Donald Trump Is A Birther

Your NYT story is from 2005. Forbes puts the Donald's net worth at $2 billion in 2010.

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Donald-Trump_U5WX.html

 

But it shows how Donald and Forbes comes up with those numbers.He probably has his 43 year old plane on the books as worth 100 million when its only worth 4






Donald did scramble back to gain control of some other Manhattan buildings, including 40 Wall Street, which he spent about $35 million to buy and refurbish in 1996. The building has about $145 million in debt attached to it, and New York City tax assessors currently value the property at about $90 million. Donald values it at $400 million.


Donald's recent golf course ventures have produced some sterling new properties, but the values he assigns those deals appear to be hyper-inflated. Donald's Palm Beach course, for example, has about 285 members who paid $250,000 for memberships, for a total of $71.25 million. Donald borrowed about $47 million to build the course and a new clubhouse. So he banked about $24 million on the deal, before other costs. He leases the land beneath the course from Palm Beach County; he doesn't own it. But Donald carries the course on his books as an asset worth $200 million.


Forbes, in bestowing a $2.6 billion fortune on Donald in its 2004 rich list, credited him with owning 18 million square feet of Manhattan property, which certainly is an impossibility. On one occasion, Donald told me that the West Side yards, which he doesn't own, would have 10 million square feet of salable space when the site, now known as Riverside South, was completed. (Mr. Weisselberg told me, alternatively, that the site would have about five million square feet of salable space.) However measured, the yards were by far the biggest property in Donald's former Manhattan real estate portfolio - but he no longer owned the tract.


Between 2000 and 2004, Forbes allowed Donald's verbal billions to grow by $1 billion. The jump came during a period when the stock market bubble burst, Donald's stake in his casinos - one of his most valuable assets until "The Apprentice" came along - had fallen in value to $7 million and, despite Manhattan's red-hot real estate market, he owned much less real estate there than he let on.

Donald said his casinos' myriad problems - no profits, suffocating debt, disappearing cash - did not mean that he had failed in Atlantic City. Instead, he described his management of the casinos as an "entrepreneurial" success, defining "entrepreneurial" as his ability to take cash out of the casino company and use it for other things.

 

It just goes to show that no one really knows the real number. Trump claims it is $8 Billion. All I know is it is more than you , I and Obama.

Anyway, the real question for this discussion is what are his cash assets?

 

Possible but I doubt it. He's paying property taxes on that plane. The less it's worth the less he pays.

 

Personally he is worth more then Obama,but Obama is expected to raise more then the 750 million he raised last time.Trump will not be able to outspend Obama imo.He isn't worth 750 million imo nor can he raise it

While Trump is worth more then Obama,I doubt he is worth more then Romeny .As much BS as Trump talks I bet he wont spend 45 million of his own cash to run like Romney did

 

I'm sure the numbers he gives the tax assessors and the numbers he gives Forbes and the public are totally different

 

Obama says he wants to raise a $billion. I don't see him raising anywhere near what he raised for the last campaign. He'll be lucky to raise $300 million if that. His uniqueness and charm have been replaced with indifference and loath.

 

I agree with you on that .I don't know how the hell he is going to raise even 300 million with all of the supporters he has pissed off . I keep reading stories like this which is what I based my statement on





http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/13/obamas-2012-campaign-fundraising-could-top-1-billion/


Obama's 2012 Campaign Fundraising Could Top $1 Billion

Well, we can expect at least one part of the economy to boom in the next two years: Some observers believe President Obama will raise -- and spend -- over $1 billion in his likely re-election campaign.




http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/14/obama-to-reach-out-to-financial-supporters/


"Obama raised a record breaking $750 million dollars in his 2008 campaign for president and could raise up to $1 billion for his re-election bid."






From a Republican


http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/48231.html


Michael Toner: It'll take half a billion dollars to beat Obama


The Republican nominee for president in 2012 will have to raise at least half a billion dollars to compete with President Barack Obama’s fundraising machine, one former chairman of the Federal Election Commission writes in a new book.

