Neil Barsky NY Times - Amid
all the self-made myths about Donald Trump, none is more fantastic than
Trump the moneymaker, the New York tycoon who has enjoyed a remarkably
successful business career. In reality, Mr. Trump was a walking disaster
as a businessman for much of his life. This is not just my opinion. Warren Buffett said as much this past week.
Between 1985 and 1991, working mainly for The Daily News and The Wall Street Journal, I covered Mr. Trump’s travails and interviewed him dozens of times. On several occasions he threatened to sue me, though he never did. But he didn’t hide his opinion of me. In “Trump: The Art of the Comeback,” his 1997 book, he wrote: “Of all the writers who have written about me, probably none has been more vicious than Neil Barsky of The Wall Street Journal.”
At the time, he was a glamorous New York City personality and an Olympic-level self-promoter who had persuaded banks and bondholders to extend him billions of dollars of credit to buy everything from a yacht to the Plaza Hotel to the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle.
He
was also a skilled negotiator with an almost supernatural ability to
pinpoint and attack his adversaries’ vulnerabilities, as several of his
Republican primary opponents discovered. Since his financial emergency
in the 1990s, he appears to have sworn off taking on large amounts of
debt, and instead has used his brand to collect fees on real estate and
other projects. This has greatly limited his downside risk, but has also
capped the amount he can earn, since he often does not own the
underlying equity on the projects that bear his name.
Since
leaving journalism in 1993, I have been a Wall Street real estate
analyst and a hedge fund manager. I have studied how businesses thrive
and why they fail. Mr. Trump’s political rise has been maddening for me
to watch, and I sometimes feel like the character played by Kevin Bacon
in the movie “Diner” who screams the right answers to a TV quiz show as
the contestants get them wrong.
“The issue isn’t that he’s crass,” I want to shout. “It’s that he’s a bad businessman!”
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