# Could the average Bozo have made the fortune of Donald Trump? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 11, 2016, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-average-bozo-have-made-the-fortune-of-donald-trump/748688 "2016-03-11T20:09:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Abner\_Ravenwood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c4cdca/32.png) [@Abner\_Ravenwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Abner_Ravenwood)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2016, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-average-bozo-have-made-the-fortune-of-donald-trump/748688/21 "2016-03-12T19:39:25Z")
Are we talking Bozo the Clown, or Bozo the District Attorney? ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2016, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-average-bozo-have-made-the-fortune-of-donald-trump/748688/22 "2016-03-12T19:58:09Z")
> [@pool](#): > > I realize that Donald Trump likely wouldn’t have made billions of dollars had it not been for the inheritance of $200 Million… Donald Trump has not netted “billions of dollars”. His net worth is difficult to estimate as it includes intangibles such as the promotional value of the “Trump” name (which is had variously public ally estimated to be worth US$4B, US$8B, and most recently, US$10B) but the actual amount of money he could raise by liquidating assets and property are estimated variously to be somewhere in the mid-hundred million territory. Like most exceptionally wealthy people, much of his “actual” (realizable) wealth is highly leveraged “paper wealth” that fluctuates with the value of real estate and commodity/stock markets, and the value of his name is only insofar what people will pay him for the use of it (which is no doubt one of his motivations in running for office). Fortune magazine [estimated his net income last year to be around US$123M](http://fortune.com/2016/03/02/donald-trump-tax-returns-income/), or about a third of what he has publically claimed, which is not bad for a dwarf agency-appendaged buffoon with a bad combover…if he started with, say, a couple hundred thousand dollars. For someone who began a career with an inheritance already in the hundreds of millions and the kind of family connections he had, it is less than impressive for a candidate whose primarily claim on his qualifications to be chief executive to one of the most powerful nations on the planet rests upon his fiscal prowess. > [@Epimetheus](#): > > Nowhere near 200 million, but Elon Musk started Zip2 in 1995 with an “inheritance” of 28k and turned it into a net worth of an actual 10 billion dollars so far. Elon Musk does not have a net worth of “an actual 10 billion dollars”; he is an investor in a company that has been valued as potentially worth US$10B if stock were to be sold on a public exchange. The two quantities are vastly different; for one, Musk is far from the only investor in SpaceX (and at least at one point had very little of his personal net worth invested in the company while trying to get Tesla and SolarCity up and running), so even if SpaceX went public and the market were as excited about SpaceX today as analysts predicted it would be a year ago when that evaluation was made his realized profit would be a fraction of that. The valuation of SpaceX could change in a heartbeat with another launch failure or even the admission that the expected order-of-magnitude reduction in launch costs cannot be realized. A brief perusal of historical valuation of aerospace companies will aptly demonstration how quickly and dramatically such valuations (dependent upon proposed but unrealized capabilities or expectation of future large contracts) can change rapidly. As an example, the LTV Corporation (an aerospace and later airline and consumer products conglomerate) was considered in the 'Seventies to be an almost unstoppable technical leader, mentioned in the same breath as IBM, Xerox, and Martin Marietta. You may be forgiven for never having heard of LTV because it went completely bankrupt in 1990 after years of struggling with gross underperformance and attempts at diversification after losing lucrative contracts to other competitors. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Monocracy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monocracy/32/4493_2.png) [@Monocracy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monocracy)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2016, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-average-bozo-have-made-the-fortune-of-donald-trump/748688/23 "2016-03-13T16:31:15Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Well if the average Bozo is smart enough to just invest in a low cost index fund, then Bozo would have [done better](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-probably-better-investing-donald-233020366.html). > > > [@](#): > > > > Trump Worth $10 Billion Less Than If He’d Simply Invested in Index Funds … Imagine Trump had retired in 1982, sold his real estate holdings and invested his $500 million in the S&P 500 — that is, 500 stocks representing the American stock market. > > > > From 1982 through the end of 2014, the S&P 500 index had an annualized return, including reinvested dividends, of 11.86 percent, according to MoneyChimp’s S&P 500 Compound Annual Growth Rate calculator. > > > > Per this calculator, every dollar invested in January 1982 would have been worth $40 by December of 2014. That means Trump’s initial $500 million would have grown to $20 billion. That’s twice what Trump says he’s worth today. You mean if someone had invested all their money at the exact instant the stock market hit a 30 year low? I don’t think the average bozo would be able to pick the precise entry point in the stock market that would maximize their profit over 34 years. It’s similar to those GW deniers who say “The earth has gotten cooler in the last X years.” Cherry pick a starting date and you can prove almost anything. > **[Dow Jones - 100 Year Historical Chart](https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart)** > > Interactive chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stock market index for the last 100 years. Historical data is inflation-adjusted using the headline CPI and each data point represents the month-end closing value. The current month is... ---
**Author:** ![sleestak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/919ad9/32.png) [@sleestak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sleestak)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2016, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-average-bozo-have-made-the-fortune-of-donald-trump/748688/24 "2016-03-13T19:22:06Z")
> [@Typo\_Negative](#): > > Do we have any idea how the other people who inherited 200 million dollars have done? If you look at people who won large amounts of money via the lottery, 95% end up at the same income level as where they started with 5 years. Slee [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-average-bozo-have-made-the-fortune-of-donald-trump/748688.md?page=1)