been steadfast in his refusal to release his tax returns. “You don’t learn that much from tax returns,” he said at the first presidential debate on Monday, where he claimed that he has been getting audited by the IRS almost every year for 15 years. “You will learn more about Donald Trump by going down to the federal elections,” Trump suggests, “where I filed a 104-page essentially financial statements of sorts.”
A lot of Trump critics have argued that he’s afraid that his tax returns will show he’s not a billionaire. Highly doubtful. First, Trump’s income will not directly correlate with the value of his assets, the debt on them or his stake in each. Second, FORBES has been scouring Trump’s fortune for 34 years. Sometimes he’s up, sometimes he down–and for much of the 1990s he was out of the three commas club.
FORBES’ new investigation into Trump’s wealth pegs his fortune at $3.7 billion, down $800 million from a year ago. A softening of New York City’s real estate market, particularly in retail and office, where valuations are trending down, has diminished his estimated net worth. New information was also a factor. Of the 28 assets or asset classes scrutinized by FORBES, 18 declined in value, including his trademark Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, his downtown jewel 40 Wall Street and Mar-a-Lago, his private beachfront club in Palm Beach.
Seven assets rose in value–including San Francisco’s second-tallest building, 555 California Street. One held steady. There are two new assets included in his total count. One is a 4% stake in an affordable housing compound in Brooklyn that is listed in Trump’s FEC filing. In his sole real estate deal this year, Trump bought a nearly 50-year-old warehouse in Charleston, S.C. that was in foreclosure. The warehouse had been owned by a company, Titan Atlas, in which Donald Jr. had been an investor. At one point the younger Trump (as well as other investors) had personally guaranteed a Deutsche Bank loan to the company; his dad later bought it out.
As for his campaign, Trump gave it $7 million and loaned it an additional $48 million of his own cash, which FORBES does not expect he will get back.
The stakes are high. For the first time since H. Ross Perot Sr. in 1992 and again in 1996, a billionaire has a shot (in this case, as a major party’s nominee, a far better one) of becoming president of the United States. Below you’ll find our estimates and assumptions for all his assets. And no, as with Oprah Winfrey and Mark Cuban and all the rest, we don’t subscribe an intangible value to his “brand.” Great businessmen turn brands into profits, which then get valued. The deals that putatively could get done do not.
One more thing: The bombastic Republican presidential candidate said on Monday night that his FEC filing showed income of $694 million for the past year. It doesn’t, because in the document he freely mixed revenue with income, and it covers a period of 17 months.
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