The main reasons Trump is rich have very little to do with his own real estate acumen, but rather his marketing savvy, celebrity and obviously his starting point.
1. He was coming up at the perfect time in NY RE before all the global $ poured in, his dad had tons of connections with NY politicians. The Hyatt hotel project he got a huge abatement on and that started his career. His dad signed all the papers, etc.
2. Then he masterfully got the tabloids to follow him in the 80's and thus making his brand and properties more valuable. No different than Kim Kardashian and all her business lines. Her family will probably be worth a billion soon.
I'm not even criticizing him for this, but he is hardly Henry Ford.
A lot of people "walk into" wealth when you get to that level though. It isn't the right mentality to have, nobody should view themselves as a lottery ticket, but you do need a ton of luck to get to be worth 2 billion. Mark Cuban is the luckiest business person ever, but he is still also a pretty smart dude who made shrewd moves.
Once again.....to pull off the developments he has done may never be duplicated by another American. I dont agree with him on everything, but you have to respect what he has done. There are very few development companies and its a tough business to crack into, but for the few that know about how it works, its rather impressive.
Yeah, I hate "labeling" sources when people link them, but alternet just a liberal rag.
eBay was all the rage in 2000, by 2007 it was basically irrelevant and nobody really uses it anymore. Most of this has nothing to do with its leadership.
Buying playplal for 1.5B was obviously a genius move. They spun it off for like 40B a few years ago.
Tons of big RE companies do way more volume than he has done in his career.
A good portion of the $ that the Trump org makes is from licensing deals because he has promoted his celebrity so well over the years.
Tons of the big REITs do way, way more in RE development than his company does. There are several RE moguls worth more than he is without the licensing and alternative revenue streams that he has created from celebrity. There is a reason he puts his name on everything like water, steaks, board games, etc. Real estate no different with him.
Not sure where you got the idea he is the best of the best at RE development.
Like the old saying goes, if 5 people tell you that you're drunk, maybe you should lie down. Rump is involved in appx 3500 lawsuits, and he is plaintiff in about 1900. So, 1600 people-and countless more who wouldn't, or couldn't, sue-tell a recurring theme: he frequently stiffs people. To think that they're all lying and HE is the Shining Beacon of Truth is to be naive.
Nothing on a life-changing scale.
50 years ago people were driving cars that travel just as fast as today's vehicles and had access to every modern appliance we enjoy today. Air travel hasn't improved - it still takes the same amount of time to travel from LA to NY.
In terms of standard of living, what is so different? High definition televisions and smartphones?
I said impeding, to impede is to stifle, delay or prevent. The Unabomber had his own take on why this was.
Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find. An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigywho enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17‐year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople.
In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000‐word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in.
You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups:
- Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort;
- Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and
- Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.
Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
I agree with you, but look at his investments and developments. Mostly held by the Trump Organization. There are many as good as him. They all would be considered the best. Hell, anyone that stacks as top RE developers per Forbes are the best. I don't count the REITs in this because they are different because of the pools of funds.
Also you have to sell your brand. The income on his properties every year is astonishing. He built most of that himself. I can be impressed with that.
Patsfan, you agree with that manifesto?
By industrial revolution standards, Henry Ford would make today's cars fly.
I used to mock all the growth-killing bureaucracy in France, now I've come to realize the USA is on the same destructive socialist path with no end in sight.
Kaczynski blamed technology, I blame Big Government.
By industrial revolution standards, Henry Ford would make today's cars fly.
I used to mock all the growth-killing bureaucracy in France, now I've come to realize the USA is on the same destructive socialist path with no end in sight.
Kaczynski blamed technology, I blame Big Government.
I never said I wasn't impressed with what he did. But a big reason he was able to go so far is because the savvy in getting the NY media to treat him like a celeb in the 80's. His dad had tons of connections when Trump was getting started and NY was a dump in the 70's, I mean you need timing with anything in life. I'm not really dissing his business record except when people act like he is omnipotent and the best developer ever. Clearly the bulk of his strategy is promotion and branding, which is fine.
I was just saying tons of people on forbes list or REITs or private equity obviously are doing more actual developing than him. I mean if you mostly do luxury, hotels and golf courses then there really is only so much development you can even do obviously as 95% of property has nothing to do with that.
I've defended Trump's business dealings before when it comes to stuff people don't think about. I'll give you an example, did you ever see the 30 for 30 on the USFL? They basically do the whole "Oh gee, let's blame the big bad billionaire for its downfall." but the USFL was going to fail either way, all the other owners took the expansion fees from the new teams because they wanted a quick fix to get some $. Trump saw years earlier that the NBA took a few ABA teams in and he figured if USFL hit it out of the park then he would possibly get an NFL team on the cheap. But that league was failing either way after the other owners took the expansion fees.
No, of course not entirely, I blame the government for the deceleration all the time. I just found it funny because it was something I didn't know until recently that those were his motives.
I think you can make the case that Kaczynski blaming technology is a function of the fact we live in a world with a pessimistic view of technology though.
You see this in numerous other aspects of culture as well, sci-fi movies painting a dystopian view of the future. That doesn't happen in a world that values technological acceleration.
However, it is true that the newer problems to solve are harder than the older ones. A lot of the "low hanging fruit" was taken out from 1870 to 1970. Getting a car to drive itself is harder than making a car. Curing cancer is harder than curing polio, etc
Atleast France understands the value of nuclear power.
Bill Gates invested 2 billion in a fission company and he had to get the Chinese government to allow him to develop it there because the regulatory and crony environment here is so bad towards nuclear.
Unfortunately, the regulatory environment in America is so glacial that TerraPower and CNNC will build the first unit in China and then deploy commercial versions of this new reactor to global markets within fifteen years.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesco...-forges-nuclear-deal-with-china/#4af6c8f5160f
