Since this keeps getting bandied about it probably should be noted that this number is chimerical. Nobody really knows how much Trump got, but it was probably rather less than this though still a very large amount of money. Tens of millions, surely. Hundreds of millions? Hard to say, but maybe not.
I find this whole thread kind of odd, though. My opinion of Trump as a man or politician could hardly get much lower, but I’d happily stipulate that Trump the businessman is probably more savvy than Obama. He’s been immersed in business world since he was a kid. Doesn’t make Trump a good businessman or Obama a bad one per se, but Trump surely understands the ins and outs of complex transactions a bit better. How could he not?
Which has nothing to do with anything as far as I’m concerned. People who think businessmen make better politicians are deluding themselves. Governments aren’t corporations and function nothing like them.
Magiver, do you have any cite for the extraordinary claim that Locrian has a net worth lower than Trump’s? Because very, very few people have a net worth that low.
So zoid mentioned Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton (um, not Perez Hilton, right?). How much are they worth? Well, according to various online sources, Kim Kardashian is worth $350 million (and that’s not including what Kanye West is worth, which is only $160 million) and Paris Hilton is worth $300 million (and very little of that comes from the Hilton family fortune, since her grandfather is giving away 97% of his fortune to charity). Those are people who have made a fortune based just on their names and the products they’ve put their names on. Let’s elect one of them President.
Trump is a high-stakes gambler, and he had the benefit of starting out with a gigantic stack of chips. That’s it. He made money, he lost money, he made more money, he lost more money…that’s what he does. Sometimes he’d win, sometimes he’d lose. This is one possible way to become very rich, though again he had the advantage of starting out ahead - referring to it as business sense is not really accurate. It’s a strategy, a reckless strategy. He’s been yo-yoing with his money for his whole adult life. That’s what he wants to do. As has been pointed out many times if he had simply invested that initial money into an index fund and just sat on it, he’d be richer than he is now. But the Trumps of the world just don’t roll that way.
Trump is good at promoting Trump. Even if he is indeed a billionaire - which is obviously disputed - he’s not the kind that is worth admiring. He’s not Bill Gates or Howard Hughes, he didn’t get his money by inventing some kind of useful device or pioneering some innovative concept. He’s not like Warren Buffet, he’s not a financial guru who used finely honed mental skills to make a series of wise business decisions. He’s not like Mark Cuban who worked his way up from the very bottom through sheer determination and savvy strategy.
He isn’t even like the guys who founded Amway. Amway is a con job, but it’s a franchised con job. You get your con man starter kit, and go to work, and if you’re successful you can con people out of millions of dollars, and if you’re unsuccessful you lose money or barely scrape by. But it’s a sound business model for the people at the top, and the guys who came up with it were actually very clever, even though it’s a total pyramid scam.
Trump is just a gambler. He throws money around, some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t. I don’t really view this as “business smarts.”
No, I’m not wrong. He was TOLD Solyndra was going to fail. He went ahead with the loan anyway. Big surprise it went to someone who shoved money into his campaign.
Steering tax payer money into a donor’s business is not a good business practice.
It’s morally, ethically and financially a business failure. The best you can claim from your ridiculous rebuttal is that he generated .09% profit. Not 1 percent. Not .1 percent. .09%.
Come back when you have an example of Obama using his own money in any business venture. Any at all. He gets paid for running his pie hole. That’s his income. He has no business background. NONE.
Big Fucking Deal. What the HELL are you trying to prove?
Trump made his money cheating and fucking over people. Is that what you consider admirable?
He hasn’t even paid his Trump University settlement. If he was truly a multi-billionaire, that’s couch cushion spare change.
Or do you consider it an honorable thing to ignore a court order to return money he stole?
This is comparing apples & oranges. Trump was not in the stocks and shares business, it’s not what he grew up with. He grew up in the NY real estate business.This is the business he inherited from his father. Trump’ s business acumen can really only be compared to other real estate moguls, preferably ones based in NY.
It is agreed the hidden premise in the thread is very weird as the idea of the comparison is without sense.
Has Obama ever pretended to being a businessman or actually tried? It does not seem so, in which case we do not in fact know if he could be a good businessman or not. And of course, what do you mean by businessman? since as anyone paying attention to detail knows, the term can cover many different types of activities…
But it is not true that governments function nothing like corporations. They indeed do not function like the family companies, particularly the unstructured or weakly structured family business. But the large bureaucratic industiral or technological corporation, with thousands upon thousands of employees, they do indeed function in the executive side or the permanent bureaucracy side of the government very much like those corporations. In the French model I see lots of back and forth between the senior managements of these - and the skill sets and the personal attributes that make for the good manager of the large scale Administrative entity (and even the politics playing with other actors in the system) certainly have many commonalities.
But of course that is a very specific kind of business experience and senior management experience in the particular - one that Trump certainly had no success with as the examples of when he tried to run such as with the previously successful airline he bought, he was a complete failure and wrecked the previously successful entity.
You are very wrong it would seem from a weird ideological circus mirrors understanding… as my reading of the history of this after reading it earlier in this thread does not support the idea of any senior executive involvement in the specific program decisions.
By what evidence do you have the US president sits on the loan guaranty committees?
your citation to the fact that the US president sat on the selection committee?
As the Trump organization is run as a family enterprise with no corporation type real separation of the family from the business, a giant network of the LLCs I believe it is mostly, without a structure like a public company, the relating of a lack of Obama’s personal bankruptcy ever with the repeated bankruptcies of the highly personalized businesses of Trump has an analytical validity.
Certainly in my real world of finance for the entrepreneurs who have the personal type holdings, we do indeed very much care about their personal bankruptcies history. But then of course it is the analysis sans political ideology.
It is notable in that it is not very kind to the Due Diligence in the (long) assessment but it also does highlight that the Solyndra management engaged in the deception of even the private credit rating agency, Fitch (a sophisticated actor) - elsewhere it is noted in this PDF that there was also specialist advisory firm that was also actively deceived by the firm.
It is an interesting read, this document, and only 13 pages. As a person who has been involved in these supported financing processes (although not this American one) it seems coherent and credible to me. Obviously not a flattering analysis, but it does render his assertions complete nonsense - of course clearly drawn from the political-ideological press accounts.
In any case, the entire process and concept has nothing to do with an assessment of the “business” or even the banking (the more relevant idea) skills of Obama himself. It is completely irrelevant to the subject. It does raise a strong question of why the US would lodge such programs in an administrative entity that is not otherwise qualified to engage in the lending analysis, it seems to me a stupid choice, but that’s doubtless from the politics of when the program was created (I read it was in fact initially a creation of the Bush the Son administration, so doubtless there is a bi-partisan policy error here).
Without Daddy’s money, Trump is nothing. Considering he had a head start somewhere in the hundreds of millions, he hasn’t been particularly successful. Factor in the decades of tax evasion, and he’s just a fucking parasite.
What you need to declare bankruptcy is to spend more money than you have. Be caught short in an exposed position because you could not cover your debts. Often because you convinced yourself you are a better businessman than you are and invest money. The source of your cash flow does not actually make it more difficult to go bankrupt.
You are assuming he thinks he needs more money. Anyway, the question is not Is Obama a billionaire and if not, why not? It is, is Trump a better businessman than Obama?
And failing savagely over and over and over again, despite being handed every advantage, including millions and millions of dollars from daddy, really tells us that Obama doesn’t need any spectacular financial successes to outdo Trump.