You said that I was misrepresenting the situation.
During Fred’s life, he served as collateral for Trump Tower. Outside of that one building, every other building owned by Donald went into bankruptcy and by the time if his father’s death, he had brought himself at least into a debt of $2.5b. It is likely that he also had various legal liabilities due to SEC violations, fraud suit losses, etc. that add to that number.
His buildings were all taken away from him and, I presume, he was made liable for some smaller amount than $2.5b but still, likely, something fairly large. Let’s assume $50m. A fair discount.
If I remember correctly, he took a $200-300m loan from Deutsche and he liquidated his father’s business, which was composed of approximately 100 buildings totaling 27,000 apartments in New York City itself and, presumably, a greater number of buildings that aren’t just apartments. Fred’s wealth was divided among the children, so we can assume that Donald received about 1/5th of that fortune.
If we assume that each of Fred’s buildings was worth something like $5m (in today’s money), then he’d have gained about another $100m there.
So he’s down $50m and up $300-400m via loans and family death. He should have between $250m and $350m
He purchases six more buildings, Mar-a-lago, 40 Wall Street, a golf resort in the South that I forget the location of, another one in California, the DC hotel, and the place in Scotland. If we assume that these are each worth $10m on average, then he has spent $60m.
At this point, he seems to be out of money. This implies that he only had $60m, where we would expect him to have 4-5x that amount. But as said, he’s beleaguered by a history of bad business operation and legal issues and we have no strong reason to expect that he would change or have learned anything given that his last giant failures were when he was already in his 40s, so we should assume that he’s continuing to add to his debts through poor choices and new legal issues.
That his new businesses seem to succeed may be some small indication that he has learned how to run things successfully.
However, Donald seems to have discovered that he does have at least one talent that can be turned into money, which is to be entertaining. And spending time in Hollywood, he picks up the same no-business-acumen-necessary side business as everyone else they with a “name” and rent that name out.
While busy in Hollywood, he lets others (e.g. Ivanka) manage his properties while he himself tries to figure out how to work fat jokes into episodes of the Apprentice.
With Ivanka running things, his name earning a few million every year, and Apprentice earnings, he has possibly found a recipe for financial survival.
But we note, for example, that he continues to regularly not pay money he owes. He yanks funding for people who are in legal jeopardy who could turn on him, like Michael Cohen, ensuring that he’s liable to end up in jail after leaving the Presidency.
The fair indication would be that despite having achieved something which should have been a maintainable business, even for someone like him, he’s still managing to dip into the red regularly.
And overall, one suspects that had he been good at business then Fred would have given him everything. So as it is, he did turn 100 buildings, in New York City, into a far smaller number, and the value of those buildings is not so great as to make that anything like a good turnout.