Trump, for example, HAS money...he just does whatever he can to not pay you or underpay you. People hate doing business with him because he's not a trustworthy individual; all the building industry people in/around NYC, no matter how conservative, didn't want to vote for him because they KNEW he was full of shit. You can be the richest man on the planet and have the liquidity to back it up, but if you're known for not honoring your word, then it'll be hard to do business. (of course some people still will, but they're not gonna be The Greatest People. You don't want to work with other backstabbers)
That's pretty much how real-estate operates, though. It's a volatile industry with a lot of shady doings. While Trump is one of the most notable real-estate moguls, how he operates is hardly unique. And most of the issues surrounding his projects are pretty common, too.
The other year, I was binging Bright Sun Films on YT which covers the history of abandoned places -- which is mostly real estate projects where things fell through. A single project -- like a hotel or casino -- can change hands dozens of times before being either completed or, more likely, scrapped. And a lot of people always wind up unpaid
Speaking of: I am dumb and gay I don't know how business works. How does a sole owner of a business take money from that and put it into their own pockets? Like if Bob at Bob's Big Discount Book Barn wants to buy a new yacht, can he just say "ooo random bonus for me!" and then that gets charged as income? Or can he just open the company check book and say "I'm writing a check out to me and there's nothing you can do about it"? Or do you just give yourself whatever salary you want and there's a steady flow of income from that?
Oh joy, I'm guessing you've never heard about the exciting world of leveraged buyouts and vulture capitalism!
You -- yes, you! -- can buy a company by putting almost no money down and finance the rest via loans against the value of the purchased company. Sometimes the vulture capitalist only puts down less than 1% of the company's value. You can then pay yourself bonuses, sell the company's assets, etc, and put it in bankruptcy to screw your suppliers, lenders, etc, after you've extracted all the value you can get... and then you move onto the next company.
There are several ways you can extract value from the company you're looting, but these are some of the obvious ones:
1) Salary. It's just earned income, taxable at the normal rates, and boring.
2) Bonuses. Again, earned income, taxable, but a bit more questionable. You can also get more creative with bonuses.
3) Non-income benefits. These are taxable, but I don't really know the rates. This includes company provided things you can't just expense against the company (although there are an insane number of things you can expense against the company)
4) Expensing against the company. This one can be a bit of a gray area, but it's huge in business and politics. This can include travel, lodging, amenities (including meals), work-related items, etc. iirc, some executives have kept second apartments which are paid for by the company. These aren't taxable (and can be used as a deduction for the company).
5) Shareholder dividends. This is more applicable with private companies. These are taxed differently but, for the most part, if you're looting a company or otherwise in bad faith, it's a little bit harder to exploit these. Basically, you'd have to be operating at a profit and then you're getting a return on that profit.
That said, I don't see him being able to extract much value from Twitter and he's supposedly buying it legit instead of engaging in the usual glorified theft.
Of course, it may all simply be leading to the worst-case scenario where he destabilized Twitter so much it can't survive no matter what/who/when. What a mess.
I mean, there are a lot worse potential outcomes.