The only venture that Trump has ever achieved moderate success at, is a television show in which he was involved in about 5% of the production. The rest of his life's achievements have all turned to shit.
The bloke is a conman and is worth next to nothing. He has networth that is estimated to be in the billions, but doesn't include the billions he owes in debt finance which I woudnt be surprised, exceeds the value of net worth.
As an example of what I mean, Manchester United is valued at 3.5 billion usd or thereabouts. That doesn't mean that if the Glazers wipe the 500 million usd in debt associated with United, Uniteds value will increase to 4 bilion usd. Rather the 3.5 billion is the value of the club based on the market valuation which is exclusive of debt owing by the company.
Similar to a family home. I buy a house for $500,000.00. I finance $400,000.00 of it. That doesn't mean the value of the house is actually $100,000.00, the house is still valued at $500,000.00 and that value is listed next to my name as an asset because I own the Property irrespectively of how much I own on finance. However to me personally, I have $100,000.00 of money in that house so although the gross value of that house is $500,000.00 its net worth to me is $100,000.00 after I pay back creditors. (obviously excluding interest etc)
The way property investors work is that they buy that house for $500,000.00 which also sometimes includes leveraging up to $495,000.00 with finance over a number of loans. If it is an existing build and the investor does not plan to make any changes, they take the punt that the properties value will increase to $600,000.00 and sell out at that point. They either then repay the loan of $495,000.00, take their $105,000.00 "profit" and proceed to invest in another property with some or all of the money; or sell part of the first property to another investor for $300,000.00 and instead of repaying the loan, borrow another $200,000 and purchase a second Property for $500,000.00. Now they are in the position where they owe $795,000.00 in debt, but have $800,000.00 in assets next to their name. So in actual fact, if they were to sell all their assets and pay back their loans, their actually position is $5,000.00... See how somebodies networth can be artificially inflated?
Trump made a "brand" out of doing just that but also included new builds and ripping construction companies off in the process. Problem is, the clown didn't know when to invest wisely and has consistently bankrupted himself over the course of his life. On more than one occasion, he has developed a product that was actually a good investment; however, due to his piss poor skills, took the profit and invested into a bad product (see his second casino in the early 90's or the XFL). This results in the second product going bad which resulted in him losing all his profit from the first property in the second property. Compounding that, because the second property was such a rubbish deal, hes actually owes more on that Property than the money he used to invested in it from the first property. As a result he's now going to lodge a bankruptcy form because he either borrowed so much on the first property to finance the scond property or invested his equity in the first property to the second property, that by the time he sells the first property, there is insufficient funds to pay off the debt owing on the second property.
