Fox News host blasts billionaires not paying Donald Trump's bills
Fox News host Mark Levin has called out billionaires for not paying Donald Trump's legal bills after the former president's legal team said paying his $400 million New York civil fraud penalty would be "a practical impossibility."
Trump is seeking a bond of $464 million to cover his fines and a stay in the execution of the monetary portion of the civil trial ruling after Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in February that Trump must pay $355 million for committing fraud. The New York court held that Trump and top executives at The Trump Organization inflated the value of his assets to obtain more favorable terms from lenders and insurers. With interest, the full payment will be roughly $454 million. Trump's lawyers are appealing the verdict.
On Monday, the Republican suffered a setback after Trump's legal team admitted in a court filing that it is a "practical impossibility" for him to make the $464 million payment and requested a stay pending the outcome of an appeal process. His team had contacted 33 companies to try to secure funding.
Why doesn’t he just pick himself up by his bootstraps and get the 450 million going, lazybones
Nobody wants to work anymore!
Being a billionaire just isn't worth it anymore. Nowadays, anyone can create a billion using AI. Sure, real billionaires and billionaire fans can tell the difference, but it's convincing enough that most people don't even care if it's artificially created billions. What's even the point now?
I mean, they call anyone with 16,000 Bitcoin a Billionaire these days....
Didn't he already turn a small $1million loan into a billion dollar empire. Surely, he could turn whatever he has now into the small amount of $450 million
Yeah, of course like everything else that lie is also full of lies. The "small loan" was actually 70 million dollars, and then he inherited 450 million on his fathers death. If he had put that in a total stock market fund and done nothing at all, he would have something like 13 billion dollars. Instead, he may or may not have 2-4 billion in total assets.
I don't know if the inheritance is public record but I thought the 70 mil was his inheritance and his brother got the lion's share until his brother died and passed it on to Donald.
I mean that’s really not fair. If he had invested in the stock market he would have had 13 billion that could be sold at any time without any significant loss of value. On the other hand, his real estate is probably worth less than a billion in a fire sale.
He is the most intelligent business man on the face of the earth, right?
Everytime I see or hear lazybones I think about CartNarc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh3fWBwaCGk
Someone at work was telling me about this channel. I should look up more videos. Thanks for reminding me.
Isn’t Trump supposed to be a billionaire? Surely a billionaire can pay his own bills! Maybe he isn’t the billionaire he claims to be.
Not just a billionaire but he testified under oath a month or so ago that he had approximately $400 million in cash so covering the whole thing himself should be relatively easy.
Except they want over $500 million in cash counting interest.
So Trump puts up $400 million of his own and gets a bond for the remaining $100 million & change. It doesn’t ALL have to come from a bond.
The 400m dollar amount is based on an audit conducted in 2021, where it listed him having around 298m. The total of 400 was an estimate based on his income and liabilities since that time.
I for one highly doubt that he has 400m in liquidity. Not because he's incapable of raising that much wealth, but because it's an incredibly dumb move to keep 400m in cash. There's no financial benefit like meaningful interests rates, and it doesn't offer any tax benefits.
Even if he has kept it in partial liquidity like a money market account or Treasury bills, the amount and the timelines may not allow for him to access the totality of his funds in time.
T-bills are highly liquid.
Better yet, if he kept it in the SP500 then it would be liquid and a better investment than whatever Trump Org is doing.
Depending on what maturity rate you choose. I think the shortest is little over a month?
Not super liquid if you are considering taxes.
Liquid means something can be sold quickly for its market value. In other words there are lots and lots of potential buyers bidding for it, so low-balling won't work, so you will get a fair price. Whereas an illiquid investment, like real estate, has few potential buyers. If you are in a hurry to sell real estate, buyers can lowball you.
Liquidity has nothing to do with whether it is wise to sell right now.
T-bills are constantly bought and sold on the secondary market before maturity, the maturity value is built into the market price. If your T-bill matured in 10 years you could sell it tomorrow if you wanted, and you would get a fair price.
You can find quotes here. Want a T-bill that matures on Mar 31? You can easily buy it. Or sell it.
