The good people at Forbes magazine have released their yearly ranking of the richest people in the world, and the net worth of US President Donald Trump has gone down for the second year in a row. Meanwhile, the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is the richest person on the face of the Earth, with a whopping net worth of $112 billion. In relative terms, Bezos would be able to pay off the debt of Nigeria almost three times over.
According to Forbes, Trump has dropped down more then 200 places on their ranking of the world’s billionaires. Over the past twelve months, they report, his wealth has declined by a massive $400 million.
To put that into relative terms, if Trump had funded the production of both “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and “Avengers: Infinity War,” he would’ve lost roughly the same amount of money. He’s gone from being the 544th richest person in the world to being the 766th richest person in the world. It’s quite a drop, and especially bad that it’s his second big drop in a row.
Trump’s wealth is going down faster than Lacie’s score towards the end of the “Black Mirror” episode “Nosedive.” Next year, he’ll deliver a speech at a wedding, wielding a knife and begging the guests for their approval. Still, the $400 million drop is not nearly as bad as the drop in 2017. Last year, Forbes reported that Trump’s wealth had dropped a full $1 billion.
So, over the past two years, the US President has lost a grand total of $1.4 billion.
So, why is Trump losing all of his money?
At this point, you may be asking yourselves the following questions: Where is all of Trump’s money going? Why is he losing it all? What’s going on here? Well, Forbes took care of that. They explained that the real estate market in New York, where Trump operates, is “tough” right now, and added that his 2016 Presidential election campaign was “expensive,” and the lawsuits against him are “costly.”
There was a recent lawsuit against the President that alleged that the real estate classes at Trump University were fraudulent.
And you have to factor in all of those settlements that Trump has paid in hush money to the various mistresses and porn stars he’s been involved with over the years in order to keep their mouths shut (which didn’t work anyway). Plus, it’s kind of tough to keep a real estate business running at full capacity and be the President of the United States at the same time.
Meanwhile, the golf courses owned by Trump have been taking financial losses in recent years, particularly Turnberry, the one in Ayrshire. Trump himself has been having to pump his own personal funds into these golf courses in order to keep them open. Turnberry is Trump’s largest financial investment outside the United States, and now, the course owes him a total of £112 million, which is almost double what they owed him the year before, £63 million.
A record 35 people have joined Forbes’ list
This year, as Trump has fallen further down the list, 35 new people have joined the running list of billionaires that is published annually in Forbes. The magazine’s editors now estimate that there are 2,208 people across the globe who are worth $1 billion or more.
With Jeff Bezos taking the top spot with his $112 billion fortune, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has now been bumped down to second place with a wealth of $90 billion.
If all of their wealth was pooled together, the world’s billionaires would be worth a total of $9.1 trillion, which is triple the gross domestic product of the UK and $1.4 trillion more than their combined worth from last year. If you’re looking for financial tips on how to become the next Jeff Bezos, his latest bump in wealth can be attributed to Amazon’s stocks, which just rose from $846 per share to $1,523 per share.
