I see your point, but Forbes methodology for verification isn't flawless.
If the 4.8 billion dollar value is based on truth social, that number is crashing. If it's based on his other assets, I don't have much faith in that value either.
To say Trump exaggerates about the value of his assets would be an understatement. He makes up huge numbers that are nowhere close to reality. The big numbers are used to his advantage when it suits him, and much smaller numbers are reported to the IRS.
A quick search on golf courses came up with this story, though there are many more.
The point is, his actual net worth is a bit of a mystery. If the truth came out, I very much doubt it would be anywhere close to 4.8 billion.
Honestly I'd be surprised if he was even close to being rich. The guy takes out loan after loan after loan in larger and larger amounts. He's most likely living on borrowed money based upon what he says his properties are worth.
Mr. Trump? A multi-billionaire? The guy who can't secure a $440m bond? That Mr. Trump? We talking about the same guy here?
There's a reason he can't secure that bond, you know. If you total up all of his asset valuations, he's a billionaire. If you subtract all of the liens, mortgages, and encumbrance he has on those assets, he's basically broke.
To be fair, and I have no idea why I'm being fair to that jackass, I think I would struggle to put together cash that's 10% of my net worth, given that most of my net worth is in my home and retirement accounts. I know the math gets a lot different as your net worth goes up, and the biggest difference is he could liquidate assets that he doesn't need to survive. But still I'm sure it'd wind up costing him more than the $500M or so on paper for the bond.
Hell, given that his "job" is just to be rage tweeting and encouraging racism, if he genuinely thinks he's gonna weasel his way out of the charges, its probably more cost effective to go to jail for a bit for attention than to sell something on short notice.
The problem is he can't liquidate his assets that easily as most of his assets are in property. And when you sell property they have to go through an independent valuation and that may present a problem since he knows he lied about their value.
The actual value of his real estate is probably a lot less than the much quoted amount. I bet he doesn't have a clue how much his properties are actually worth.
If you count all of the money that people actually have over the course of their life they probably do have well over a million dollars just not at the same time.
Calculating someone's worth minus their debts is meaningless.