Taxes depend on if your investment was profitable, not liquidity. Something can be illiquid but subject to no taxes (if you lost money on it) or very liquid but subject to high taxes (if you made a lot of money).
Of course, it's possible that selling an investment today wouldn't synergize with your particular tax avoidance strategy. But that's not a liquidity problem, that's a you problem.
You're right, that guy doesn't know much about liquidity. Trump could have parked his money in T-Bills and made 4.8% annually on them, risk free. And no state taxes.
Sounds like a smart thing to do if you're going to pay a fat judgement. Trump is bad at planning and shouldn't get the benefit of the doubt. He just didn't plan on losing at all.
I imagine you probably don't become a billionaire by just letting people force you to pay your "bills," or by following "the law," or by caring about "people," or by responding to ethical "responsibilities."
Probably you become a billionaire by doing the opposite, but idk
Elon Musk loves setting money on fire apparently, so it is actually surprising he's not bailing trump out...
Even musk must know a bad business proposition Paying that bond will pit you directly in the cross hairs of various agencies
Yeah...
The same agencies that forced him to buy Twitter and trump will attack if he gets power.
Musk is 100% dumb enough to foot the bill thinking if trump wins he gets it back, and gets more free reign to do what he wants without government interference.
If he had the money, I legit wouldn't be surprised if he put up some money.
Like, you can't rule out Musk or trump doing something because its irrational. Most of what they do is irrational
Musk already got a 2b contract out of NASA, and all it cost him was to give the lady who signed it a cushy job.
That and owning the company that makes the only reusable rockets on Earth, I guess.
Musk is a twat but you can't deny that NASA is getting their money's worth out of their contracts with SpaceX.
2 billion doesn't even pay for a single launch of SLS. And I wouldn't be surprised to see Starship land on the moon (or at least impact the moon, lol) before the next launch of SLS.
I would be VERY surprised. And I NASA didn't award blue origin a second moon lander contract because they have utmost faith in Starship/HLS.
I will be first in line to say Falcon is an amazing piece of engineering, and Starlink is a great way to fund Falcon. It'll never turn a profit, but it's an amazing way to turn venture capital into cheap rockets for everyone.
But SpaceX has missed every single HLS deadline by a mile. They've got 2 more weeks to do their first unmanned moon landing, according to the original schedule. It'll take 12 (or 20?) successful launches to do 1 lunar landing and return, so I'll take this bet.
The 2 billion contract was for HLS. It was originally higher, but Kathy Lueders gave SpaceX a call to lower their bid to just under the (previously undisclosed) limit, making them the only valid bid. That's what the Blue Origin lawsuit was about, but the judge said it was legal for NASA to "enter in negotiations" with single parties, so this was allowed. You might recognise the name Kathy Leuders, because right after she handed SpaceX the contract, she quit NASA and got a job at SpaceX.
I think I'm validated in finding the whole HLS situation extremely concerning.
I agree with you on HLS, the whole thing seems foolish. I meant more like SpaceX will chuck something around the moon for sport than that they would actually get HLS working. After all, SpaceX can already get to the moon, a lot of the recent payloads to the moon have flown on Falcon 9.
The hardest part of getting to the moon is getting mass to orbit, and Starship just proved it could get mass to orbit, even if the reusable components didn't work out. Now they just need to put Blue Origin's lander inside the payload bay with a kick stage to send it off to the moon 😉 Doing a ton of refueling just to send an entire, oversized Starship as a lander makes no sense.
Donald Trump is a Republican multi-billionaire, maybe he should pitch in.
He should just go without his lattes & avocado toast and stop buying phones if he can't afford his lifestyle.
Something something bootstraps.
Something something "personal responsibility."
Something something "own fault."
Why doesn't trump, a "billionaire", pay his own damn bond? You just said Blbillionaires can afford it.
Even if this guy wasn’t trying to weasel out of paying a cent, there is some validity to the argument that money in commercial real estate is not particularly liquid.
If it weren't leveraged and/or overleveraged already, he could have signed loans by now that would have paid for it. Haven't we already heard how Maralogo is worth like 1.8B despite being on the tax rolls for 20M? Sounds like plenty of equity there alone.
