Former President Donald Trump failed to crack Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans for the first time in a quarter of a century.
Trump has been on the Forbes 400 every year since 1996, but, the magazine said, “If Trump is looking for someone to blame, he can start with himself.”
“Donald Trump is worth an estimated $2.5 billion, leaving him $400 million short of the cutoff to make this year’s Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people. The real estate mogul is just as wealthy as he was a year ago, when he stood at No. 339 on the ranking, but he is down $600 million since the start of the pandemic. Technology stocks, cryptocurrencies and other assets have thrived in the COVID era. But big-city properties—which make up the bulk of Trump’s fortune—have languished, knocking the former president out of the nation’s most-exclusive club,” said a writeup in the storied financial outlet.
Forbes added that five years ago, the real estate mogul-turned-politician had a “golden opportunity to diversify his fortune” as federal ethics officials were pushing him to divest his assets. He didn’t, and in the process, missed out on the chance “to reinvest the proceeds into broad-based index funds and assume office free of conflicts of interest.”
Jeff Bezos led the list this year, followed by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Larry Page.
Though Trump didn’t make the list, his finances have stayed in the news. Last month, he sued his niece Mary Trump, the New York Times and three Times reporters over the paper’s articles exposing years of his apparent tax evasion schemes.
In the lawsuit, filed in New York’s Dutchess County, Trump accuses Mary Trump and the Times of engaging in an “insidious plot” to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office.” The lawsuit names Mary Trump, the New York Times and reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Beuttner as defendants. It also names 10 John Does and 10 ABC corporations.
The filing, a copy of which was acquired by TheWrap, said that effort was a violation of a 2001 confidentiality agreement signed by Mary Trump. Trump is seeking “an amount to be determined at trial, but believed to be no less than One Hundred Million Dollars” from all parties named in the lawsuit.