To clarify, Ed Teller said he'd rather people thought that he'd won a Nobel than to have actually won one. (We may never now what he meant by that, but we can imagine earning such respect broadly is better than having to refer to credentials to get people to listen to you.)
In Trump's case, he'd rather screw someone who trusted him out of a $1M deposit so he can brag about it to a barber rather than build a business relationship that could make him far more money. He's interested in conspicuous consumption, and what others think, more than the bother of actually...
...making a profit. If he did, he'd be able to read a balance sheet and an income statement by now. He can't even read the real estate leases he signs. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HPq... This is a big difference between him and the top 20 (100?) New York real estate developers.
Plenty of wealthy people take pains not to draw attention to themselves. They try to stay off the Forbes list, while Donny faked his way onto it so he could win loans that didn't match his actual assets and earning power. The former is what he cared about, not the latter.
bsky.app/profile/char...
“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”
That last one is still true today.