President Donald Trump has said since the beginning of his political career that his vast wealth insulates him from ordinary political pressures and makes him less likely to engage in corruption. And while he may not be in the same financial league as his most important supporter, Elon Musk, the president is indeed plenty wealthy.
According to Forbes, President Trump was tied with six other people including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings for the honor of being the 319th wealthiest person in the world in 2024. The path to the Forbes 400 has been long and winding for the 47th president, including pitfalls and reversals that nearly wiped out his fortune multiple times, as well as legal troubles that may have landed him in prison for the rest of his life had he not won the 2024 presidential election.
How did he amass his fortune?
In Trump’s telling, he is a self-made man who built his fortune with a small loan from his father. But in “every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth,” said The New York Times, which claims that his parents ultimately transferred nearly $1 billion to their children while paying almost nothing in taxes. “Fred Trump was relentless and creative in finding ways to channel this wealth to his children,” and much of his maneuvering was “structured to sidestep gift and inheritance taxes using methods tax experts described to The Times as improper or possibly illegal.”
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Trump’s father, Fred, was a real estate tycoon who operated mostly in and around New York City, and Donald Trump “served his own apprenticeship in the less glamorous family business of renting apartments,” said the Los Angeles Times. One of his earliest duties was “booting poor, nonpaying tenants” out of a Cincinnati apartment complex purchased by his father. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1968, Trump returned to New York City and took on a larger role in the family business. He “took control of the company – which he renamed the Trump Organization – in 1971,” said BBC. His “first big move” was “to negotiate an unusual arrangement with the government of New York City” including a 40-year tax abatement in order to purchase the Commodore Hotel in New York City, said the Miller Center. The hotel was relaunched in 1980 and rebranded as the Grand Hyatt Hotel.
As his portfolio expanded, “the one that made him,” was Trump Tower, said Curbed. In 1979, he bought the department store Bonwit Teller for $10 million and demolished it to make way for the mixed-use high-rise that would eventually bear his name. When it opened on October 1, 1983, Trump Tower “offered an unprecedented mix of high-end retail space and luxury condominiums,” said The Hollywood Reporter. “Celebrity was a big ingredient” in its success, said Curbed, and Trump sold residential units to Hollywood stars including Steven Spielberg and Fay Wray. With his real estate empire expanding, Trump also embarked on a media blitz that “helped the real estate developer transition from a figure of note in New York City to a national celebrity and household name,” said The Atlantic. In 1987, he published a ghostwritten book, “The Art of the Deal,” that was a “phenomenal success, spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list,” said The New Yorker. By 1990, his holdings included not just Manhattan high-rises and other real estate developments but also casinos, golf courses and the Eastern Airlines shuttle service he had purchased in 1989 and renamed Trump Shuttle.
Overcoming bankruptcy with a little help from his family
The Trump Organization fell on hard times in the 1990s. Hit hard by the recession,”the amount of cash that Mr. Trump had available to him had fallen below $1.7 million and was expected to fall below $800,000 within months” in 1991, said The New York Times. Trump had been forced to sell his airline to USAir in 1991. Those struggles forced him into the “transaction that would eventually free him from his financial travails,” which was to take “his struggling casinos public, selling stock to raise money and shifting his personal debt into the new company” in 1995.
In 1997, Fred Trump transferred his real estate holdings to his four children, which they sold off in 2004. Donald Trump received $177.3 million. Yet he filed an “individual tax return reporting $89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year” in 2004, said The New York Times. It was also in 2004 that Trump began hosting NBC’s reality show “The Apprentice,” in which a group of contestants competes to win a contract from the Trump Organization. The show, which Trump hosted from 2004 to 2015, helped him make “some $197 million” over 16 years. In addition, “$230 million flowed from the fame” associated with the show.
Not everything that Trump touched during this time period turned to gold, however. Between 2005 and 2010, Trump operated Trump University, which ultimately had to pay out a $25 million settlement to “more than 6,000 Trump U students who paid thousands of dollars for courses they describe as worthless,” said NPR. In 2006, he launched a self-branded vodka business that “stopped production in 2011, reportedly due to a lack of interest,” said Time. Trump also operated an unsuccessful steak business, a failed travel search engine, and a short-lived mortgage company between 2006 and 2012.
When Trump launched his bid for prnbcesident in 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth at $4.5 billion. As president, he largely refrained from new ventures. While he served his first term, his “assortment of businesses brought in some $2.4 billion in revenue and some $550 million in income from 2017 to 2020,” said Forbes. After leaving office in 2021, he founded the Trump Media and Technology group, which included his new far-right social media website, Truth Social. In early 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.5 billion, but that figure ballooned to $6.4 billion “within a day of Truth Social’s parent company going public,” said Forbes. By then, Trump was in the middle of his third run for the presidency, which he would ultimately win.
Trump’s wealth soars higher than ever as his second term begins
On January 17, 2025, days before being sworn in for his second term as president, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency, a meme coin, “sparking a feverish buying that apparently sent its market capitalization soaring to several billion dollars,” said CBS News. His wife, Melania Trump, also launched a currency the same day. The decision to launch Trump-branded cryptocurrency on the eve of his presidency created a “mind-boggling number of potential conflicts of interest” and “aligns with the interests of rich crypto bros who want to seize the reins of government to make themselves even richer,” said Rolling Stone. Even with that new venture, his net worth today, estimated by Forbes at $5.8 billion as of February 14, 2025, is “mostly derived from his ownership of the Trump Organization,” said MarketWatch.
