How The Presidency Made Mar-A-Lago Trump’s Most Valuable Property By Far |
Donald Trump just couldn’t resist a low-stakes flex in a high-attention zip code.
On Monday, the president waded into Tuesday’s special election in Florida State House District 87 with a Truth Social post: “JON MAPLES HAS MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT!” Maples, a Republican financial advisor, ended up losing Tuesday’s race by two points to Democrat Emily Gregory, a small business owner. Which means Gregory now represents two constituencies that really matter in modern Republican politics: the voters in her district—including Donald Trump himself—and the private club where the sitting president resides and often hosts power, money and, increasingly, government.
For the first time this March, when Forbes recalculated Trump’s net worth for our World’s Billionaires List, we estimated Mar-a-Lago’s value at over half a billion dollars. It now stands at $564 million, by a wide margin the single most valuable property in his portfolio and up over 50% from a year ago.
Much of that can be chalked up to a sort of election win premium that has made the club, perhaps, the most efficiently networked driveway in America. Forbes estimated Mar-a-Lago’s value at about $340 million in September 2024 for the Forbes 400 list, the last valuation round before Trump returned to the White House. Not long after, Palm Beach real estate experts were already granting it higher valuations. “My head tells me at least $500 million,” Corcoran Group’s Dana Koch said in January 2025, a $100 million jump from a previous estimate. “I have people who would fight me tooth and nail to tell me it’s worth $750 million, a billion, $1.25 billion, $1.5 billion—seriously, they’d fight me on it, real estate people,” he added. Aperture Global founding agent Isaac Klein made a similar case around the same time, explicitly framing the bump as stemming from public goodwill attached to a “unique president.”
A better term for goodwill might be gravitational pull. Since Trump won the 2024 election, Forbes found at least 32 billionaires who reportedly made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Of those 32, 25 are wealthier than they were a year ago; collectively they’re worth a combined $2.3 trillion, up $700 billion.
The list reads like a Gilded Age guestbook. Trump business partner Hussain Sajwani (net worth: $15.3 billion) visited. The world’s richest person, Elon Musk ($839 billion), did too. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth richest members of Forbes’ 2026 Billionaires List—Sergey Brin ($237 billion), Jeff Bezos ($224 billion), Mark Zuckerberg ($222 billion) and Larry Ellison ($190 billion)—have also apparently been spotted. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ($154 billion) reportedly stopped by quietly to attend a $1 million-a-head fundraiser in April—shortly before the administration reversed course on restricting the company’s chip sales in China. (A person familiar with Huang’s visit denied that he made a donation, but confirmed he was at Mar-a-Lago.) Other billionaire guests include members of Trump’s administration, including commerce secretary Howard Lutnick ($7.2 billion), education secretary Linda McMahon ($3.6 billion) and ambassador to Italy Tilman Fertitta ($11.7 billion).
“I have people who would fight me tooth and nail to tell me it’s worth $750 million, $1 billion, $1.25 billion, $1.5 billion—seriously, they’d fight me on it, real estate people.” - Dana Koch
Mar-a-Lago’s soaring valuation also has a boring but important underpinning: cash flow. In his most recent financial disclosures, Trump reported about $50 million in resort-related revenue in 2024, nearly double 2021’s $27 million. Forbes estimates that the club, a go-to location for all sorts of MAGA events, made Trump some $33 million in profits in 2024, up from $14 million in 2021.
Palm Beach’s rising tide has helped, too: The luxury market there has skyrocketed in recent years. “Everyone wants to be around Trump right now,” Compass agent Chris Deitz told Forbes in December, noting intensified demand for homes in the “security zone” around the club. Trump’s three nearby mansions are collectively worth about $100 million, up from $88 million a year ago and $42 million in 2021. Hedge fund titan Ken Griffin ($49.8 billion) is building a colossal 28-acre estate down the street; mining magnate Gina Rinehart ($25.5 billion), casino billionaire Steve Wynn ($3.9 billion) and activist investor Nelson Peltz ($1.6 billion) are among the billionaires with glitzy properties nearby.
In the grand scheme of the president’s $6.5 billion net worth, up $1.4 billion year-over-year, Mar-a-Lago’s roughly $190 million boost is relatively small. It’s a bit less than the combined increases in all his U.S. golf courses and pales in comparison to the impacts of the takeoff of his crypto ventures (+$1.8 billion), the dropping of an estimated $517 million fine linked to his fraud trial in New York and the collapse in the value of his shares in Trump Media and Technology Group (-$1.4 billion).
Mar-a-Lago’s been on his balance sheet for a long time, though. Trump bought the 17.5-acre estate in 1985 for $10 million and turned it into a money-printing machine long before he ever ran for office. When he first won the White House in 2016, he reportedly doubled the initiation fee to $200,000; today it’s apparently at least $1 million. So on Monday, as Iranian officials publicly rejected negotiations to end the country’s war with the United States and Israel, the president’s mind still wandered to Palm Beach—trying, unsuccessfully, to pick who would represent Mar-a-Lago in the Florida House.
With additional reporting by Dan Alexander.