Trump’s wealth shrinks by $400m

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U.S President Donald Trump’s fortune had fallen for the second year running in  annual ranking of the world’s wealthiest people.

 

Forbes said that Trump’s net worth had fallen by $400m (£287m) to $3.1bn over the past year.

“ It means the president has slipped more than 200 places in the billionaire rankings from 544th richest last year to 766th this year,’’ it said.

The magazine attributed Trump’s decline in wealth to “a tough New York real estate market, particularly for retail locations; a costly lawsuit and an expensive presidential campaign”.

Trump reached a $25m dollar settlement in a legal dispute about claims that his Trump University real estate courses allegedly defrauded students.

However, Trump fared better in Forbes’s ranking than in Bloomberg’s billionaires list, which put his net worth at  $2.86 billion .

Forbes said a record 35 people have joined the list of the world’s billionaires, with the magazine calculating there are now 2,208 people with a net worth of more than $1billion.

In the new ranking,  Forbes  named the Amazon founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, as the world’s richest man with 112bn dollar fortune.

Bezos replaced the Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, who fell back into second place with $90bn.

Forbes calculated that Bezos’s fortune, which is mostly held in Amazon shares, increased by $39.2bn over the past year,  the biggest ever one-year gain.

Amazon’s shares have nearly doubled from $846  a share last March to 1,523 dollars per share last night.

Gates, who had topped the Forbes billionaires list for 18 of the last 24 years, saw his fortune rose modestly from $86bn to $90bn