Trump tumbles out of exclusive Forbes billionaires club, businesses downhill

Donald Trump:

Donald Trump

*Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga and Abdulsamad Rabiu on Forbes list

Donald Trump has tumbled out of the ultra-exclusive Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people for the first time since 1996.

He is now worth $2.5billion, $400 million shy of this year’s cutoff.

Warren Smith,64, is the last on the list, with estimated net worth of $2.9billion. He is tied with 11 other people on the exclusive rich list.

Trump could have been on the list, but he reportedly lost $600 million of his fortune during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The former U.S. leader was ranked 339th last year. His highest ever position was at 71st in 2003, the year before he launched his NBC hit series The Apprentice.

But in March 2020, three years after Trump refused to divest from his name-brand real estate holdings, the coronavirus pandemic upended the economy.

Divesting when he took office in 2017 would have been an opportunity to diversify his assets, Forbes argues.

Even if he divested and paid maximum capital gains tax, investing the rest into wider portfolios like the S&P 500 could have left him 80 percent richer than he is today.

Instead, his narrow wealth portfolio was dealt a blow by the pandemic’s particularly powerful impact on tourism and hospitality, as well as big city real estate prices.

According to a report by Mail Online, Trump’s real estate and hospitality businesses are going through bad times.

His famous hotel in Washington D.C. saw revenue drop by 60 percent in pandemic year, with an outstanding loan of $170 million to deal with.

Trump’s luxury apartment holdings in New York City and other urban centres also lost value as parts of the city saw rent prices slashed.A June Associated Press review of more than 4,000 transactions over the past 15 years in 11 Trump-branded buildings in Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas and New York found prices for some condos and hotel rooms available for purchase have dropped by one-third or more.

That’s a plunge that outpaces drops in many similar buildings, leaving units for sale in Trump buildings to be had for hundreds of thousands to up to a million dollars less than they would have gone for years ago.

Related News

‘They’re giving them away,’ says Lane Blue who paid $160,500 in March for a studio in Trump’s Las Vegas tower, $350,000 less than the seller paid in 2008.

His Manhattan buildings, like Trump World Tower, have lost more than 20 percent of their value since Trump took office, Insider reported earlier this year.

The pandemic has also hit demand for commercial real estate – and the value of Trump’s stake in a the building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan has dropped by $80 million, to $685 million, according to a Bloomberg estimate, which examined financial disclosures, real estate documents, and loan documents.

On Forbes global list, Trump is listed 1,344th, far far below three Nigerians who made the cut.

Aliko Dangote still remains Africa’s leading billionaire with net worth of $11.5B. He is 191st in the world.

Mike Adenuga is 442nd on the list with a wealth of $6.5B

Abdul Samad Rabiu completes the Nigerian outing at 574th with an estimated net worth of $4.9 billion.

Two South Africans and an Egyptian Nassef Sawiris are also on the list.

Sawiris is 297th with $8.3B net worth.

Nicky Oppenheimer of South Africa is 308th with $8B and the Johann Rupert Family are 358th with $7.1 Billion.

On top of the Forbes list is Jeff Bezos with estimated networth of $177B.

He is followed by Elon Musk $151B, Bernard Arnault and family $150B, Bill Gates $124B and Mark Zuckerberg $97B.

Load more