BREAKING NEWS: Forbes Reporter Fires Back At Trump’s ‘60 Minutes’ Claim In Response To His Reporting

0:02Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me once again is my colleague, Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander. Dan, thanks so much for coming back on. Yeah, thanks, Brittany. Nice to be here. It's great to have you here because you are the perfect person to explain this conversation. Actually, the perfect person not only at this company, but on this planet, I think, because President Trump, after Republicans suffered a resounding defeat in the midterms, he sat down with 60 Minutes for a wide ranging interview. And in the middle of the conversation, he was asked how, according to Forbes, his net worth went up by nearly$3 billion since he returned to office.

0:42He provided an answer that you called nonsense. So we will get into why you believe that is based on your reporting. But I want to talk about exactly how he made this money. You're the person who tracks his net worth at Forbes. So you are the person for this conversation. So before we get into how he made the money, talk to us a little bit about that timeframe here that you think 60 Minutes is referring to. Yeah, they're asking about a$3 billion gain. And if you look from the fall of 2024, so right around the time of the election to the fall of 2025, right as Donald Trump's kind of settling into the presidency.

1:18In that year, we estimated his net worth grew by$3 billion. So it looks like that's the period that they're talking about. And you lay out four reasons, four major reasons why his fortune shot up this much. And two of them are from crypto. So let's go through them one at a time. But first, we'll start with crypto because that knocks off two. Sure. So he creates two crypto ventures, one just before the election, another just before the inauguration. The first is called World Liberty Financial. The second is the Trump meme coin. And together, those two entities provide a ton of cash for Donald Trump.

1:54OK, so he's betting on crypto sort of. But the people really betting on crypto are the people buying these tokens. And Donald Trump is cashing out of these tokens in certain ways. differently for each of them. From the start of 2025 to the end of 2025, he collects$1.4 billion of cash from those two entities. So that's a huge component of it. Now, when creating these two ventures, Trump also hangs on to a lot of the crypto for himself. We discount the value of a lot of that because it's unlocking over time and the price of it's very dependent on whether he's selling and also just fluctuations in how people feel about him at any point.

2:41But nonetheless, by the fall of 2025, we estimated that that crypto was worth about a billion dollars. Then you get to his overseas licensing business, which we can get into as well. But that's another 400 million on top of the two cryptos. Talk to us about that. You read my mind there. Go right to that 400 million. How is he making hand over fist over those brand deals? So while Donald Trump was in office the first time, he promised not to expand his overseas licensing portfolio. And in the second term, he initially, they were sort of saying, well, we're going to play by the same rules as we did the first time.

3:19But then they decided, no, actually, we're not going to do that. And they decided to expand internationally, both during the election, right after he wins, and then once he's in office. So what you have is sort of a dormant overseas licensing business. This is where other developers are paying Trump to put his name on their golf courses or on the residential buildings or other properties that they're building. He's not putting any money in. He's just offering his name. But they're paying him a fee for that. And if you look at that business, it was really, really sleepy after his first term. Who wants to brand something with the Trump name after January 6th?

3:56I mean, overseas, he was sort of a has-been. And then once he decides that he's running again and the campaign is having a lot of success, and certainly after he wins, you see tons and tons of money flowing in. The income from that business expands dramatically. I mean, I'm talking about like 10 times as much. And as that income is shooting up, the value of the business goes from about$100 million to$500 million. That's plus$400 million for Donald Trump's net worth. Then the last major reason here is a little bit different than the other three. It's thanks to a decision from a New York appeals court.

4:34Talk to us about that. That's correct. So the New York attorney general had sued Donald Trump while he was out of office for lying about his net worth for years. And at the conclusion of that suit, the judge imposed a fine. The fine was$454 million plus accruing interest as Donald Trump appealed. He did appeal. And when that case went to the appellate court, then the appellate court came up with kind of an interesting decision. What they said is, first of all, yes, we think that he committed fraud for all of these years by lying about his net worth. But we also think that the initial penalty was too harsh.

5:10And they didn't come up with a new penalty. They just said, we're going to vacate that one. So the effect of it is that you have nearly a half a billion dollar liability, that penalty get off of his balance sheet, and that increases his net worth by half billion dollars in one fell stroke. It's interesting, Dan, because I watched the 60 Minutes episode as well. I watched this moment where Forbes was brought up, your reporting was brought up, and those reasons that you just listed, President Trump, he didn't name them. We will go through his answer line by line here, because the 60 Minutes correspondent says there's a Forbes story that said your net worth went up by $3 billion since you returned to office.

5:50Trump said, so did everyone's. Then the correspondent said, my net worth did not go up by$3 billion for the record. Trump goes, well, you should have had stock. Is the stock market to thank for President Trump's fortune skyrocketing? Absolutely not. In the fall of 2024, we estimated that Donald Trump had about$415 million in liquid assets. Now, inside that portfolio, the vast majority of it was not in stock. So it looks Just like from an analysis of his financial disclosure, only about 10 % of that was in the stock market. If you take that 10 % of$415 million, that gives you roughly$40 million or something like that, and you appreciate that by 14%, which is how much the S &P 500 went up over that period, you're talking about a few million dollars.