Also, good luck finding a bank to accept collateral when your appealing your crimes of lying about your collateral.
I think the $1.8 Billon is how much is leveraged against the property lol.
But the equity in real estate is liquid in the form of security for a bond. What this tells us is that he doesn't have enough equity to cover the bond- in other words he's been lying all along about his wealth. Surprised?
There's no validity to the argument. I don't get a pass on that shit for paying fines or taxes to the government. "Oh, sorry, my money is tied up in illiquid video game consoles." Fuck's sake.
Isn’t that taxing the rich to pay the poor? Redistribution of wealth? Welfare?
Is that what Fox is advocating?
Rules only apply to their enemies.
Fox News: "Bilionaires should pay their fair share"
OK.
This is it. This is where Republicans turn on the wealthy and we finally start taxing them.
Please let this be it.
It could be that anyone with that level of liquid assets available knows that a "loan" will never be paid back - it was PROVEN that the Trump Org engaged in fraudulent activity, so the appeal is just to try to gain some time. Anyone who puts up cash pending the appeal will definitely lose it once the process confirms what the courts have already ruled.
tHaTs SOciAlISm!
Why cant he just pull up his bootstraps and get a job?
Find someone who values those properties the amount you say they are and then we'll talk.
-New York State.
I'm just waiting for the 24th when it's revealed that MBS is buying a $50 million property from Trump for $550 million thus solving all Trump's problems. It's not like that sort of thing is completely unheard of for Trump. This is just a larger scale.
In response, billionaires should get together and donate a few billion dollars to public defenders, pay off people's medical debt, and offer to buy Mar-a-Lago in order to turn it into public housing.
Al Lago is a chintzy motel with a shitty omelette bar. estimated value of less than 5% of the ruling. He's going to have to sell his bedbug infested resorts and ugly golf courses too
All his properties are inflated values, thats the Russian money laundering scheme at work.
All of them are likely highly leveraged already as well.
Sell 20 million bucks of property, debt grows by 1780 million bucks.
For sure, catshit wrapped in dogshit
I'd say this is a mess of Trump's own making. Nobody forced him to perform the actions that got him into this legal trouble. If you can't afford the penalty, don't do the crime.
Why don't the Fox News owners pay them if they want to so bad? Idiots.
Ruperts got the cash.
I also want to see billionaires spend their money on things that I want them to
I’m sure there are still a few Russian oligarchs who have enough liquid assets to bail trump out, in return for some massive political favors once they help him con enough rubes into electing him again.
The problem is that Trump didn't do enough for them when he was in power and they don't think he could win again. To the oligarchs, Trump is a lost cause. Trash that they don't even have to clean up themselves.
Someone needs to write a book.. “The Fart and the Squeal: A history of the Trump dump” with all proceeds going to charities. I want to raise more money for that than he ever could for his litigation obligations.
Hahahaha
On top of everything else, he had months to prepare for this eventuality.
Wouldn't the greatest businessman of his generation know that it takes time to raise that kind of money?
I mean he does have his shoes.
First, did he actually think that there was some kind of giant market for those things? I've heard people speculate it was his attempt to get the Black vote.
Second [and I've said this before] Fredo Corleone could have figured out that the President of the US could extort all kinds of money from Saudi Arabia. Team Rocket could have figured it out! Wiley Coyote could have figured it out.
How much has Mark Levin kicked in? Surely he can loan Trump 5 or 10 million to help him get there.
I wonder why he hasn't?
Wait, so it's okay for billionaires to hoard their money and not give back to society and try to help with homelessness and starving kids but they should put up millions to help Donald as soon as he needs money?
According to Donal Mar-a-lago is worth billions already. Couldn't he put that up for collateral?
I guess his new shoe line didn’t take off like he expected.
I think it'd be best it Tailor Swift gives him a loan.
She's far too good a businesswoman to do a pants-crapping insane thing like that
I know these are always wrong but it says $50 million
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-politicians/republicans/mark-levin-net-worth/
Millionaire complains about billionaires