Page 6 - How To Get Rich

Tower, the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and many other top-tier properties. I had a
yacht, a plane, a bestselling book.
One magazine headline said,EVERYTHING HE TOUCHES TURNS
TO GOLD , and I believed it. I’d never known adversity. I went straight

from Wharton to wealth. Even in down markets, I bought properties
inexpensively and made a lot of money. I began to think it was easy.
In the late eighties, I lost focus. I’d fly off to Europe to attend fashion
shows, and I wasn’t looking at the clothing. My lack of attention was
killing my business.
Then, the real estate market crashed. I owed billions upon billions of
dollars—$9.2 billion, to be exact. That’s nine billion, two hundred million

dollars. I’ve told this story many times before, but it bears repeating: In
the midst of the crash, I passed a beggar on the street and realized he was
worth $9.2 billion more than I was. I saw a lot of my friends go bankrupt,
never to be heard from again.
The media had me for lunch. Forbes, BusinessWeek, Fortune, The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times—they all published major stories

about my crisis, and a lot of people seemed to be happy about it.
I’ll never forget the worst moment. It was 3A.M . Citibank phoned me
at my home in Trump Tower. They wanted me to come over to their office
immediately to negotiate new terms with some foreign banks—three of
the ninety-nine banks to whom I owed billions.
It’s tough when you have to tell a banker that you can’t pay interest.
They tend not to like those words. An ally at Citibank suggested that the

best way for me to handle this difficult situation was to call the banks
myself, and that’s exactly what they wanted me to do, at three o’clock on a
cold January morning, in the freezing rain. There were no cabs, so I
walked fifteen blocks to Citibank. By the time I got there, I was drenched.
That was the low point. There were thirty bankers sitting around a big

table. I phoned one Japanese banker, then an Austrian banker, and then a
third banker from a country I can no longer remember.
InThe Art of the Deal, I had warned readers never to personally
guarantee anything. Well, I hadn’t followed my own advice. Of the $9.2
billion I owed, I’d personally guaranteed a billion dollars. I was a
schmuck, but I was a lucky schmuck, and I wound up dealing with some
understanding bankers who worked out a fair deal. After being the king of