Warren Buffett Told Everyone Why Donald Trump's Businesses Failed 25 Years Ago and Nobody Noticed
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Warren Buffett is well known for predicting the financial weather, and it looks like he was ahead of the pack when it comes to grading Donald Trump, too.
In 1991, Buffett, who's currently worth more than $67 billion and is a public supporter Hillary Clinton, spoke to a room full of business students fom the University of Notre Dame. That was the same year that the Republican nominee, who was a real estate investor at the time, entered the Trump Taj Mahal into bankruptcy, according to Yahoo Finance.
Buffett said that Trump basically bought properties for more money than they were worth and then couldn't pay the loans back.
“He simply got infatuated with how much money he could borrow, and he did not give enough thought to how much money he could pay back,” Buffett said, according to Yahoo.
Although Trump couldn't pay the money back he continued to get more loans, Buffett said.
“The big problem with Donald Trump was he never went right," said Buffett, according to Yahoo. "He basically overpaid for properties, but he got people to lend him the money."
According to the transcript of Buffett's speech, he asked the business students to list the qualities of a good investor and business leader. He said that the successful people he's met are more like Founding Father Ben Franklin and less like Trump.
“You would probably relate it to a lot of qualities, some of which would be straight from Ben Franklin," he said. "I would suggest that the big successes I’ve met had a fair amount of Ben Franklin in them and Donald Trump did not.”
Buffett was referencing Franklin's "13 virtues," a list of rules and moral guidelines Franklin made for himself at the age of 20. Some of the virtues include avoiding "trifling conversation," avoiding "hurtful deceit," and "avoid extremes."
In this election cycle, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has publicly slammed Trump's business history as a part of their ongoing Twitter war. Warren tweeted a string of articles accusing the businessman of fraud.
Trump is facing multiple lawsuits from students of Trump University, a course which was marketed as being able to help attendees become successful in the world of business. The lawsuits allege that Trump University charged people thousands of dollars for classes that didn't come close to delivering on their lofty promises. Trump has denied the allegations.
