How Much Is The Donald Worth

All this talk about Donald Trump got me to wondering how much money he really has. It seems he doesn't have money. He has 'holdings'. And debt. Massive debt. Trump Entertainment Resorts alone, which is worth $135 million to Donald, carries $1.2 billion in debt.

His 'holdings' are real estate. And he does NOT own a lot of the things he claims he does.

So how much is he worth? No one knows. Estimates range from zero to $2.7 billion. Donald's claims range anywhere from $5 billion to $9.5 billion. And that variation can come out of him on the same day!

I have no idea what Mr. Trump's net worth is. Tim O'Brien is probably the closest with his figure of $150-$250 million. And don't repeat that. Dandy Don is sueing Tim for $5 billion for saying Donny is NOT a billionaire.

Here is the information I gathered while trying to find out his net worth. I've included links to the sources for each piece of information.

And Mr. Trump, if you would like to respond to any of this, let me know. I will publish anything you would like right here unedited (please don't tell me I'm fired!). I give everyone an open forum and a fair chance to explain or defend themselves. $250 million is nothing to sneeze at, but he may well be worth billions. I don't know.

From New York Times writer Timothy L. O'Brien
Two weeks ago, Forbes published its list of America's wealthiest people. Donald held 83rd place with what Forbes described as a $2.7 billion fortune.
Never mind that anyone on the Forbes list -- and a lot of people off it -- can tell you how little Forbes knows about them, or their assets. Just read Trump himself. In 1990's ``Surviving at the Top,'' Trump wrote that he didn't understand why anyone took the Forbes rich list seriously. ``A sloppy, highly arbitrary estimate of certain people's net worth,'' he called it.

From The Motley Fool.
First, let's deal with Trump's net worth. It is simply a myth that he has much equity in New York real estate. I know, Forbes says he's worth $1 billion, but Forbes is wrong and knows it (did you notice how much nicer Donald was to the late Malcom Forbes in his current book than in "Staying on Top?" Did you notice how many ads Trump International Hotel had in the Forbes 400 this year?)

Donald J. Trump, the supposed billionaire, has margined his stock to his investment bank DLJ for a $40 million loan, according to theStreet.com. The piece said that if the stock falls below a certain price, Donald's in default to DLJ and they can take over his stock. DJT's 1997 10-K, in fact, referred to this bizarre transaction, and said a default could trigger a change in control.
So what we have here is a company that's hurting, that has negative cash flow, and a Chairman who's using the precious cash to buy stock back and who - coincidentally I'm sure - defaults on a separate loan if the stock drops below a certain price. This, in my mind, is an act of desperation that will not work without a radical and quick transformation of the Atlantic City, which is not in the cards.
It's complicated, I know, but it's all in the public domain. And the facts are right. The noose is tightening.

From New York Times writer Timothy L. O'Brien
Forbes, in bestowing a $2.6 billion fortune on Donald in its 2004 rich list, credited him with owning 18 million square feet of Manhattan property, which certainly is an impossibility. On one occasion, Donald told me that the West Side yards, which he doesn't own, would have 10 million square feet of salable space when the site, now known as Riverside South, was completed. (Mr. Weisselberg told me, alternatively, that the site would have about five million square feet of salable space.) However measured, the yards were by far the biggest property in Donald's former Manhattan real estate portfolio - but he no longer owned the tract.

Donald whittled down his mammoth personal debts by forfeiting most of what he owned. Chase Manhattan, which lent Donald the money he needed to buy the West Side yards, his biggest Manhattan parcel, forced a sale of the prized tract to Asian developers. Though Donald would claim after the yards were sold that he remained a principal owner of the site, property records did not list him as such.

Donald continued to carve out a niche for himself in New York real estate as the manager of other people's properties. In 1994, General Electric was looking for someone to refurbish the old Gulf & Western building on Columbus Circle in Manhattan, and retained Donald. Presto, the renovated skyscraper was christened Trump International Hotel and Tower. Even though Donald didn't own the building, it later flashed across the opening credits of "The Apprentice" as if he did.

