Donald Trump will make a $400,000 salary as president. His shares in Trump Media could keep him rich to the tune of $8 billion
Donald Trump has boasted about his personal wealth for decades. But a dollar figure has never been publicly shared—or settled upon. Now that he’s been elected president for the second time, his actual net worth could swing dramatically.
For one, as president, he’ll earn an annual $400,000 salary.For another, he’s currently raking in enormous sums on paper thanks to his hundreds of shares in the parent company of publicly listed social networking site, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp.
The share price of the hugely popular social media platform Truth Social’s parent company has grown over 100% since January and more than 85% over the past month.
What experts say Trump is worth
Analysts have spent years attempting to ascertain Trump’s precise net worth—and Trump hasn’t helped, by refusing to publish his tax returns over the years.
What we do know: Trump came into a sizable inheritance from his father Fred Trump’s real estate dealings, and then Trump went on to make major real estate investments himself, and he secured a bevy of TV licensing deals in the early aughts.
But he also has, in recent years, been buried under a mountain of lawsuits and settlements.
Still, he’s one of the wealthiest people on the planet: He currently stands in 479th place on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index list of the world’s 500 richest people. As of Wednesday, Bloomberg assessed Trump’s fortune to be $6.49 billion.
Last week, Forbes made a similar estimate of $8 billion, a substantial month-over-month growth. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal says his wealth is greater—somewhere between $7.5 billion and $10 billion, debt included, representing a twofold increase from his riches when he ran for office in 2016 and 2020.
Nonetheless, Bloomberg says real estate—Trump’s original industry—is the main source of his fortune.
Trump Media is keeping him asset-rich
The largest part of Trump’s paper wealth is the 114.75 million shares in Trump Media stock that he owns. That’s according to Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida.
When markets opened Wednesday, Trump’s shares were worth “close to $4.8 billion,” Ritter told Fortune. But the value oscillates wildly, as it has throughout the election cycle. “The stock has backtracked to $35 as I write, [now] worth about $4 billion.”
Plus, those billions are hardly close at hand. “If [Trump] tried to convert these shares into cash, he would have to pay capital gains taxes on the entire amount of proceeds, since his cost basis is zero,” Ritter said.
And it’s unlikely that Trump would be able to sell most of his shares at a high price.
As of late September, Trump Media has $3.14 per share in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet, Ritter pointed out, and it’s currently losing money, with just 2 cents per share in annual revenue. As such, if Trump were to sell his stake gradually over the coming year (assuming an average of $10 price per share), taking a capital gains tax rate into account, Ritter estimates that Trump’s current $4 billion would equate to just $800 million after tax.
But the values of Trump’s other assets, like real estate, are unlikely to change much once he’s back in the Oval Office, Ritter said.
“The main thing that is unusual about his personal balance sheet is that the biggest asset, on paper, is his holdings of DJT stock,” he explained. “And this value cannot be easily converted into cash, whether he won or lost the election.”
Or as Matthew Tuttle, the chief executive of Tuttle Capital Management, which has invested in Trump Media, put it in a Wednesday morning email to Fortune: “The only thing I can share is he just made a small fortune on DJT stock.”
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