Donald Trump

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Donald Trump : biography

14 June 1946 –

The next Donald Trump’s project was a skyscraper on the fifth avenue, which was named “Trump Tower”. This tower of sixty eight floors is situated in front of the store “Tiffany”, and it couldn’t stay unnoticed just because of this fact. This building was noticed not by ordinary people, but by “Tiffany” visitors, who were exclusively rich people. This project was very difficult – the developer practically spent nights at the building area, he fired many workers, didn’t get enough to eat and enough sleep, but he became famous. The skyscraper’s name was also a very well calculated marketing move. Donald was made fun of in the press, journalists claimed that he made monuments for himself – but several years later building companies were ready to pay enormous amounts of money to get a permission to use the name Trump, which became a brand.

Soon “Trump Tower” became a real symbol of luxury. Apartments and offices in this skyscraper were sold immediately and for big sums of money. When the situation on the New York building market got more difficult and Donald’s business rivals started to lower prices, but Donald did the other way round, as he thought that status was more important than money. And he won again.

In 1977 Donald Trump got married. Ivana Zelnichkova, a former Czech skier, was a photo model when they met and was very beautiful. Fallen in love Donald presented her diamonds, took her to Paris and Las Vegas, and made her a gift – his famous skyscraper – on their wedding. This marriage gave him three children – Donald junior, Ivanka and Eric.

During the following ten years Donald Trump earned the title of “the king of American real estate” by right. After building “Trump Tower” he decided to realize his dream – to make an entertaining empire in Atlantic-City. He got his younger brother Robert involved in this project, who became the head on buying the land and got a license on gambling business. The complex Harra was opened in 1982 in collaboration with “Holyday Inns”, it cost two hundred and fifty million dollars. Four years later Donald redeemed “Holyday Inns” and the complex’s name turned into “Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino”. It became the symbol of Atlantic-City, like “Trump Tower” in New York. Soon Trump became the owner of several casinos and golf-clubs, airline “Trump Shuttle Airline”, vodka’s brands and grocery goods, a huge yacht, a football team “New Jersey Generals” and he even invested money in several not very perspective building projects. He had never been too modest in the childhood, and now, on the top of his rise, he practically had a megalomania. When somebody asked him about his business, he answered “It is wonderful to be Donald”.

Trump built his business rather risky – he took loans in banks on all his projects and didn’t invest his own money. His dealerships brought either fantastic money or ruin to his investors, but creditors were ready to give money just when they heard his name, and gradually Donald became too convinced in his constant luck and he practically stopped listening to the crux of his bargains, which were made outside the main sphere of his business – building. Most likely, the ordinary blindness with success was the reason of the following decline of Trump – the great magnate felt, that he achieved all his aims and lost control of his empire, he didn’t manage to hold a balance between rising debts and current assets. Unfortunately, his instinctive sixth sense of profitable projects was combined with absence of accurate planning, and it influenced on his business. In 1990, after buying “Taj Mahal”, the most expensive casino-hotel in the world, Donald was on the edge of bankruptcy – the whole amount of his empire’s debts was more than nine billion dollars, and one billion Trump owed personally. In order to pay off the debts he had to transfer to his creditors control of the most part of his real estate.