Donald Trump Net Worth Down By $1.2 Billion, Misses Forbes 400 Richest In US

Former President Donald Trump has missed a spot on Forbes’ list of 400 richest people in the United States after his net worth plunged by $1.2 billion. This is the first time in 25 years that the real estate mogul has not been included in the list.

Forbes has increased the minimum net worth required to make the 2021 list to $2.9 billion, up from the $2.1 billion cutoff amount in 2018. This knocked off at least 51 billionaires off the list, including former President Trump.

Trump, who currently has a net worth of $2.5 billion, failed to make the list by roughly $400 million.

According to Forbes, the former president’s net worth is the same as last year, when he was at No. 339 on the ranking, but his wealth has dropped by $600 million after the COVID-19 pandemic caused some of his big-city properties to lose value.

Prior to this year, Trump has consistently appeared in the top half of Forbes’ list from 1997. When he was elected as president in 2016, his net worth was $3.7 billion, Forbes stated. That came down to $3.1 billion in 2017 and stayed there for 2018 and 2019.

Forbes attributed Trump’s decision to hold on to his assets after he was elected president as the reason why he lost $2 billion.

“If Trump is looking for someone to blame, he can start with himself. Five years ago, he had a golden opportunity to diversify his fortune. Fresh off the 2016 election, federal ethics officials were pushing Trump to divest his real estate assets. That would have allowed him to reinvest the proceeds into broad-based index funds and assume office free of conflicts of interest ... Trump decided to hang onto his assets," Dan Alexander, Forbes’ senior editor, wrote.

Forbes estimated that Trump could have been worth $7 billion by September 2021 if he had made different financial decisions, which would have put him on the top half of the list.

Oprah Winfrey, a former news anchor whose talk show turned into a media and business empire, was also knocked off the list. She first made the list in 1995 with a net worth of $340 million. However, her current net worth of $2.6 billion was $300 million short of the minimum net worth required this year, according to Market Watch.

Jeff Bezos, who founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994, remains the richest person in the U.S. with a net worth of more than $201 billion. He is followed by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk with a net worth of $190.5 billion and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a net worth of $134.5 billion.