What Are The Trump Offspring Worth?

I don't want to put words in your mouth but it's probably a fair guess that you think of the Trump spawn as worthless. Not in Forbes world they're not. Chase Peterson-Withorn reports that the 3 oldest offspring are all multimillionaires, $25 million for each of the 2 moron sons and over a quarter billion for Ivanka (counting Jared). I wonder if Timothy Egan's toilet bowl-cleaning sister at the rural Walmart relates to them better than she can to Bernie and Elizabeth.

Unlike their boastful father, they aren’t eager to say. Their earnings aren’t publicly available, and their holdings are tied up in private investments and shielded through opaque shell corporations. Even Ivanka Trump’s federally mandated financial disclosure form, with its broad loopholes and wide ranges, is of limited help.

So Forbes dug into property records, court documents and government filings to unearth as much of the first family’s financial dealings as possible. The findings: Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump appear to be worth about $25 million each. Ivanka Trump has likely amassed similar riches from her work at the Trump Organization but is worth far more-- around $375 million-- when you factor in her fashion line earnings and marriage to real estate heir Jared Kushner. The president’s 26-year-old daughter, Tiffany, and 13-year-old son, Barron, meanwhile, don’t seem to have gotten much from their father so far. Neither has the first lady, besides a small Trump Tower apartment, 33 floors below the couple’s gilded penthouse, worth $1.5 million.

Unlike most wealthy heirs, the Trump children haven’t gotten their riches from trust funds or received chunks of the family business through careful transfers over time. In fact, they own virtually none of the Trump Organization’s vast holdings. The only major venture in which the president has included his family appears to be the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., where his three eldest kids-- Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric-- each owns a 7.5% stake, worth about $6 million apiece.

Instead, most of their money appears to have come from hefty salaries they’ve earned as longtime executives at the Trump Organization. Their father pays well. Over the past two decades, the three siblings have taken in an estimated $35 million each in pretax salary, commissions and bonuses, according to a Forbes analysis of Donald and Ivanka Trump’s financial disclosures.

They have used those earnings to build their own portfolios, buying up splashy real estate and launching their own business ventures-- with varying degrees of success.

The most entrepreneurial sibling, Ivanka Trump spent years burnishing her father’s brand while building one of her own. As an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, she scouted deals around the globe and headed up interior design for Trump hotels, amassing about $25 million of wealth from her day job.

Ivanka Does Baku

She likely earned just as much from her lucrative side hustles. First was an Ivanka Trump-branded jewelry line, launched in 2007. Then came handbags, shoes and other accessories. By 2013, the business was doing about $75 million in sales, according a New York Times review of internal documents. A major line of women’s work wear soon followed, and quickly hit $100 million in revenues. Ivanka, whose company licensed her name to outside manufacturers, likely got around a 7% cut of her brands’ wholesale revenues, which are typically about half of retail sales, according to industry experts. That means her fashion-line income could have topped $10 million per year, before taxes and expenses, at the height of her brand’s popularity.

The good times didn’t last. Hit by her father’s divisive politics, sales reportedly plummeted, and in July 2018 she announced she was shutting down the entire operation, rendering it virtually worthless. “After 17 months in Washington, I do not know when or if I will ever return to the business,” she said at the time.

No worries, since her biggest source of wealth is her husband, real estate heir Jared Kushner. The couple’s financial disclosure forms, which list their assets jointly, peg their net worth between $52 million and $759 million-- nearly all of it in Kushner-related holdings. A document the president’s son-in-law privately submitted to a potential lender, later obtained by the New York Times, narrows that range considerably. It shows Kushner’s net worth was about $324 million at the start of 2017, which would put the couple’s combined worth in the range of $375 million.

Much of their fortune remains tied up in Kushner Cos.’ commercial buildings and rental apartments, plus cash accounts and a portfolio of index and mutual funds. Despite hailing from two real estate dynasties, the couple has little personal real estate of their own. Ivanka still has her two-bedroom “starter” apartment on the sixth floor of the Trump Park Avenue building her father developed, worth about $3 million. But for years she and Kushner actually lived on the building’s 28th floor, in a penthouse owned by Donald Trump. Their vacation home, a cottage at the Trump National Bedminster golf club, is also owned by the president. The couple rents their current residence, a six-bedroom Washington, D.C., mansion, from a Chilean mining heir.

The first sibling to enter the family business, Don Jr. has spent a career working for his father and funneling his salary into businesses of his own, with a mixed track record to show for it. Also an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, Don Jr.-- who helped manage the company’s property portfolio before he and Eric were put in charge of all operations while their father is in office-- likely pulled in similar pay as his sister.

It has afforded him a cushy lifestyle. Don Jr. owns a 5,900-square-foot apartment in a midtown Manhattan luxury tower and an upstate New York cabin, where the noted outdoorsman fly-fishes in the Delaware River. He also appears to own a share of a 171-acre upstate New York hunting reserve alongside Eric. In April, Don Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle made headlines when they snapped up a $4.5 million, seven-bedroom Hamptons mansion.