6:37This is not what boosted his net worth by$3 billion. Then we have this. Here's what President Trump says. I devote almost no time to my net worth. I don't care. I have a lot of money, far more than I ever thought I'd have, and I guess it's gone up. I don't even know. Is that congruous with the President Trump you know and you've reported on? Not just that I've reported on, but that Forbes has reported on. So Forbes launched the Forbes 400 in 1982. And at that time, Donald Trump was vying to be higher on the list. In fact, he lied in order to get onto the list initially. and over the years it's hard to think of another American who sort of more consistently from 1982 has pushed and cared about what Forbes said he was worth.

7:23In fact I'll tell you a little story a handful of years ago before Trump got into politics I wasn't covering him. I sat next to the person who was doing what we call his file the calculation of his net worth and all I heard was just her phone ringing off the hook all day long for like two weeks with people from the Trump Organization, just badgering her about trying to get Donald Trump's net worth up. And I just remember thinking at the time, gosh, I hope I never get that assignment because it sucks up all of your time and you don't get to do any of the other estimates for the billionaires that we were trying to value.

7:56Of course, several years later, that got to be my only assignment. And the fact that it takes up a lot of time was actually a blessing. Well, now here you are and the president continues to post about you on social media, but we will continue down his answer. Then he says this. I have a son who was a very straight, good guy. He watches over money. I don't even talk to him about it. Is that true? It doesn't seem like it. I interviewed Eric Trump in Trump Tower in 2017, right after his father became president. This was in, I think, February of 2017. And I was sitting there with him and I said, you know, are you going to update your dad on the financials of the business while he's serving.

8:36And I don't have the exact words in front of me, but it went something like, yeah, probably I'll, you know, financial reports and that sort of thing. And then it was, well, how often is this going to be? You know, probably quarterly. And it was, and then he said, you know, my father and I are very close and we're pretty much inseparable. So when you stack up both Eric Trump's words and the fact that Donald Trump for decades has cared inordinately about what people think he is worth, the likelihood that he's not paying attention to what his net worth is, I'd put close to zero. You wrote a book on this.

9:16You've covered this, like you said, for years now. You know these numbers better than anybody else. Then President Trump continues on, and he says something to the effect of, I don't take a presidential salary, and the conversation moves on from there. If you were in the chair that the 60 Minutes Correspondent was in, what question do you think President Trump needs to be asked and needs to answer? Well, I don't know. I think the interviewer did a great job. But I will say that the presidential salary is$400 ,000 a year. And Donald Trump's net worth, as we estimate it from the fall of 2024 to the fall of 2025, went up by$3 billion.

9:54If you're making$3 billion in a year, that means is that you're making$400 ,000 or the presidential salary every 70 minutes. And that includes while you're asleep. So the idea that him donating his presidential salary is significant, is ridiculous. This is the equivalent of you or I finding six cents in our couch cushions. It's not money that matters to him. The money that matters to him is what happens to his business, where his business expands. And what we've seen over the last few years is that he's made billions of dollars largely because of sort of the fame, the excitement, and the access that the presidency offers.

10:30I really appreciate you breaking this down. You laid it all out in, I believe, a 42-part thread on X. And you went step by step, and you ended on the note of, hey, I got to go eat dinner, but we still have a year to cover. And a lot has happened in that year, because the timeframe you're saying 60 Minutes was talking about ended in the fall of 2025. Obviously, you and I are sitting here and it's fall of 2026. And I'm not going to make you do a another 42 thread post here. But overall, if you could give us the big picture here, what happened with President Trump's net worth and fortune in the last year?

11:09So the broad strokes of what's happened, it's actually decreased a little bit from then to now, but the broad strokes of what has happened is that the Trump Media and Technology Group has declined very dramatically. Its stock has. So has the value of the meme coin and the value of World Liberty Financials token. Now, those things have declined, but they've declined as some of those crypto tokens have been unlocking. So those two things sort of balance out a little bit. And the other thing that has happened is that the golf business and the private club business has gone through the roof. So Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, obviously, if you're a wealthy person and you want to have the ear of Donald Trump, there's a pretty simple way to do it.

11:53Pay a million dollars and you join Mar-a-Lago and you're going to get to have dinner near him throughout the winter. Same sort of logic applies at his golf course in Washington, D.C. In the summertime, he spends a lot of time at Bedminster. And the golf business just overall is doing very well. Post-COVID, golf has been tremendously popular. And so that business has really, really boomed for Donald Trump at the time that his social media company and the crypto efforts have declined. One thing that's also important to remember here is that the crypto money, a lot of that, he's already out. So the people who have purchased what he's selling are losing tremendous amounts of money.

12:37But Donald Trump is sitting pretty. I mean, he's already cashed out a tremendous amount of money. And so even if all that stuff goes to zero, he's going to be a-okay. And he will have made a lot of money on crypto regardless. Dan Alexander, always appreciate your reporting. Thank you so much for coming on, breaking down those numbers with me. Sure thing. Thanks, Brittany.