Earlier this month, when presidential campaign hobbyist Donald Trump sent his financial disclosure paperwork to the Federal Election Committee, he said his ”net worth is in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” Bloomberg Politics crunched the numbers and reported today that Trump’s net worth might actually be far less — around $2.9 billion.
Forbes previously put Trump’s net worth around $4 billion.
In other words, Trump may just be a successful billionaire instead of an all-caps successful billionaire. Bloomberg’s tally does not “value Trump’s brand beyond accounting for cash held in accounts for his licensing deals and business partnerships.” The report also notes that “there may be additional assets that the analysis doesn’t include.”
In Trump’s calculation of his own wealth, his brand plays a starring role — although the strange alchemy that allows it to multiply in worth is hard to replicate. After suing a New York Times journalist who reported that Trump may have only been worth around $250 million about a decade ago, the real-estate mogul told a lawyer, “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try.” Bloomberg did not run its calculations — which were conducted using “a standardized approach to value the assets owned by the world’s wealthiest people” — through the Trump emotional-wealth flux capacitor.