In “Pendulum Swing,” an analysis of the 2010 midterm elections published by the University of Virginia Center for Politics, former FEC chief Michael Toner writes that election watchers “haven’t yet fully focused on Obama’s 2012 fundraising advantage.”



“Without credible primary opponents, as is likely, Obama will likely be able to roll over hundreds of millions of dollars of excess primary funds directly into his general election campaign,” Toner writes. “Obama in 2008 was forced to burn through more than $400 million of his $750 million campaign war chest just to defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.”

Toner, who was chief counsel of the Republican National Committee and a legal adviser to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 campaign, says the GOP’s most serious hopefuls will have to opt out of public campaign financing if they hope to keep pace with the president.

 

Another story that shows how Donald calculates his net worth


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...nald-trump-is-a-mere-millionaire-1687222.html

$5bn: the cost of saying Donald Trump is a mere millionaire
Businessman sues journalist who questioned scale of his wealth, reports Stephen Foley


Donald Trump's response, when an investigative journalist published a book alleging he wasn't the billionaire he claimed, was to fire off a $5bn lawsuit, a typically thunderous gesture from the orange-haired skyscraper mogul and star of the US version of The Apprentice. But when hauled before lawyers to give a testimony in the case and explain how he valued his empire, he gave answers that would have made an accountant blush.

In the 2007 deposition, made public before a court hearing yesterday, Mr Trump said he uses "mental projections" to estimate the worth of his properties, admitted exaggerating the success of his businesses ("who wouldn't?"), and says that his perception of his own personal "brand value" goes up and down with his mood. The upshot is that Mr Trump's actual worth is more mysterious than ever, at a time when he is fighting to salvage numerous property deals from the recession and has seen his Atlantic City casinos business go bankrupt.

Mr Trump says that anyone claiming he is not a billionaire is undermining his business, and that the allegations in TrumpNation, a book by New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, had cost him lucrative deals across the world. Mr O'Brien and his publishers were in a New Jersey court yesterday arguing that his lawsuit is ridiculous, and asking a judge to throw out the mogul's claims for $5bn in compensation and damages.

Mr O'Brien wrote that Mr Trump was worth a quarter of a billion at best, and perhaps no more than $150m. At the same time, Mr Trump was telling his banks and Atlantic City casino regulators that his businesses were worth $3.6bn – and telling any reporter who asked that he was worth $6bn.

The difference, he explained, was that his personal "brand value" amounts to around $2bn. "There are those that say the value of the brand is very, very valuable," he said at the deposition, and added: "My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feeling."

With lawyers preparing for yesterday's hearing, Mr Trump remained belligerent over the weekend. Talking to the Wall Street Journal, he promised that Mr O'Brien would "wish he had never heard of that goddam book".

In the deposition, Mr Trump was confronted with evidence that, in public interviews, he had exaggerated his ownership stake in some of the properties that bear his name. There are Trump-branded skyscrapers, casinos, golf clubs and other businesses throughout the world, but many have outside investors or bank loans underpinning them. An assessment by Deutsche Bank, when it underwrote a loan for one property, was that Mr Trump was worth $788m. He said Deutsche did not count all his assets.

There was also a skirmish over the meaning of the word "average". While he publicly claimed that an apartment development was selling for $1,300 per square foot on average, he conceded that "on some units I averaged $1,300" – meaning that this was most likely closer to a best price than to an average.

The developer was asked if he ever exaggerated in statements about his properties. "I think everybody does. Who wouldn't?" he said. "Would you like me to say, 'oh, gee, the building is not doing well, blah, blah, blah, come by the building' – nobody talks that way. Who would ever talk that way?"

At one point, a questioner asks if that means he inflates the value of his properties in general, non-financial public statements? "Not beyond reason," Mr Trump said

 

On a final note Trump might hand Obama a second term on a silver platter by running as an independent

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/part_possible_beauty_white_house_g3ONypPvTuPZmiHJGH08TK

In an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" Thursday, developer Donald Trump reiterated he is looking seriously at jumping into the Republican primary battle, and may run as an independent in the general election if he fails to win the GOP nomination.