and brought Frangi to meet him. The cousins made an investment pitch: get a good deal on a yacht, refurbish it and sell or lease it as a moneymaker.
By June 2021, documents show, Boulos was sending Kushner sales presentations about an unfinished yacht, later named the Solstice.
The firm told Kushner that the price to acquire the yacht was €12.5m (about US$15m at the time). That included costs and a flat brokerage commission of €1m for Boulos, Frangi and their colleagues.
“Just so we understand the business deal,” Kushner said on a call, according to portions of a transcript, “you are going to make 1mm on the closing.”
But according to Frangi’s text messages at the time, his firm was making much more than that. The brokers were spending millions less to acquire the yacht than they claimed to Kushner, according to Frangi’s messages. “THIS MAKES US 3.5,” Frangi told an associate.
The text messages show that his brokerage worked to conceal the details from Kushner. “It’s going to be difficult to hide,” an executive at the firm wrote. He said it was important that Kushner not hire an independent appraiser.
Boulos was not copied on those messages, and it is not clear whether he was aware of this aspect of the plan. But text messages make clear that he was personally engaged in the process. When Kushner’s lawyer seemed to be slowing the deal down, for example, Boulos made his displeasure known inside the firm. “Me and Tiffany,” he wrote to associates, are “pissed off”.
The family spokesperson said Tiffany Trump had “no knowledge of or interest in any part of these transactions”.
The sale closed in early 2022. Frangi said he had made about US$400,000 from the commission, and that Boulos had made US$300,000.
Frangi also acknowledged taking extra money that had been earmarked for transaction fees. But he said it was a few hundred thousand dollars, not millions. He said that it was wrong to think of the price as inflated. He said the deal called for Kushner’s investment group to pay a single sum to buy, transport and insure the yacht. If Frangi could do it all for less, then of course he’d make more profit, he said.
If that was the deal, that is not what the contracts say.
As for his text messages, Frangi said they were unreliable. “I write usually very erratic and I just throw things and I always live in the future and everybody knows that about me,” he wrote in a text message to the Times.
Kushner eventually realised that he had been overcharged, according to a lawyer for another broker, who recounted the deal during a financial dispute with Frangi. The lawyer, Taylor Howard, wrote that Kushner had been overcharged by US$2.5m and confronted Frangi, who concealed the reason for the higher price. “In reality, Mr. Frangi was using that to bolster his returns on the transaction,” Howard wrote.
A spokesperson for Kushner declined to comment on details of the deal. He said Boulos had recently been doing a “great job” working to find a new buyer for the yacht, and that a deal was pending.
The Saudi deal
On June 22, 2022, a few months after the yacht deal closed, Boulos and Frangi gathered at the Virginia home of a wealthy Saudi businessperson. Frangi knew the businessperson, Abdulelah Allam, through the yacht business and was millions of dollars in debt to him.
Allam was in Virginia in self-imposed exile. He had potentially billions of dollars in real estate seized by the Saudi Government during a 2017 corruption crackdown by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and was desperate to get his property back.
Frangi came up with a plan, text messages show: he could use his relationship with Boulos and the Trump family to help Allam persuade the Crown Prince to return his property. In exchange, Frangi said, he wanted Allam to forgive his debt and cut him in on a future business deal.
Boulos had needs of his own, Frangi said. “He needs 25,000$,” he told Allam in a text message before the meeting. “Is loan. I told him.” He included Boulos’ name and bank account information.
The day of the Virginia meeting, Allam texted that he had deposited US$100,000 into Boulos’ account.
Everyone involved said the money was not intended to buy access. But they offered contradictory explanations for it.
According to Boulos’ spokesperson, Frangi’s “financially struggling company” owed Boulos money. So, at Frangi’s request, the Saudi businessperson settled the debt by paying Boulos himself, the spokesperson said.
But an aide to Allam said the money was a loan to Boulos that Boulos still intended to repay.
Frangi has explained the money in different ways, at times calling it a loan to Boulos and at other times calling it the settling of a debt.
Whatever the purpose, in the weeks and months that followed the US$100,000 bank deposit, Frangi detailed plans to “soften up” Saudi officials. Part of that involved presenting Allam as being close to the Trumps. “We have a month and a half to get everything started before the wedding,” Frangi wrote in text messages.
They strategised about photographs and access. “Would be good you fly with Michael and Tiffany pls,” he wrote to Allam. Later, in Arabic, he added, “Please delete all texts”.
Boulos was not copied on those text messages. Allam’s aide, Rashad el-Hassanieh, said: “Mikey never promised anything. He said, ‘I’ll listen, but I can’t promise anything.’”
Boulos was not involved, his spokesperson said. “Mr. Boulos has never dealt with, been involved with, nor discussed Mr. Allam’s Saudi Arabia concerns with anyone, including Mr. Allam himself,” he said.
As months went on, people around Allam warned him that the plan had little chance of working, messages show.
They were right. Allam never got his wedding invite, his access or his property back.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Justin Scheck, Tariq Panja, Jo Becker and Bradley Hope
Photographs by: Nick Hagen, Stelios Misinas and Stephen Hiltner
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES