Remember when Rachel Maddow announced back in March that she would release an exclusive copy of President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return? As we all learned from that episode, Trump made $150 million in 2005 and he paid $38 million in taxes, which equaled about 25 percent of his income. That’s a larger percentage than what’s paid by Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and MSNBC as a corporation.
It was interesting to see how liberals talked about Trump’s wealth in the 2016 election because they took the opposite approach they took to Mitt Romney. Romney, who boasted a net worth of $250 million, tried to pretend he was just an ordinary person, often appearing robotic in the process. Liberals used this to attack him as being out of touch.
Meanwhile, Trump flaunted his wealth, claiming to have turned a loan of $1 million into $10 billion – a 999,990% return over the course of his business career. And did liberals respond by claiming Trump was too wealthy? Nope – they tried to claim that he was no where near as rich as he claimed. Many even denied that he was a billionaire at all.
This story got little attention in the media, but last week we did get confirmation that Trump is indeed a billionaire.
Late on Friday, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics released a 98-page financial disclosure form according to which President Trump reported income of at least $594 million for the period from 2016 and through April 2017 and assets worth at least $1.4 billion; he also had personal liabilities of at least $315.6 million to German, U.S. and other lenders as of mid-2017 implying a net worth of just over $1.1 billion. The disclosure form was Trump’s first since taking office.
Meanwhile, Forbes Magazine puts Trump’s net worth at around 3.5 billion.
“President Trump welcomed the opportunity to voluntarily file his personal financial disclosure form,” the White House said in a statement, adding that the form was “certified by the Office of Government Ethics pursuant to its normal procedures.”
On the income side, the largest component was $115.9 million listed as golf-resort related revenues from Trump National Doral in Miami, down from $132 million a year ago. Income from his other hotels and resorts largely held steady according to Reuters. Revenue from Trump Corporation, his real-estate management company, nearly tripled, to $18 million, and revenue from Mar-a-Lago grew by 25%, to $37.25 million helped perhaps by the doulbing of the club’s initiation fee to $200,000 after Trump’s election.
H/T Zero Hedge
In fairness to Trump, his net worth is being calculated based on the net asset values that the Trump Organization holds. In publicly traded corporations, companies’ values reflect their profitability, not just the values of their assets. In the real estate sector, the typical real estate-related stock trades at 20-45 times the earnings they generate, depending on their growth prospects (meaning if a company earns $1 million, its market capitalization will be $20-$45 million).
There’s a lack of publicly available information on the Trump Organization’s earnings, but we do know that it brought in $9.5 billion in revenue in 2016. Let’s assume 5% of that made it to the bottom line – or – $475 million. Even if we were to attribute a below-market price to earnings ratio to the Trump Organization (of, let’s say, 15 times earnings), we’d get a company value of over $7 billion, which Trump himself owns 100%.
It’s not quite $10 billion, but it’s pretty damn close. And when you’re worth $7 billion, what’s another 3 at that point anyway?