Donald's recent golf course ventures have produced some sterling new properties, but the values he assigns those deals appear to be hyper-inflated. Donald's Palm Beach course, for example, has about 285 members who paid $250,000 for memberships, for a total of $71.25 million. Donald borrowed about $47 million to build the course and a new clubhouse. So he banked about $24 million on the deal, before other costs. He leases the land beneath the course from Palm Beach County; he doesn't own it. But Donald carries the course on his books as an asset worth $200 million.

According to former members of the Trump Organization, Donald did not retain any ownership of the site's real estate - the owners merely promised to give him about 30 percent of the profits once the site was completely developed or sold. Until that time, the owners kept Donald on to do what he did best: build. They gave him a modest construction fee and a management fee to oversee the development. They also allowed him to slap his name on the buildings that eventually rose on the yards because his well-known moniker allowed them to charge a premium for their condos.

Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren't his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations. Even so, Trump Hotels' shares rose to about $36 in 1996, giving Donald a stake worth about $290 million. With little real estate left to speak of in Manhattan, Donald's wealth was centered on his casinos.

But in subsequent years Trump Hotels' stock price tanked. Had Donald tried to pare down some $1.8 billion in debt smothering the casino company and spruced up the operation, he might have ridden a reignited gambling boom and grown his newly seeded fortune. Instead, Trump Hotels, which never earned a profit in any year between 1995 and 2005, became Donald's private stockpile of ready cash. In 1996 alone, Trump Hotels' shares fell to $12 from $35.50. About a decade later, the New York Stock Exchange delisted the shares entirely and any kid with a quarter could buy the stock. (Trump Hotels recently reorganized as Trump Entertainment Resorts; it now carries $1.2 billion in debt, and Donald's stake in the company is worth about $135 million.)

When I interviewed Donald in 1996, he was effusive about his casinos and somehow seemed to forget that he owned relatively little Manhattan property at the time.

From Bloomberg
O'Brien argues Trump is worth, at most, $250 million. His assessment is based on interviews with three sources anonymous to the reader -- but known to editors and lawyers at both the New York Times and Warner Books -- supposedly very familiar with Trump's finances.

The sources insisted on anonymity, says O'Brien, because they were worried they might be sued by Donald Trump. They were right to worry: One goal of the lawsuit, according to Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz, is to find out who they are.

The suit claims that Trump made the details of his obvious billionaire-ness available to the author, only to have the author ignore them. ``O'Brien spent approximately three hours at Trump's offices,'' it reads, ``but he scarcely glanced at any of the thousands of pages of documents made available to him.

From Donald himself
"When I was in trouble in the early 90's, I went around and - you know, a lot of people couldn't believe I did this because they think I have an ego - I went around and openly told people I was worth minus $900 million," -Donald Trump

From Wehaitians
When I popped the wealth question, he paused momentarily and scrunched his eyebrows. We had reached a crossroads. Out it came. He pursed his lips a little bit. Out it came. He blinked. Out it came, rising up from deep within him.
"I would say six [billion]. Five to six. Five to six," he said.
Hmm. The previous August he told me that his net worth was $4 billion to $5 billion. Then, later that same day that August, he said his casino holdings represented 2 percent of his wealth, which at the time gave him a net worth of about $1.7 billion. In the same day, Donald's own estimates of his wealth differed by as much as $3.3 billion. How could that happen? Was Donald living in his own private zone of wildly escalating daily inflation, a Trump Bolivia? And his $1.7 billion figure in August was well below the $2.6 billion that Forbes would credit him when it published its rich list just a couple of months later.
Now Donald was saying he was worth $5 billion to $6 billion.
"Five to six. Five to six."
And on the nightstand in my bedroom at Donald's Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, was a glossy brochure that said he was worth $9.5 billion.

From Wikipedia.
In January of 2006, Trump filed a $5 billion libel suit against biographer Timothy L. O'Brien and publisher Warner Books for claiming that he was only a millionaire with a personal worth of somewhere between $150 million-$250 million and not a billionaire.