Ivanka Trump built a brand based on success and elegance and aimed at professional women. Her father’s politics upended everything.
Where in the world is Ivanka Trump? Donald Trump’s most famous child, Ivanka became a staunch defender of his, introducing him at the 2016 and 2020 Republican conventions and even shutting down her business and leaving the Trump Organization to become a loyal White House advisor. Then he lost the 2020 election. Afterwards, Ivanka and her family retreated to Miami, buying a $30 million home on Indian Creek Island, a man-made barrier isle where their neighbors include Jeff Bezos and Tom Brady. “I am choosing to prioritize my young children,” she said in a 2022 statement the night her father announced his 2024 bid.
These days, if her Instagram is at all representative, her mind is far from Washington, D.C.—posts about family birthday celebrations, fitness and outdoor adventures including surfing, skiing and motor bike racing abound, plus photos from travel to places like Egypt and Paris. In March, she headed to India for the wedding of Anant Ambani, the son of India’s richest person. In October, she took her 13-year-old daughter to see Taylor Swift, who has endorsed Kamala Harris. Though she testified at her father’s fraud trial in New York last November, she walked away unscathed, even as her dad and brothers were fined hundreds of millions.
The 43-year-old can certainly afford to step away from the family business, both real estate and politics, though she’s not as rich as you might expect. Ivanka’s business ventures in clothing, jewelry, shoes and real estate seeded a fortune that Forbes now estimates at $50 million, less than 1% of her father’s net worth. Her husband—heir to a different real estate dynasty, which has been more proactive about giving stakes to members of the younger generations—is also far richer, worth nearly $1 billion.
That leaves Trump’s oldest daughter in a somewhat unexpected place, surrounded by men of great wealth, without as much of her own—not the path many likely envisioned for her. For undergrad, Ivanka went to the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated in 2004, 36 years after her father and four years after her brother walked across the same stage. Trump rewarded her with a nearly interest-free $1.5 million loan, which she used to purchase a 1,550 square foot unit in the Trump Park Avenue building; Forbes estimates that the place is worth about $2.9 million today.
She joined the Trump Organization in 2005, eventually directing multiple expansions of the real estate empire, including the D.C. hotel and the Doral resort in Miami. Ivanka didn’t live in that first apartment long, though: She and Kushner—whom she married in 2009—moved into a Trump-owned penthouse in the same building around 2011, renting out the first apartment for $10,000 per month. Trump cut her a deal on her new digs—she and Kushner also paid $10,000 a month to live there, meaning she got an essentially free upgrade to a much nicer place. She never bought the new apartment, and Trump eventually sold it to a woman with alleged ties to Chinese intelligence, seemingly shuffling Ivanka and Jared into a different, even larger penthouse in the building—where they paid the same $10,000/month.
Her Trump Organization position eventually paid her some $2 million annually, per her later federal disclosures. But Ivanka had her sights set on more. In 2009, she wrote a book, “The Trump Card,” that has sold around 26,000 copies, according to data from Circana BookScan, but earned her at least $2 million in advances and royalties, per a document released in her father’s fraud trial. Then she started up several side ventures that made her millions more: Ivanka Trump-branded jewelry, handbags, shoes, work and athletic wear. They sold well, and she got a cut of all sales: 6.5% of Marc Fisher shoes, 8% on Mondani handbags, 36% of net revenue plus a $300,000 annual consulting fee for Madison Avenue jewelry, according to the same document. Forbes estimates that her 2013 lucrative deal with G-III made her an estimated $16 million between then and 2018 (on total sales of over $200 million), and that she made over $11 million from her other business endeavors between 2009 and 2016.
Ultimately, what stalled her cash flow was politics. When Donald Trump became president in 2017, Ivanka became a top advisor, giving up her salary. Plus, her government work was unpaid. Some cash did flow anyway: She got a year of severance from the Trump Organization, for example. She also owned shares of several smaller Trump businesses, including a luxury real estate brokerage and an online merchandise shop, and converted her performance-based revenues from them into fixed payments—around $1.5 million annually.
Her lucrative side gigs were crippled, though. She initially kept much of her mini-empire running, but as her father polarized the country, sales reportedly plummeted for her branded products. Nordstrom, for example, stopped carrying her apparel within weeks of her dad taking office, and stuck to their decision despite outrage from the president. With watchdog groups raising ethics questions and her businesses’ revenues collapsing, Ivanka shut down the whole operation in 2018, citing a desire to focus on her political work. The financial repercussions weren’t limited to her brand deals, either. Her second book, “Women Who Work,” came out in 2017 and has sold around 35,000 copies, per Circana BookScan. Though she received over $1 million in advances from it, according to the financial disclosures she filed as a government employee, she donated some of the proceeds to charity “in light of government ethics rules,” she told CNN at the time.
One thing did give her bank account a boost, but only after she left office: When the family sold the D.C. hotel for $375 million in 2022, far more than analysts thought it was worth, she and her brothers all got a cut of the profits, roughly $4 million apiece. A New York judge later clawed back those profits from Eric and Donald Trump Jr. Ivanka, on the other hand, got off scot-free; an appeals court dismissed the suit against her, individually, in 2023 as outside the statute of limitations.
Despite all these changes, Ivanka thus appears to have maintained a sizable cash cushion. Forbes estimates her cash and investments at over $40 million today, after accounting for taxes and spending.
That’s not all she has. According to a review of public documents and the couple’s voter registration records, in 2021, she and Jared purchased an 8,500 square foot mansion on Indian Creek Island, Florida for $24 million through two LLCs, borrowing $15 million to do so. Their neighbors on the exclusive tropical locale, known as the “Billionaire Bunker,” include Bezos and Brady, as well as investor Carl Icahn, art collector and car dealer Norman Braman and Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Public records also show that the couple remodeled the home in 2022 and 2023, including changing the “master pool configuration” and putting in a new sewage line. After debt, Forbes estimates that Ivanka’s share of the house is worth about $7.5 million today.
While her path to wealth has differed in key ways from that of her brothers—Donald Trump Jr. (estimated net worth: about $50 million) has leaned heavily into the new family business of politics to boost his fortune in recent years, and Eric Trump (estimated net worth: about $40 million) has stayed focused on the old family business of real estate—her net worth of around $50 million all added up puts her in the same ballpark. But there is one other thing they all have in common: So far, while paychecks have flowed, barely any assets have been handed to them by their wealthy father, whose own fortune was estimated at nearly $6 billion this week.
With additional reporting by Dan Alexander and Chase Peterson-Withorn.
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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