Trump drops from Forbes list of wealthiest Americans

Former President Trump dropped off The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans for the second time in three years, Forbes Magazine said Tuesday.

Trump, with an estimated $2.6 billion fortune, is $300 million short of the criteria set by The Forbes 400 ranking, dealing a blow to the former president, who the magazine said has “obsessed” over the list for decades.

Forbes said the former president’s net worth is down more than $600 million from a year ago, citing Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, as the primary reason. According to the magazine, Trump’s 90 percent stake in Truth Social’s parent company has dropped in value from around $730 million to less than $100 million.

Forbes said Trump’s office buildings in San Francisco and New York, which are down by millions of dollars, also played a role in the drop of his fortune.

The ranking comes on the heels of the start of Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York, where he faces a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) over more than a decade of alleged fraud.

On the first day of the trial Monday, prosecutors showed Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney and fixer, previously revealed in a deposition that he and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg were assigned with inflating the former president’s assets to “obtain the number that Mr. Trump wanted.”

Cohen provided an example to prosecutors in which Trump might want to be “higher on the Forbes list,” so he would suggest that, for instance, his $6 billion net worth should actually be $8 billion.

When James announced the lawsuit against Trump last September, she pointed to Cohen’s 2019 testimony before Congress, in which he claimed Trump significantly overstated his wealth before he took office.

Trump was put onto The Forbes 400 list in 1996, according to the magazine, where he remained until 2021, when his fortune dropped to $2.5 billion, around $400 million shy of the cutoff required by the list.

At the time, Forbes said Trump hung on to assets upon taking office in 2017 rather than putting the money in an index tracking fund, which the magazine said cost him $2 billion. The COVID-19 pandemic also dealt a blow to Trump’s properties amid tanking tourism.