NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Donald Trump fell off of Forbes’ 400 list of America’s richest residents for the first time in 25 years, after losing $600 million since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the news organization revealed Tuesday.
According to Forbes, the former president is now worth $2.5 billion, leaving him $400 million short of the cutoff to make the exclusive list.
Trump ranked at number 339 on the list in 2020. The highest rank he ever held was in 2003, when he was listed at number 71 – a year later, he launched his NBC series “The Apprentice.”
Forbes said Trump refused to divest from his name-brand real estate holdings in March 2020, when the pandemic upended the economy. The outlet noted that if the former president divested in 2017, it would have been an opportunity to diversity his fortune.
Trump instead decided to hold onto his assets, which were worth an estimated $3.5 billion, according to Forbes. If he had decided against that, he could be 80% richer than he is today.
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“His refusal to divest, in other words, cost him $2 billion,” said Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander, in an article explaining how Trump has fallen off the list.
Forbes said if Trump had chosen to invest his 2017 fortune into the S&P 500 when he took office, he could have been worth $7 billion by this September – which would have made him the 133rd richest person in the United States.
“From 1997 to 2016, Donald Trump maintained a spot in the top half of the Forbes 400. But things took a turn for the worse the year he won the presidency. After five years of dropping in the rankings, he's now off the list entirely,” Alexander wrote.
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