The ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ Author Is $1.2 Billion in Debt

Kiyosaki’s house stands out among its neighbors: white stucco homes with Spanish tiles and sprinklered lawns flopped out front. And then there’s the Kiyosaki residence, a rambling Moroccan fantasia with muddy adobe walls and a pink door. He bought it three years ago, furnished, for $4.5 million after his divorce. “I know it’s very strange,” he says after I arrive, “but I’m very strange.”

Kiyosaki is deeply tan, with white flashing teeth and his black hair swept back. He’s wearing wire-framed glasses with a medallion on the bridge, a simple gold bracelet, and a watch with the biggest face I’ve ever seen. The clearest evidence of his age—he’s 79—is his voice, which is raspy and frequently drops down to a faint whisper. He’s a charming host, generous in his use of compliments, charitable and forthcoming when answering questions. We start with a tour.

In his office, there’s a sealed copy of Cashflow, a board game he designed to teach basic financial principles. A nearby vitrine holds a chrome-covered version of his 2021 book, Capitalist Manifesto: How Entrepreneurs Can Save Capitalism. You could say his office is a museum of his achievements—until you visit Kiyosaki’s actual museum, in a wing of the house overlooking the garden. There you’ll find framed best-seller lists, a plaque celebrating 1 million YouTube streams for the Rich Dad podcast, and photographs of Kiyosaki with Oprah Winfrey, Boris Johnson, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He served in the Marines during the Vietnam War, and one corner of the museum is dedicated to that time: an Air Medal, a model helicopter, and a painting of Kiyosaki in a flight jacket with both “Semper Fi” and “MAGA” scribbled on it in Sharpie.

Kiyosaki has written two books with Donald Trump: Why We Want You to Be Rich (2006) and Midas Touch (2011). There were plans for a third, but they apparently got derailed when Trump announced he was running for president. “I love the guy,” Kiyosaki tells me. “He’s an asshole, but there’s no two Donald Trumps.” He describes one meeting with Trump at Trump Tower. Kiyosaki had been on CNBC with Maria Bartiromo earlier that day, and Trump asked him if Bartiromo was “as hot as she looks.” Kiyosaki’s wife, Kim, objected: “Donald, you already have Melania.” Trump’s reply: “But I’ve already fucked Melania.”

I could go on like this, highlighting the parts of Kiyosaki’s past I personally find most disagreeable. I’d point to all the times he predicted a market crash that never came, highlight his boomer preoccupation with woke-ism run amok, quote his rants about the “Biden crime family.” I could describe him as just another huckster, selling suspect financial advice to the gullible. “The ascent of gold has just begun,” he wrote on X in June. Two weeks later, an update: “​​I was wrong. Gold still crashing!” There are more lawsuits to mine for details, like a class action brought against Rich Dad Education in which plaintiffs alleged that the seminars’ “sole purpose” was to “up-sell ‘students’ into additional useless but more expensive coursework and mentoring, which can cost up to $64,899 per enrollee.” (The case was dismissed for technical reasons.)

But as I discovered, the arc of his existence is far too unusual to fit into such a reductive frame. Kiyosaki’s life story is both bizarre and oddly familiar, intersecting frequently with what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk”: atomic bomb tests, tsunamis, helicopter crashes, the EST movement, the Branch Davidians cult, and the bizarro futurist R. Buckminster Fuller. Even these, however, are only backdrops to its central drama.

To understand Robert Kiyosaki, you have to go beyond the billion-dollar debt. (Though you have to understand that part too.) You must trace a winding path that begins with his boyhood in Hawaii as one of four siblings who lived in awe of the man whom Kiyosaki calls, even in casual conversation, his poor dad. The museum has a section devoted to his father, Ralph Kiyosaki: Hawaii’s former state superintendent of education, who ran for lieutenant governor in 1970. “Kiyosaki can be the difference between unfulfilled hopes and solid governmental accomplishments,” a poster from that campaign reads. Ralph is in horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie, peering hopefully toward the horizon. “He was a great man,” his son tells me.

Kiyosaki's first book, the one before Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is dedicated to Ralph, “the best teacher I ever had.” His next book never mentions his father by name, and is dedicated instead to “all parents everywhere.” That act of literary betrayal—the source of Kiyosaki’s fame and much of his wealth—is the enduring mystery of his life. If he revered his father, why did he decide to cast him as a pitiable failure in what became one of the best-selling books of all time?

“My earliest memories of Robert are always this striving, this learning, this uncovering, unpacking things,” his sister Tenzin tells me. Striving seems to run in the family: Tenzin, born Barbara Emi, spent years as a Buddhist nun, studying under the Dalai Lama. She’s now a hospice chaplain in Southern California, with close-cropped gray hair and a demeanor that’s as serene as Kiyosaki’s is intense. Unlike her brother, she has never made much money. “I was always poor,” she says, “and I continue to be poor.”

Kiyosaki and Tenzin were born just a year apart, in 1947 and 1948, and have two younger siblings, Jon and Beth. They are fourth-generation Japanese Americans. Some members of their extended family served in the military during World War II; others were sent to internment camps. Both Tenzin and her brother describe their early childhood in Hilo, on the Big Island, as idyllic. “Our family entertainment was to go watch the volcanoes erupting,” she says.

The 1960s brought a series of upheavals to Hilo. First, in 1960, a tsunami destroyed much of the town, killing several of the Kiyosakis’ classmates. Two years later, in July 1962, the family witnessed nuclear tests out in the Pacific through their dining room window: a surprise flash that turned the horizon white, then deep red, then black. When Kiyosaki describes the blast in Rich Brother, Rich Sister, a book he wrote with Tenzin, his normally staid prose edges toward the apocalyptic: “It looked like someone had slit the throat of an animal and let the blood gush out across the sky.”

