[sanjiwatsuki]

This article is really poorly written in order to paint Trump in the worst light possible.

First, Donald Trump's dad died in 1999. The article is calculating as if he received 1/5th of his father's estate in 1974. Furthermore, even if he had received his share of the estate in 1974 and invested it entirely in index funds, Trump outperformed that by all estimates (as seen in the graph in the article).

Second, the article ignores all taxes and expenses explicitly. The article states that it assumes that Trump "reinvest all dividends, not cash out and have to pay capital gains, and pay nothing in investment fees." This is a ridiculous assumption -- everyone is going to have expenses. Everyone is going to get taxed on it at some point. With more reasonable assumptions, Trump trumps the SP500 further.

Third, even if Trump wanted to invest his entire net worth into indexes, it wouldn't be possible. I can guarantee you that it would have been very hard to liquidate his entire estate and invest into indexes.

You can say that Donald Trump became rich because he came from a rich family, but this article goes out of its way to make outlandish assumptions to make him look bad.