Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Massad Boulos, who has been widely described as a billionaire and a lawyer and was recently named as one of Donald Trump's advisors on Middle East affairs, appears to be neither a billionaire nor a licensed attorney, according to public records and interviews.
Boulos first entered the public eye in 2018, when his son Michael met Tiffany Trump at a club in Greece and the pair began dating. The couple married at Mar-A-Lago in 2022, making Massad Boulos Tiffany's father-in-law. He was credited in news stories with playing a key role in Donald Trump's 2024 electoral victory, helping peel Arab American voters away from Democrats in battlegrounds like Michigan.
Earlier this month, Trump said Boulos would be a "senior advisor" on Middle Eastern affairs, joining a team that includes Trump's longtime friend and supporter Steven Witkoff, his pick for ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Marco Rubio, his nominee for secretary of state, who will shape US policy in the region. At the time, Trump described Boulos as an "accomplished lawyer" and a "highly respected leader in the business world."
But Trump apparently inflated Boulos's résumé. Business Insider found no proof of Boulos's supposed billions. And while he may have attended law school, he hasn't passed a bar exam and can't practice law.
Claims of the Boulos family's wealth first started circulating in English-language media in 2018, when Tiffany Trump's relationship with Michael Boulos became public. The New York Post said his family "owns a multibillion-dollar conglomerate" and later mentioned Boulos Enterprises. Vanity Fair echoed the description of the Boulos businesses as "worth billions," a description that was picked up by the Times.
On December 2, the New York Times said Massad Boulos built "his wealth in West Africa" and runs two companies, SCOA Nigeria and Boulos Enterprises. The Financial Times called him an "auto tycoon" who leads both companies, while ABC called him a "billionaire businessman" who "runs Boulos Enterprises."
But Massad Boulos doesn't run Boulos Enterprises, according to several former employees and its actual boss, Boulos Boulos. Boulos Enterprises is part of the Boulos Group, a holding company owned by a different group of Lebanese Nigerians with the same last name.
A due-diligence report for Boulos Enterprises Ltd. created by Moody's Orbis database doesn't mention Massad Boulos. Archived copies of the Boulos Group website from 2016 and 2018 didn't mention him, either. And Elephant Africa Holding, a Mauritius company created by the Boulos Group to hold its paper businesses, also doesn't mention Massad in its corporate filings.
On Thursday, the Times called Boulos's wealth and backstory into question and said he previously misled one of its reporters by answering "yeah" when asked if it was accurate to call his company a multi-billion dollar business.
Beyond headlines in news outlets, BI couldn't find any evidence to suggest Massad Boulos is a billionaire. The company Massad Boulos actually does run, SCOA Nigeria, which has a subsidiary called SCOA Motors, is a penny stock. Its shares trade for about two Nigerian naira, roughly a tenth of a US cent, making the entire business worth about $865,000. That's not Billionaire's Row money, but it could buy you a 957-square-foot condo in Queens.
The company's latest annual report, which is partly printed in Comic Sans, is consistent with such a valuation. For its financial year ending September 30, SCOA reported about 5.9 billion naira, or $3.7 million, in revenue and about 25 million naira, or $15,562, in post-tax profits. The year before, when sales were weaker, SCOA lost about 715 million naira, or $444,000.
In interviews with the New York Times, Boulos has said he didn't correct the record because he doesn't discuss his businesses. He also said it was hard to value his family's businesses.
It's possible that Massad Boulos's family could have other sources of wealth. His wife, Sarah Fadoul Boulos, is the daughter of another Lebanese businessman in Africa, Michel Zouhair Fadoul, whose company boasts of a presence in "more than 10 countries" and has been listed among the most successful Lebanese businesses in Africa.
On social media, Massad and his family seem to live large, posting content from a yacht floating off the southern coast of France and a ski run in the Alps. While Massad Boulos has virtually no history of political giving, his son Michael made $200,000 in political contributions in two days in 2020. Michael was also reported to have proposed to Tiffany with a $1.2 million ring — which he "upgraded" to an even pricier piece by their wedding day.
Phone numbers listed for Massad Boulos and his wife were disconnected. Efforts to reach him through family members and political associates weren't successful. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
It's also not clear that Massad Boulos is a "lawyer," as Donald Trump has described him.
Some news outlets say that Boulos has a law degree from the University of Houston. But a spokesman for the University of Houston system said that's not correct; Boulos has a bachelor's degree in "general business" from one of its smaller schools, the University of Houston-Downtown.
In a 2015 interview on Nigerian TV, Sarah Boulos said her husband "graduated as a lawyer from Thurgood Marshall School," part of Texas Southern University, before they moved to Nigeria. Massad Boulos also listed a law degree from the school on his LinkedIn profile before the profile went offline, according to information saved in the contact database Rocketreach.
Texas Southern officials didn't respond to several requests for comment on Wednesday and Thursday.
But graduating from law school doesn't make someone a lawyer. Nahdiah Hoang, the executive director of the Texas Board of Law Examiners, said in an email that Boulos applied to take the July 1996 bar exam, but he either didn't take it or didn't pass.
A spokeswoman for the Texas Bar said Boulos "is not now, and never has been, an attorney licensed to practice law in Texas."
BI also checked bar records for DC and 47 other states — covering 99% of the US population — and found Boulos wasn't registered as a lawyer in any of those states, either. (BI was unable to confirm if Boulos was registered to practice law in Alaska or South Dakota.)
L'Orient Le Jour, a Lebanese newspaper, reported that Boulos is also a citizen of Lebanon, Nigeria, and France. There's no public evidence that Boulos is licensed as a lawyer in any of those places.
He was not listed in the directories for the 11 largest French bar associations, which cover two-thirds of French lawyers. Lawyers in Lebanon must be registered with one of two bar associations; one of them, the Beirut Bar Association, said Boulos wasn't in its database, and the other didn't respond to repeated inquiries. The Nigerian Bar Association and the country's Supreme Court, which maintains its registry of lawyers, did not respond to emails about whether Boulos was an attorney.
Narimes Parakul contributed reporting.
