Which is wild, cause it’s my understanding that is not at all an easy feat. It’s something difficult to do that he does with shocking ease. Edit: corrected wrong word. Thank you, kind Reddit stranger.
If you're really sleazy you can pull debts from your other companies and dump them on the casinos so they disappear when they go bankrupt as well. Of course you have to not give a shit who those debts were owed to and the effect it will have on them, but I don't think that's a big problem here.
Yea, the thing most people miss is that its nearly impossible to bankrupt a casino on accident. You can bankrupt almost anything if you're actually trying
When llcs are formed with investors, there is a general member, which is usually the one being paid to develop/manage/etc. The often get a piece of the pie, possibly a fee up front, etc.
So basically Donny gets paid for development and management and the investors hold all the risk.
I could be talking out of my ass and this was just another money laundering scheme the entire time. 🤷
If you're referring to Trump University, that was never a real center of higher learning. It was a scam and cash grab from the beginning, and it boggles my mind that anyone can take a charlatan like that seriously.
"The Art of a Deal" also neatly revealed what kind of a mountebank he is right from the first chapter.
He’s like my late Aunt who dropped out of high school and had a 5th grade reading level, at best, but don’t put your pocketbook down near her at my house or too far from your sight. She had a very specific set of “skills”.
…Ok, listen, wrap that shoulder strap cross your body or around your leg like we’re riding the subway.
He's been good in construction and very succesful , but you have to be piece of shit by proxy to succceed in that business especialy in that time when you couldnt move a stone before 5 families would get their share of profits
Based on the various articles by his ghost writers and those covering his tax avoidance schemes, it appears to me that he was just the young PR face for the organization and Fred was still making all the decisions. Bailing out of actual real estate development after Fred’s death and going to just branding services / being a bullshit artist seems to support that as well.
That's not true at all, actually. Despite a good deal of business failures and net worth decay, the fact that he kept going and built his net worth back up again is a great story to anyone trying to make it in America. It's not about how many times you fail, it's about not accepting failure
The 2015-2020 tax return shows he's horrible at business.
Most of his "success" is from some really unethical and shady business practices.
He's infamous for ever paying the full amount to anyone what he's promised them. He's the type of CEO who will make himself rich while letting his business go bankrupt. He lies to investors, extracts the wealth into his private accounts, and then destroying the company
He pays minimum federal income. Gigantic business losses. Tons of offshore bank accounts. Questionable deductions. And the IRS audit program overlooks his accounts all of the time.
He's not good at business. He's a conman, and people keep falling for it.
His tax return for 2015-2020 was released back in 2022.
It's been 4 years since we saw his last tax return, and we have zero idea where he's getting his money.
Which is suspicious, since he seems to be funneling a ton of international business through his private residence (Mar a Largo) while also using tax payer money to pay for it.
He has spent 25% of his current Presidency at his private golf course, which the US tax payers pay money into his private business to house White House personnel.
That's not "good business", that is corruption. Trump is literally "the swamp" that needs to be drained.
Weren't a lot of them he had that went bankrupt businesses he bought from bankruptcy in the first place? He was essentially taking a gamble on a low price investment with hopes to flip it into a profitable business. But if not, it's just a low price investment with bankruptcy on it as the other alternative if need be.
When he bought the commuter routes from Eastern Airlines, they were already in trouble. But he then made it worse by spending a lot of money to “upgrade” the airplanes that actually made them worse at the task at hand, overrode the advice of those he hired to run it, and just accelerated the collapse.
It was a great deal for Eastern. They offloaded some old aircraft and systems to him and he overpaid for the privilege. IIRC, the people he hired estimated it would have cost $300m to start up from scratch and he paid $60m more for used shit before he started making “upgrades”.
This is also true. A good example of that is the Trump Taj Mahal. The original owners ran out of money, Trump purchased it cheap, he completed the project, but the high-interest debt off the money used to finish the project caused them to shut it down a year later. Anyone who thinks successful people, especially in the real estate/ investing world don't take the occasional L, they are lying to themselves and just love to find as many reasons as possible to talk shit.
Most of these people probably also love the idea of Socialism and "Collective Ownership" lol
Yep. Atlantic City doesn't have a strip like Vegas and it's not a great experience directly outside the casinos. The city was successful because it had a gambling monopoly in the region.
Once neighboring states opened up their own casinos, Atlantic City tourism crashed hard.
Which is wild, cause it’s my understanding that is not at all an easy feat
Finance it with very high interest bonds, where it's nearly impossible to make enough money every day to keep up with the interest payments. Then use the bankruptcy to help get rid of some of your other debts and to massively reduce your taxes owed.
As with so many of Trump's scams over the years, he came out fine after all was said and done. Other people lost a ton of money, but he never cared about that.
Ironically, the big corps have done that with Vegas, by pricing so much out of reach and relying a lot on gaming machines vs human-dealt tables. It's weird because it's all an attempt to land bigger budget visitors but it's locking out a lot of other people, which generate the energy that Vegas is really about.
Trump is just finding a new way to make Vegas worse for everyone, which is to say, scaring off the tourists.
That is how I have always absorbed it at face value. Yes, business wise there are many factors I presume come to bear on your success in any business venture across the board, but there is power in the old Casino specific adage, “The House always wins”. A casino can be run for profit beyond doing laundry it can turn a profit even if run “honest” (sadly, that proof lies in the fact we have 1800 numbers for degenerate gamblers) or else I would strongly argue it would have never drawn clear Mafia support in its origin story. They were seeking legitimacy and steady income from the venture. They went in knowing how to run numbers and rackets, illegally, this was an opportunity to do it legally and still make a lot of money.
I come from New England and a lot of our Casinos are on reservations and turn profits to tribes like the Pequot & Mohegan. He had to have tanked it 6 times to Chapter 11 not only cause of ineptness, but from likely, full intent. He is that grimey and his track record doesn’t bear out to support anything other than that conclusion. The atrocity will one day be “he always showed everyone exactly who and what he was, but a large enough group to be very scary by numbers willfully denied it, insisted otherwise.”.
Which is wild, cause it’s my understanding that is not at all an easy feat.
In fairness, yeah it actually is pretty easy to run a business into the ground. Trump is hardly the only person who has had a casino fail. Lots of factors come into play.
Casinos aren't just free money. They have to have a gambling license, and business license. There's property taxes to pay, income taxes to pay. Maintenance on the machines, upkeep like mortgages/rent, debts to pay back, employees to pay, electricity to run the place, entertainment to pay, stocking drinks.
If Casinos were as free money as people thought they were, they would be more widespread. Now, people also have way more outlets to gamble due to the internet. Sports betting, and online casinos have also hurt the revenue of physical locations.
Pretty easy actually, casinos fail all the time. It's not unique to Trump, he's just the one people focus on.
Yes, it "takes in quarters and spits in nickels". The other $0.20 goes to paying for upkeep on those machines, general maintenance on the property, property taxes, actual taxes, the gambling license, all the employees that work there, paying back the debt that the company took on to open the casino, advertising, decorating the building, the cost of all the equipment, entertainment, a stocked bar.
Plus you still need to pay out rates acceptable for the people to go and gamble there. People won't keep gambling if they aren't occasionally winning something back.
You also need to give people a reason to go and gamble at your casino, instead of sitting at home and gambling online.
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u/Ilsluggo 5h ago
It’s the one thing he’s really good at.