Donald Trump is rich, but nowhere as rich as Jeff Bezos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every October Forbes magazine releases their list of the 400 wealthiest people – the Forbes 400. The Top Ten was shown by the National Review on October 5, 2021 in an article titled Forbes Richest Americans. I have shown the Top Twenty above in a bar chart. Jess Bezos was first, with $201 billion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where was Donald Trump on that list? Another article by Dan Alexander at Forbes on October 5, 2021 explains that instead Donald Trump falls of the Forbes 400 for first time in 25 years. The Donald only is worth $2.5 billion – short of the $2.9 billion needed to make the list. Oprah Winfrey is worth $2.6 billion, so she isn’t there either. (Jeff Bezos is worth over 80 times what The Donald is). How The Donald ranked in the previous years, from 1996 to 2020 is shown in a second graphic.

 

Back on October 4, 2016 I blogged about How to visualize a Trumpload of loss from The Donald’s 1995 income tax returns. For that post I imagined that sum via a stack of dollar bills about 62 miles high. For the current $2.5 billion, it’s a stack about 169.7 miles high. Compare that with the International Space Station, which orbits at a height of 250 miles.

 

Jeff Bezos $201 billion is represented by a 13,641 mile-high stack of dollar bills. That’s only 61% of the 22,236 miles representing the orbit for a geosynchronous communications satellite.