Trump didn’t start with a few hundred million and he didn’t continue his dad’s business. He started relatively small, leveraging his successes to finance new projects, and went in a completely different direction than his father, who mostly built large apartment complexes in Brooklyn and Queens.
And again, the couple hundred million he inherited came more than a decade after Trump Tower, The Art of the Deal and many other successes. He was also 53 or 54 years old by then. He didn’t start out with two hundred million so your ROI figures are meaningless.
How did he finance those early projects? Oh, hid dad financed them. And had all the connections what with it being his industry and all. You and I have very different definitions for “completely different direction”. He took over his dad’s mega successful real estate empire. Paris Hilton didn’t make her money in hotels.
Must be nice to start in between third base and home plate. Turning a couple hundred million into a few billion is in no way impressive. Hell, when these NFL guys worth 100 billion manage to blow it all, it’s a story because it seems so impossible to screw that up. So, Trump managed to not screw up a few hundred million. Don’t make him a good business man.
And, technically, he went bankrupt four times. Many people lost a lot of money in his many implosions of his dad’s business.
At the time of Fred Trump’s death in 1999 his wealth was estimated to be around $250 - $300 million. So he was worth nowhere near $200 million at the time Donald Trump was starting out.
Yeah, Trump benefitted by his education, his drive, his intelligence, his interest in the business, his father’s experience and connections. So what? He took the ball and ran with it and achieved success undreamed of by his father. And he did it twice.
And yes, he took a completely different direction than his father. Fred wanted no part of Manhattan and Donald made it his bitch (to use today’s charming vernacular).
If Trump hadn’t gone in a completely different direction he’d have been building apartment complexes in the outer boroughs like his father did.
Read The Art of the Deal sometime and learn how Trump really built his business in the early days. Then you won’t be coming in here making all these ignorant assertions you’re cluttering up the thread with.
My take is that if your investments earn the market rate of return (inclusive of risk) or even somewhat less, then you are a competent businessman. Beating the market is hard. But Trump hasn’t done that: his investors have regularly taken a bath. I would characterize him an excellent salesperson, self promoter and negotiator. (Trump’s book emphasizes self promotion, so that term isn’t wholly derogatory).
Most of his fortune is tied up in property development: only a slice of it is entrepreneurial. And much of that has now been taken away from him by Univision et al. Contrast with the entrepreneurial Paris Hilton, via Wikipedia: “She has parlayed her media fame into perfumes and a fashion line with her endorsement; her fragrances have reportedly earned $1.5 billion. There are 44 Paris Hilton stores worldwide, with products including perfumes, handbags, watches and footwear. Hilton earns over $10 million a year from product sales[4][5] and, as of 2005, was paid about $300,000 for appearances in clubs and events.[6]”
Not bad, really. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that she is not currently Presidential material.
His father seems like he was a savvy businessman. I’m sure he could have dreamed bigger than a 7% annual rate of return. Donald took the ball and walked with it.
You really need to stop with the 7% return nonsense. Trump didn’t start with $200 million. He didn’t start by managing his father’s vast apartment complexes. And he hasn’t been successful in getting banks and investors to invest in his many projects over the years because he didn’t know what he was doing.
There are always people who like to think outstanding people are overrated. These are the kind of people who think Ringo Starr’s not a very good drummer, that Arnold Schwarzenegger only won bodybuilding contests because he used steroids, and, more recently that Ronda Rousey’s only kicking everyone’s butt in MMA because she hasn’t faced any real competition.
Go ahead and wallow in your ignorance and your false beliefs if it makes you feel better, as it obviously does. But nobody who knows anything about the real world is going to take you seriously.
I agree, and I want to hear more about Trump’s exceptional and outstanding investigation into Obama’s birth, in which he claims he found “interesting things” in Hawaii. I definitely want to know more about these interesting things the exceptional and classy Trump found about Obama’s birth certificate.
I bought my first condo in 1998 using the entire $3000 I had to my name (ah, the days of free money). I sold it in 2001 and pocketed $72,000. I wasn’t rich then, and I am not rich now. But apparently I am as good as Trump, at least by your reasoning.
So he was born rich and got richer. So what? Running a business has nothing to do with running a government. I don’t care if he makes Bill Gates look like a piker, he’s a racist bully who belongs nowhere near any branch of government.
Yeah, even if he’s fabulously wealthy or a good businessman that by itself does not make him deserving of either admiration or censure. You could run either of the Koch Brothers or Warren Buffet or [insert billionaire here] and get someone who has made and moved billions and yet whose main character trait in the eyes of millions is not obnoxiousness. Hell, Ross Perot was an out-and-open wackadoodle and he was more tolerable in polite company.
And fer cryin’ out loud, Mitt Romney was almost the book example of a Gentleman Capitalist and kept getting hit for being “out of touch”… so let’s give the people what the people want, I suppse…
What I see happening is that there has been some sort of popular culture phenomenon in the recent past, in which a large slice of society has grown to see as a great positive asset the stance of being “out of fucks to give”. Trump, ostensibly free of having to please anyone - not the Kochs, not Addleson, not the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute, not the Christian Coalition or whatever it’s called these days, and certainly not Fox News - unless HE feels it’s worth it to please them, gives voice to that phenomenon. He is in effect a political antihero, in it to mortify both the starched-shirt Moneyed Establishment, and the Intelligentsia of BOTH the right and left.
It usually takes a lot to surprise me, but I’m honestly surprised by Trump’s showing in the polls. Always, I have held the Republican Party in extreme contempt, but I thought your average man-in-the-street Republican was still a decent sort for the most part. Now I’m not so sure. How is Trump’s juvenile antics not outraging more of the rank and file?
I figure these shenanigans would be harmful to the Republicans’ image and scare away fence-sitters and independents. Are they? Have there been any polls on how this segment views Trump?