I don’t remember where I read the long article, but it basically says this:
His father Fred was a tough businessman good at business, but he was a “slumlord” and that was not prestigious.
He wanted to up the image so he made Donald the face of upscale business, but just the face ... Fred Trump still ran everything.
After his father died Donald Trump made a series of business decisions that didn’t work out and was near bankrupt. There is a video where he points to a homeless guy in NYC and says that guy is richer than me.
Becoming a TV star saved him and he made a lot of money from The Apprentice.
Trump’s real estate mistakes was not sticking with what he knew, which was residential and commercial. For the casinos, he swung for the fences, which is not always wise.
Not true.
Trump was over-leveraged and was upside down on his balance sheet when several of his ventures did not pan out. In effect, broke.
But other ventures were panning out and he was able to rebound.
There are 250 subsidiaries under the Trump banner.
I’ve seen it with homebuilders. For each new subdivision they build, they set up a subsidiary to sheild the corporate assets from claims.
They might open three to five subs a year. Some sell quickly and are highly profitable. Some are a quagmire and the developer walks away and takes the loss. Does that make the developer a bad business person? Heck no! They are raking it in overall.
Only those who dared to go big or go home will understand that not every venture pans out. Most people are not that brave.
A slum landlord allows his property to devalue, because he won’t invest in his property. I don’t know if Fred Trump qualifies as that. Being a low rental does not qualify one as a slum landlord.
Here is how one person described how Fred Trump made his money.
He made money by building residential houses. He wasn’t born rich and his father died when he was 11 and was trained as a carpenter out of high school and built his first house at age 20 and sold it for a profit. Next year, he built and sold 20 houses. By age 30 he had built hundreds of homes and he started a supermarket, a whole new concept at the time because back then food stores had food behind the counters and a clerk would pull what you want from the back.
Fred Trump became mega rich during WW2 by building barracks at naval bases on east coast, and from this, he got an idea that all these young men would go home and start families when the war was over. So he started building affordable cheap housing and apartments in the New York area. By 1960 or so, he had built over 20,000 units of housing.
Post the article or admit you pulled this gossip out of your dog’s nether region.
Trump Tower was before the Apprentice - how could he have been that broke after Trump Tower?
What he did wasn’t easy....doesn’t matter to me that he had his ups and downs...he prevailed because he didn’t quit. Big bold ideas that he worked his butt off for.