Epidemic hits billionaires, too. Forbes says Donald Trump lost $1 billion in a month.
Given all that’s going on in the world (hint: coronavirus), maybe no one really cares: But Forbes magazine has nonetheless gone ahead and issued its annual ranking of the world’s billionaires.
It may provide suddenly jobless people or those whose 401ks have evaporated the slightest bit of schadenfreude — taking pleasure in others’ misery — to learn that because of the economic battering delivered by the pandemic, many billionaires are worth a few hundred million less, that some have dropped off the list, and that there are fewer billionaires now than a year ago.
But probably not.
Among those taking it on the chin: new legal Florida resident, and president of the United States, Donald Trump. According to Forbes’ estimates, released on Tuesday, Trump’s net worth just dropped $1 billion in one month, to $2.1 billion.
Trump’s resorts in South Florida, including Trump National Doral, the chief revenue driver for his family company, have been shut by the pandemic. The Forbes ranking was readied March 18, which means the magazine’s estimates reflect the pandemic impact up to that date. Trump Doral closed on March 23, but hotel occupancy rates across the region were already plummeting by then.
Miami Palmetto Senior High grad and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, retained the top spot on the list even though he saw his net worth drop by $18 billion, to $113 billion — but that was “primarily due to his recent divorce,” Forbes said.
New to the list this year: His ex-wife, novelist MacKenzie Bezos, who debuts at No. 22 with a bullet, at a net worth of $36 billion.
And while stores and restaurants are shut down — and many workers sent home without paychecks — luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault vaulted into the ranks of the top three billionaires with a family fortune of $76 billion. His ascension came at the expense of Warren Buffett, whose status as the Sage of Omaha didn’t save his net worth from plunging from $82.5 billion last year to $67.5 billion. Arnault’s LVMH is a principal investor in Miami Design District Associates.
To put a relevant gloss on the release of the list, Forbes created a “tracker” on all the ways some billionaires are helping or giving money for pandemic relief, including keeping employees on the payroll even when businesses are shut down.
Some might also argue — and they do, in fact — that if billionaires and their companies were taxed even just a bit more, at least some of these emergency appropriations for economic relief and the deep deficit spending required wouldn’t be necessary. Amazon, for instance, went two years paying zero in U.S. federal taxes before getting a $162 million tax bill in 2019 on a whopping $13.9 billion in earnings — or a 1.2 percent tax rate.
Forbes highlights coronavirus relief efforts by Carnival Corp. chairman and Miami Heat principal owner Micky Arison. The NBA team is providing disaster assistance to team employees, concession workers and housekeepers, and Arison has donated $1 million to a fund to help employees and other community members, Forbes notes. Arison has also offered Trump to make cruise ships available for use as floating hospitals, although that offer has not been taken up on.
The magazine also drily notes that “Carnival did not suspend cruises until mid-March despite many passengers contracting coronavirus” on its ships.
Carnival’s stock has dropped 78 percent, despite a bump after Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund took a stake in the company in recent days.
According to Forbes, Arison’s fortune has dropped since last year from $8.1 billion to $5.1 billion now.
Other Miami-Dade billionaires are down, too.
Auto dealer and civic activist Norman Braman saw his net worth dip some, from $2.5 billion to $2.4 billion. Optometrist and inventor Herbert Wertheimer’s dropped from $3.1 billion to $2.4 billion, tying him with Braman and others at number 875 on the Forbes ranking. Former airline executive Rakesh Gangwal went from $3.8 billion to $2.4 billion.
Some with local connections, on the other hand, held their own.
Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross kept his net worth steady at $7.6 billion (Ross pledged $500,000 to support meal programs for public school students and underserved populations in South Florida as well as church relief efforts in Miami Gardens, Forbes said).
Hedge-fund manager and Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper, a Miami Beach resident, also held steady at $12 billion, and so did Coconut Grove insurance mogul William Berkley, at $2.6 billion.
Others on the list: Related Group chairman and art patron Jorge Perez, number 1,135 on the list with $1.9 billion, and medical entrepreneur and philanthropist Phillip Frost, at number 1,415 with $1.5 billion.
Forbes’s 2020 ranking includes 2,095 billionaires, down from 2,153 last year. The total combined net worth of the 2020 billionaires is $8 trillion — or about four times the total of the unprecedented relief bill passed by the U.S. Congress — and that’s down from $8.7 trillion in 2020.
A record 1,062 individuals saw their fortunes drop, a trend Forbes attributed to both turbulent markets and the coronavirus pandemic.
This story was originally published April 7, 2020 at 5:45 PM.