"Trump’s casinos could have been concrete blocks lashed to his ankles. But at that perilous juncture, he somehow transformed them into a personal lifeline. From that point until 2009, when Trump stepped down as the company’s chair, his Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts would pay him $44 million in salary and $82 million overall. The people who invested, who threw him that lifeline, didn’t do so well: The company lost $1.1 billion over that time, filing for bankruptcy twice. The stock price would peak at $35.50 in 1996—and ultimately fall to as low as 17 cents a share.
“People who believed in him, that listened to his siren song,” the uber-investor Warren Buffett would say, “came away losing well over 90 cents on the dollar. They got back less than a dime.”