The megalomaniacal, self-effacing real estate developer is also a TV personality, bestselling author, casino/resort/golf course developer, university founder, public speaker, magazine publisher, and potential political candidate. You'll also find his name attached to brands of clothing, bottled water, fragrance, vodka, and steak.

A Manhattan native, upon his father's retirement, Donald used his share of the family cash to move into the Manhattan real estate market in the '70s. Donald spent much of the '80s on a tear as he developed apartment buildings-his most notable project was the pink-marbled Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue-and plunged millions into Atlantic City. But the furious pace came to haunt him at the end of the decade when the market started to turn south and by 1990, Trump had accumulated more than $2 billion in debt. He propped himself up soon enough. In the mid-'90s, he staged a comeback, partnering with a number of other investors to build a collection of glitzy buildings. He's gone on to parlay that into countless real estate deals, media ventures, and licensing arrangements, which have carried his name-and bizarre hairdo-into every home in America. These days much of his income is derived from licensing deals, whereby he's paid fat upfront fees for the use of his name, as well as a percentage of revenues/ profits. Most of his gold-tinted real estate projects are structured in a similar fashion, with Trump receiving an estimated 8 to 15 percent cut from the sale of a particular building's condos.

Of course, the value of the Trump name has increased a good deal in recent years. Although his ego has loomed large over Manhattan for decades, middle America's blissful ignorance of the Donald was breached in 2004, when his reality show The Apprentice bowed on NBC. The show has since faded from the spotlight-witness the 2008 debut of the unfortunate Celebrity Apprentice-but it turned the Donald into a national phenomenon, and he's used his newfound celebrity status to profit accordingly.

Trump met his first wife, Ivana, at the Montreal Summer Olympics in 1976. They married in 1977 and had three kids before divorcing: Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric. After the marriage's messy end in 1990, Trump married Marla Maples. The couple had one daughter, Tiffany, before divorcing in 1997. He married Slovenian model Melania Knauss in 2005 and they had a son named Barron in 2006. [Image via Getty]