Openly telling the world you’re more than a billion bucks in debt is quite a strategy, and one that, admittedly, is all but guaranteed to keep your name in headlines.
As you’ve no doubt seen by now, that’s exactly what Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki has been doing. For those unfamiliar, the book, originally billed as being penned with Sharon Lechter and released nearly 30 years ago, is a parables-esque personal finance best-seller that helped Kiyosaki establish a stardom, of sorts, that has ultimately led us to the claimed $1.2 billion debt figure.
In a lengthy October 2025 interview on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, Kiyosaki was asked point-blank to specify “how much debt” he has, leading to him citing the $1.2 billion figure that’s become a headlines mainstay in subsequent months. Asked if the sheer amount of this stated debt makes him nervous, Kiyosaki laughed.
“Are you shitting me?” he said, as seen above. “It gets me sexually stimulated. No, I’ll tell you why: You owe the bank $20 million dollars, and you can’t pay it back, you got a problem. But you owe the bank a billion dollars, and you can’t pay it back, it’s their problem.”
Kiyosaki, who, unsurprisingly, is a Trumpian, went on to point out that the money is linked to various real estate-focused investments.
The nature of the debt has since been dissected a bit more closely thanks to a Vanity Fair piece published this week by Christopher Cox, who interviewed Kiyosaki at his home.
Cox, notably, also heard from Kim Kiyosaki, Robert’s ex-wife and business partner, who added more context to the hefty debt figure, saying the $1.2 billion is actually linked to a larger group of investors. VF, citing Robert’s own estimate of bringing in $3 million per year, speculates that his personal chunk of the debt could top out at as high as an estimated $60 million.
“He loves to say things that shock,” Kim was quoted as saying in the piece, which is as good of a way as any to end this article.
