Donald Trump

Business Personality / TV Personality

Donald Trump's name is synonymous with New York hustle and money at the turn of the 21st century. Trump started young in his father's New York real estate business, and by the 1970s had made himself a Manhattan deal-maker, somehow talking banks and city government into financing his ambitious developments. He built the grandiose Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in 1982, and soon he moved into the casino business in New Jersey. Outspoken and flamboyant, Trump became a favorite of the press, and his multiple marriages and divorces were regular tabloid fodder. (Trump was married to model Ivana Zelnicek from 1977-92 and to Marla Maples from 1993-99. He married his third wife, Slovenian model Melania Knauss, on 22 January 2005.) Trump went suddenly on the skids in 1990, finding himself over $900 million in debt and facing bankruptcy. But ever the dealmaker, he rebounded; by the year 2000 he was again worth over a billion dollars. He talked publicly about running for the U.S. presidency the same year, then decided against it. In 2004 he began playing the demanding boss-man in the hit NBC reality series The Apprentice,. ("You're fired," his ritualistic dismissal of the show's losers, became a popular catch-phrase.) His books include Trump: The Art of the Deal (1988), Trump: Surviving at the Top (1990), Trump: The Art of the Comeback (1997) and Trump: How to Get Rich (2004).

Extra credit: Trump's nickname is "The Donald"... Trump has three children with his wife Ivana: Donald Jr. (b. 1977), Ivanka (b. 1981) and Eric (b. 1984); he has one daughter with Maples, Tiffany (b. 1993); and he has a son with Knauss, Barron, born in March of 2006... Trump is famous for his objection to handshakes; a 1999 Time magazine article quoted him as saying "I think the handshake is barbaric... Shaking hands, you catch the flu, you catch this, you catch all sorts of things"... Another germophobic casino-owning billionaire was Howard Hughes.

Trump joins Steve Forbes and Bob Smith in our loop Candidates 2000.

Other business tycoons of Trump's era include Bill Gates and Leona Helmsley.