Like Ivanka, Don Jr. has tried to branch out from his father’s real estate business. A document filed with the city of New York ties Don Jr. to a half-dozen outside investments, with cryptic names like MSMDF Agriculture LLC (which holds a stake in a hydroponic lettuce company) and Future Venture LLC (which the Trump Organization has said was set up “to pursue technology investments”). Those companies have been tied to Dallas-based money manager Gentry Beach, a longtime friend of Don Jr. and a Trump fundraiser. The president’s son once reportedly lost $200,000 investing in a dry Texas oil well with Beach.

But Don Jr.’s best-known ventures were in Charleston, South Carolina. He was among a group of investors who purchased an old Navy hospital in the city for $5 million, with a plan to renovate it and lease part of it back to the county. After the renovations dragged on and the government pulled out, the developers filed for bankruptcy and sued the county. The parties settled in 2017, and the county repurchased the property for $33 million. It’s unclear whether Don Jr., who told Charleston’s Post and Courier he was a passive 10% investor “with no voting rights or control,” profited from the deal.

Then there was the nondescript, rusting warehouse in a North Charleston industrial park. Don Jr. and a group of investors bought the place as part of a prefab concrete business they hoped would revolutionize low-cost home building. The venture never took off, leaving Don Jr. and two others on the hook for a $3.65 million Deutsche Bank loan they had personally guaranteed. Days before the loan became due, his father stepped in. Donald Trump purchased the debt, then foreclosed on the property, bailing his son out in the process. The president quietly sold the building, which had a history of roof leaks and environmental contamination, in February 2018 for $4.1 million.

The youngest of the three siblings from the president’s first marriage, Eric Trump’s finances appear to be the most closely tied to Donald Trump. He lives in a penthouse on the edge of Central Park that spans four units-- two purchased at a suspiciously steep discount-- in his father’s Trump Parc East building. He keeps a luxury duplex on the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in New York’s Westchester County. And his pay as an executive vice president at the Trump Organization-- where he oversaw much of the firm’s golf club and resorts business before he was tapped to co-run with company with Don Jr.-- seems to be his only major source of wealth.

The New York City filing appears to tie Eric to only two ongoing businesses: his stake in the Trumps’ D.C. hotel and the Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia. There, Eric Trump apparently has a complex arrangement with his father. Eric serves as the winery’s president. Its website is maintained by “Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC.” And Eric Trump-related companies appear to handle daily operations. Yet Albemarle County land records and the president’s financial disclosure form make it clear his father actually owns the property.

The Trumps have employed convoluted, interfamily arrangements for decades. According to a New York Times investigation, Fred Trump used a handful of methods-- essentially turning his heirs into his property managers, landlords, bankers and consultants-- to move wealth to his children while skirting taxes. Donald Trump may be following suit. In addition to the winery deal, Ivanka’s disclosure lists a handful of stakes in ventures that shift money from Donald Trump’s empire to members of his family. Through T International Realty LLC, Ivanka is entitled to commissions from the sale of condos her father owns. Through entities like TTT Consulting LLC and DT Bali Technical Services Manager LLC, Ivanka is entitled to consulting and management fees from properties her father’s companies manage—making her a consultant on the Trump Organization’s own deals. The ventures’ ownership structures hint that her brothers have similar stakes. These businesses don’t seem to have thrown off major cash yet, according to financial disclosure forms, but they could provide avenues for the president to transfer significant wealth to his children. (Ivanka converted her income stream from these ventures into fixed annuities for the duration of her tenure in government, in an effort to sidestep conflict-of-interest concerns.)

Besides these deals, Forbes found no signs that Donald Trump, who spent three decades looking under every couch cushion for assets to show Forbes for our twice-annual billionaires lists, has handed his children a large sum of cash. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, appear to have made only minor bequests to their grandchildren, according to documents filed by their estates.

 Yet the lack of detailed financial records, including Trump family tax returns, make it difficult to fully trace how much wealth has trickled down to the president’s children. If they have taken on significant debt or have invested exceptionally poorly, they could be less well off than we estimate. If they have extensive and well-hidden business ventures, they could be richer than we figure.

Regardless, they’re in no hurry to speak up. When Forbes launched its inaugural list of the 400 richest Americans in 1982, Donald Trump personally lobbied harder than anyone for a higher spot on the ranking. “Share fortune estimated at over $200 million,” we wrote in the issue, listing Fred and Donald Trump together. “Donald claims $500 million.” In 1985 he invented a fake persona to lie about a transfer of wealth from his father, successfully securing a sole spot on the list. Three decades later, his children are roughly the age he was back then. But rather than announce a financial coming-out of their own, they are taking a decidedly less Trumpian approach: They’re not commenting.

Raise your hand if you want their taxes to go up (Elizabeth Warren). Raise both hands if you want their taxes to go up a lot (Bernie). Now bark like a dog if you want to read one day soon that Barron shot them all with Eric's favorite elephant gun (Howie).

Barron by Jim Boden