14 – He Really IS a Self-Made Millionaire

That’s right – the Donald wasn’t (technically) lying when he claimed to have started with nothing. His father, Fred Trump, was a mid-scale developer. He built affordable housing in low-income NYC neighborhoods, accumulating $400,000,000 in assets by 1999 – the year he passed away.

Well, before Donald made his first billion, he bankrupted his father’s Trump Hotel/Resort/Casino empire four times. So, technically, he started from less than nothing.

His first trips to bankruptcy court were over the ‘Trump Taj Mahal’ (in 1991) and the ‘Trump Plaza’ (1992.) After reorganizing all of his holdings into ‘Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts,’ the Donald borrowed even more from investors and defaulted on a total of $1.9 billion in 2004. Somehow, he get refinanced again, surviving until the housing bubble-crisis of 2009. When that happened, Trump walked away from his properties altogether, leaving investors with another $400,000,000 of debt.

As he does with most of his ‘accomplishments’, Trump wrote a book to brag about “winning with the lenders and winning with the banks and winning with the bankruptcy judges.”