All posts tagged "Wealth"

Can Trump back up his boast that he's worth $10 billion?

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and author David Cay Johnston, who has been covering Trump for decades, thinks not.

Rather, he contends that the 45th president's pocketbook will get exposed and that his true net worth may prove to be substantially less. ...

Donald Trump has reportedly been booted from "the country’s most exclusive club," Forbes reported.

Trump is now $300 million short to qualify for The Forbes 400 ranking of America’s richest people. According to Forbes, Trump has "relentlessly" lied to reporters for decades in his attempts to boost himself higher in the list.

"His net worth is down more than $600 million from a year ago. The biggest reason: Truth Social, his social-media business. Trump once envisioned a significant percentage of the country logging onto the platform," Forbes reported. "But that never happened. Roughly 6.5 million have signed up so far, about 1% of the total on X (né Twitter). Trump’s 90% stake in Truth Social’s parent company has plummeted in value from an estimated $730 million to less than $100 million."...

The first time I realized I came from a working class immigrant family was when I was six. I had gone shopping with my mom and aunt when we decided to pop into an open house for a property we could never afford. The moment I laid eyes on that big blue two-story home something in me changed. It became one of many defining moments of my life, and from then on I became obsessed with the traditional version of the American Dream.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook not only made household names out of its founders thanks to the movie "The Social Network" -- it has also minted the latest crop of the richest people on the planet.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bill Gates didn't lose his title as the world's richest man last year; he gave it away by plowing billions into his charitable foundation, experts say.

Kate Harding wrote an interesting post about some two-bit wingnut pundit named S.E. Cupp, who is next in line in the stream of female pundits whose good looks flatter their mainly male audience and who say outrageous things to titillate the haters. I'm actually not surprised that Cupp plays the part of the populist while bragging about her taste for the finer things in life. Ostentatious displays of wealth are actually part and parcel of right wing "populism", for a couple of reasons. First of all, the base that creates right wing populism is wealthier on average than the country as a whole. Their argument for being "populist" is about class only insofar as they have decided that the more actual privilege you have, the more oppressed you are, which is why they use the term "class warfare" strictly to describe the unsavory attempts of the hoi polloi to get a piece of the wealth that we created through our labor, wealth that right wing populists believes belongs in the hands of the already wealthy.