Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker claimed in a speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday night that unlike former President Donald Trump, he is an “actual billionaire.”
“Take it from an actual billionaire,” Pritzker said, to cheers, “Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.”
Democrats cheered Pritzker’s billions — just after cheering Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for attacking billionaires.
Pritzker inherited his billions from his family. As Vanity Fair recently recounted:
Nicholas J. Pritzker arrived in 1881, worked as a pharmacist, and his three sons—Jack, Harry, and A.N. Pritzker—become lawyers and started the firm Pritzker & Pritzker, which was successful enough to fund the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. The global Pritzker empire began in earnest in 1957 when A.N.’s son Jay Pritzker and his brother Donald spent $2.2 million to buy Hyatt House, a Los Angeles motel that had recently opened near LAX, sensing that high-end travelers would need a lux place to crash near the airport. They quickly built Hyatt into one of the world’s biggest hotel brands, and along the way acquired companies like Ticketmaster (sold to Paul Allen in 1993) and the Marmon Group, a manufacturing conglomerate they sold to Berkshire Hathaway, first partially and then entirely.
Through a series of deals and savvy investments, the family has managed to keep the fortune, and then some—since the pandemic it’s added over $10 billion. Forbes estimates that the entire family’s net worth is $41.6 billion, split among the roughly 50 members.
Trump also benefited from his father’s wealth — but on a smaller scale. He borrowed millions of dollars from his father, then invested it — not by playing the stock market or funding other companies, but by developing real estate.
Some of Trump’s businesses did go bankrupt — another Pritzker taunt — but Trump used bankruptcy to rebuild, and kept taking risks.
Pritzker faced criticism, and federal investigation, for dodging property taxes by removing the toilets from one of his mansions in Chicago’s wealthy Gold Coast neighborhood so that he could declare it uninhabitable.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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