3 ms·
Had he taken the money he was lent or given at the start of his business career, and invested it into an index fund instead of doing his attempts at business, h
by Frondo 10y ago
Had he taken the money he was lent or given at the start of his business career, and invested it into an index fund instead of doing his attempts at business, he would now have a net worth of $12 billion instead of $4 billion.
He did far, far worse as a businessman than he would have had he done nothing.
Based on that alone, I can call him not a good businessman.
- shostack 10y agoInteresting... Hadn't heard that before, source?
- bhritchie 10y agoThe article I linked in a sibling to your comment sources several versions of this calculation in the footnotes, though I'm sure there are others as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/should-donald-trump-have-indexed- https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/should-do...
- bhritchie 10y ago> Had he taken the money he was lent or given at the start of his business career, and invested it into an index fund instead of doing his attempts at business, he would now have a net worth of $12 billion instead of $4 billion. Matt Levine wrote a great article on this idea: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/should-donald-trump-have-indexed- https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/should-do... Maybe the best line: "For one thing, if he put all his money in index funds and reinvested all the dividends for 41 years, he'd be dead, because you can't buy food with reinvested dividends."
- heartbreak 10y agoCrazy that I'm not dead yet. Somehow the rest of us manage to eat without spending dividends earned from money given to us by our parents.