Trump Worth $10 Billion? You're Likely a Smarter Investor
While Trump did have a big head start -- his father, Fred, was a multimillionaire New York real estate developer -- there's no doubt The Donald has created a fortune of his own. But even if he had stopped working 30 years ago, he could have done much better. All he had to do was shift away from real estate and park his money in the same place that you can: an unmanaged stock index fund.
The Background
To compare Trump's performance to that of an unmanaged index fund, we need to know two things: his beginning net worth and his current net worth.
There's considerable debate about Trump's net worth. It's estimated at $4.1 billion in the latest Forbes 400 list, which puts him in the No. 133 spot of the richest folks in America. However, Wednesday he issued a press release announcing his net worth at $10 billion.
Fine. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his net worth is $10 billion.
Now we need to establish his net worth at some point in the past. Trump was on the Forbes 400 in 1982, when the magazine published its first annual list of America's wealthiest denizens.
That year, Forbes said Trump's fortune was "estimated at over $200 million," but also acknowledged that Trump claimed it was "$500 million," according to Timothy L. O'Brien's book "TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald."
