You’re a funny guy.
Well, Trump has twice built multi-billion dollar businesses, the first time growing it from a million dollar investment from his father and the second time from being almost a billion in the hole. His finances and his business have survived numerous divorces and lawsuits and bankruptcies and the death of four (IIRC) of his key executives in a helicopter crash.
Like him or not (and choose to focus on a handful of his failed efforts rather than his hundreds of successful ones or not) the guy knows how to build and run vast and complicated financial empires. There’s not a person on this board who could come close to accomplishing what he’s accomplished.
:dubious: Well, Bernie Madoff built a multi-billion dollar business from an initial capital of $5000 he earned from working as a lifeguard and sprinkler installer. I don’t think Madoff’s business achievements qualify as impressive either.
The point is that making large amounts of money by massively screwing over other people is not a reliable indicator of business acumen.
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His finances and his business have survived numerous divorces and lawsuits and bankruptcies […]
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Actually, a lot of his businesses haven’t survived his very numerous lawsuits and bankruptcies. That’s not a sign of a great businessman. There is no reliable evidence that Trump’s net worth is even as much as he would have accumulated just by putting his multimillion-dollar inheritance into an investment account. That’s not a sign of a great businessman either.
[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
Like him or not (and choose to focus on a handful of his failed efforts rather than his hundreds of successful ones or not) the guy knows how to build and run vast and complicated financial empires.
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What “hundreds of successful ones”? I don’t see how you can get a number like that except by pretending that every company that has any backing whatsoever from Trump’s businesses counts as one of Trump’s own “efforts”. The enterprises that Trump has actually spent his time involved in have had a much less impressive success/failure ratio.
And remember, Trump is the son of someone who was one of the richest and most influential men in America back in the 1970s. He had tens of millions of dollars in assets and credit available to him from the family weath. Building and running vast and complicated financial enterprises for someone in that position is not any more remarkable than becoming an entertainment celebrity is for someone who’s the child of wealthy influential entertainment celebrities. Trump is basically the Charlie Sheen of business success: i.e., a hard worker with a gift for branding and attention-getting who would nonetheless be most likely a complete nonentity if it weren’t for the backing of a high-achieving and well-connected parent.
By the same token, Donald Trump couldn’t come close to accomplishing what many on this board have accomplished in other fields—literary, scientific, legal, medical, etc. (And AFAIK none of us got multimillion-dollar inheritances to jump-start our accomplishment activities.) So why should we consider Trump’s accomplishments any more impressive than those of our highly accomplished fellow Dopers, except out of sheer sycophantic fawning over money and power?