Bagli have a fantastic, in-depth, 5,000-word account of Donald Trump’s business dealings in Atlantic City for the New York Times that is full of lurid details that amount to this core point: Trump’s New Jersey casinos were never successful operating businesses, but they did make a lot of money for Donald Trump personally, because he tunneled assets out of the enterprises into his own pockets. Then you pay yourself a high salary, and when it eventually goes bankrupt that’s the investors’ problem. Consequently, while one way to make a lot of money founding and managing a company is for the company to be very successful, and thus for your share of it to be very valuable, that actually isn’t the only way.Īnother thing you can do is run a business that stays afloat for a number of years without really being profitable. It’s typical for large business enterprises to be financed in large part by people who didn’t found the company and don’t necessarily manage it.
