It’s turning out to be an awful week for Donald Trump. The Republican nominee for president is worth some $800m less this year than he was last year, according to the Forbes 400, an annual ranking of the world’s wealthiest people.
Trump’s net worth fell from $4.5bn to $3.7bn between the 2015 and 2016 ranking. He is now tied for 156th place in the magazine’s annual wealth competition with fellow real estate developers Jerry Speyer and Igor Olenicoff, FedEx founder Frederick Smith, and Steven Spielberg, who saw his own net worth rise by about $100m. Trump is down 35 places from 2015.
His fall came as the rich got even richer. The country’s 400 richest were worth $2.4tn this year and had an average net worth of $6bn, both record highs. For the 23rd straight year, the wealthiest person on the list was Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Gates gained $5bn in the last year – his net worth has increased from $76bn to $81bn.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, too, gained ground: an additional $20bn makes him the second-richest person on Earth, up from the fourth-richest last year. Entrepreneur Warren Buffett’s ranking dropped second to third, though his net worth went up from $62 to $65.5bn. Mark Zuckerberg also had a good 2015: the Facebook CEO made $15.2bn between this list and the last, placing him in fourth place and knocking Oracle CEO Larry Ellison down to No 5. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $6.4bn increase to $45bn put him up at sixth place from eighth last year. Republican financiers the Koch brothers are tied for No 7: their personal fortunes grew by only $1bn this year. Meanwhile, Pierre Omidyar, founder of the Intercept, was up $100m to $8.1bn, rising three places from #57 to #54.
Notable absences from the list included Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the biotech startup Theranos, which is being investigated for fraud. Forbes revised Holmes’s net worth to zero from $4.5bn after investigations into Theranos’s proprietary technologies suggested the company had falsely claimed a number of scientific breakthroughs.
Holmes isn’t the only one with money troubles this year: among Trump’s woes are uncertainties in the New York City real estate market, where demand for retail and office space has become less urgent, according to the magazine.
Trump’s net worth has been a subject of much debate over the course of his presidential campaign, as his steadfast refusal to release his tax returns has kept most details of his financial dealings out of the public eye. The New York Times revealed last week that Trump had declared a $916m loss on his 1995 state tax returns; the partial returns provided to the Times by an anonymous source are the largest single disclosure of Trump’s financial dealings.
Fortune’s research into Trump’s wealth has the advantage of 35 years of research on the man – the first time Forbes published an estimate of Trump’s wealth was on its first-ever Forbes 400 in 1982, when he was worth a mere $100m. Nowadays, young Trump wouldn’t even make the list – the poorest person on the 400 is car dealership magnate Gail Miller, with $1.7bn. Even adjusted for inflation, Trump’s $100m in 1982 is “only” $249m.
