| | | They were wrong about Wilbur Ross for years:
Turns out Wilbur Ross isn’t a billionaire. Uh-oh. - The ...
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-oh-where...
Nov 08, 2017 · President Trump's billionaire commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, has a big problem: He is apparently not a billionaire. Forbes magazine, keeper of the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, reports...
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is not a billionaire, Forbes ...
www.marketwatch.com/story/commerce-secretary...
Nov 07, 2017 · Not a billionaire: Wilbur Ross Forbes magazine says Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has exaggerated his net wealth for years and is not an actual billionaire. After reviewing his federal financial...
Why billionaires like Wilbur Ross lie to Forbes and Bloomberg ...
qz.com/1123599/wilbur-ross-is-probably-just-one...
Nov 08, 2017 · Wilbur Ross is probably just one of many billionaires who lie about being billionaires ... who has spent 13 years on its Forbes 400 billionaires list, was in fact not, ... Trump and Ross’s ...
The Case Of Wilbur Ross' Phantom $2 Billion - Forbes
www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/11/07/the...
Nov 07, 2017 · For 13 years, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has been telling Forbes that he's a billionaire, producing numbers to bolster his point. But it seems he has been lying all along--and not just to us.
........ So began the mystery of Wilbur Ross' missing $2 billion. And after one month of digging, Forbes is confident it has found the answer: That money never existed. It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004. In addition to just padding his ego, Ross' machinations helped bolster his standing in a way that translated into business opportunities. And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross' private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits.
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Wilbur Ross is probably just one of many billionaires who lie about being billionaires
It’s been a rough week for US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross. On Nov. 5 the Paradise Papers, a giant leak of documents, revealed that he had a stake worth millions in a company with ties to people close to Russian president Vladimir Putin. On Nov. 7, Forbes reported that Ross, who has spent 13 years on its Forbes 400 billionaires list, was in fact not, and probably never had been, a billionaire.
Forbes estimated Ross’s wealth last year at $2.9 billion. So did Bloomberg. But in federal filings submitted before he joined Donald Trump’s cabinet this year, Ross declared only $700 million in assets. ...............
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If Ross could deceive Forbes and Bloomberg for years, how many of the other numbers in lists of the world’s rich people can we trust?
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Just look at Ross’s current boss: president Donald Trump.
Journalist Tim O’Brien detailed the decades-long dance between Trump and Forbes in his 2005 book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald and a piece (paywall) for the New York Times magazine. The pattern is jarringly similar: Rich person lies, Forbes believes them. Trump’s “propensity for inflation, matched with Forbes’s aversion to hiring the sizable staff it might need to assess accurately the wealth of each of its designated 400, got Donald on the magazine’s inaugural list in 1982,” O’Brien wrote.
One of Trump’s favorite tactics to up his number was to insist “on impossibly high figures for his net worth and then, in a faux fit of complaining, settled for an estimate that Forbes convinced itself was conservative—even though it was often wildly high anyway,” O’Brien writes.
Forbes’ figures on Trump’s wealth make some extraordinary jumps, O’Brien points out. Between 1982 and 1983, a year of heavy recession, Trump and his father’s fortune doubled. Between 1986 and 1989, Forbes judged Trump’s wealth as having leapt from $700 million to $1.7 billion “during a four-year period when he was borrowing huge sums to buy money-losing properties,” O’Brien writes.
In later years, Forbes commented on Trump’s intense lobbying to push up his valuation. “We love Donald,” it wrote in 1999, when it valued him at $1.6 billion. “He returns our calls. He usually pays for lunch. He even estimates his own net worth ($4.5 billion). But no matter how hard we try, we just can’t prove it.”
For 2004, when Forbes put Trump’s wealth at $2.5 billion, O’Brien quoted three anonymous sources “with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” to estimate the real figure was between $150 million and $250 million. Trump sued O’Brien; a judge threw out the case in 2009 and an appeal failed in 2011.
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