That same summer, the federal government set up the main training center for the newly created Peace Corps in Hilo. Ralph, who had worked as a teacher and school principal, was eventually chosen to run it. “We got droves of these young people coming to our sleepy town,” Tenzin says. “The trainees had this fire in them. It was so inspiring.” Both Kiyosaki and Tenzin describe this period as one of the happiest in their life. “The family was really close at that time,” Kim tells me, “because they were all working toward a bigger purpose.”

By the end of the decade, a rift had opened within the family. Kiyosaki was a poor student, more interested in surfing than studying. The rest of the family followed Ralph’s lead. “Their value systems are my dad’s,” he tells me. “They believe in their false god, which is a college degree.” When the Vietnam War started and Kiyosaki joined the Marine Corps, the decision baffled his father: “My poor dad just went, ‘Why?’”

Kiyosaki remembers his time as a Marine as the most consequential period of his life. He was a pilot on a helicopter gunship in Vietnam, which meant that he killed “a lot of people.” He almost died himself when his helicopter crashed into the ocean after an apparent act of sabotage by another American. But he also remembers sitting on the deck of an aircraft carrier at night, looking out over the water and debating the meaning of life with a fellow aviator.

By war’s end, Kiyosaki felt lost. He moved back to Hawaii. “Most women in my life then were war girls and prostitutes, and I enjoyed these relationships,” he writes in Rich Brother, Rich Sister. He was proud of his service, but he was also questioning just about everything, including his mission in Vietnam: “Was I fighting for America, or was I fighting for multinational corporations and their investors?” In short order, he cycled through a menu of early-’70s woo-woo: tantric sex, rebirthing, neurolinguistic programming, past-life regressions.

Nothing really took until he went to a seminar in Waikiki run by Werner Erhard, né John Paul Rosenberg, who created a program in personal transformation drawn from the greatest hits of 20th-century psychoanalysis and philosophy. His four-day EST courses, as they were known, were controversial; participants were put under great psychological stress in the belief that they’d achieve emotional breakthroughs. Kiyosaki loved it. “On the final Sunday, I got this blinding revelation,” he tells me. “I’m a liar. I’m a liar and a cheat. That’s why I was always in trouble.”

This moment kicked off a lifetime of spiritual seeking on the cultlike fringes of American self-help, which culminated at a 1981 conference in Lake Tahoe where he met with R. Buckminster Fuller, the visionary philosopher (some called him a crank) most famous for his geodesic domes. Fuller’s ideas are hard to summarize, but always seem to reach toward a utopian vision of escaping the drudgery of everyday life. “Every time he talked—and I met him three times after that—every single time, it’s like something went off inside of me: Boom!” Kiyosaki says. “It felt like a ball of fire swirling around inside, and I started to cry.” In his personal museum, one wall has a giant framed drawing by Fuller, which Kiyosaki took home after that first meeting.

Kiyosaki had been trying to start up various businesses before he met Fuller—a Velcro-wallet company, a supplier of merch to rock bands—but everything changed after Tahoe. “Bucky kicked my butt. He said, ‘What’s your purpose in life?’” To get rich, Kiyosaki answered. “Bucky chewed me out. He says, ‘It’s a waste of a good mind. Go and do what God wants done.’” Another flash, another revelation: His mission wasn’t to enrich himself, but to teach other people how to be rich.

Kiyosaki met Kim in 1984, and together with a partner they ran an education company based on Fuller’s principles called Money and You, which used games to teach financial literacy. Some participants loved the program, which, like EST, took place over four days and focused on personal transformation. But the company ran into trouble overseas in 1993, when the Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired a special on its courses. The siege at Waco, which had killed three Australian members of the Branch Davidians, was in the news, and the reporter looked at this American import with suspicion. “They put our group up as a cult,” Kiyosaki says. “Our business collapsed the next day.”

Kiyosaki began looking for his next project. “Bucky always said, ‘Your job is to build an artifact,’ and I didn't understand what he was saying back then,” Kiyosaki tells me. Now he did: “Build something you can see, touch, and feel. So I built the Cashflow board game. And because nobody could understand the game, I wrote a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad.”

Kiyosaki’s years of searching coincided with a period of profound disappointment for his father. After his work with the Peace Corps, Ralph became the state’s first Japanese American superintendent of education, a role he handled so well that he was drafted as the running mate of Samuel King, a Republican candidate for governor. They lost the election, badly, in November 1970. Three months later, Ralph’s father died; the next month his wife, Kiyosaki and Tenzin’s mother, died too. She was 49. “It just knocked him to his knees,” Tenzin says. “I don’t think he really ever came back from that.”

For the next two decades, Ralph had trouble finding work. “Observing Dad later in his life gave me a vision of the future,” Kiyosaki writes. “There he was, a highly educated, hard-working, socially responsible man, struggling in his final years.” That struggle seemed like a repudiation of everything Ralph had taught his son. When Ralph died in 1991, Tenzin was at his bedside, but Kiyosaki was not.

Kiyosaki says the premise for Rich Dad, Poor Dad, published six years after Ralph’s death, came to him in a burst of inspiration. “I was sitting in Bisbee, Arizona,” trying to write, “and all of a sudden, I thought, I had a rich dad and I had a poor dad. It just flowed right out from there.” His siblings were aghast to see Ralph depicted as the hapless poor dad in the book. “Oh, they hated me for it,” Kiyosaki says. But his mission was bigger than one man. In the opening pages of the book, he quotes Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” connecting it to his break from his father. “Choosing not to listen to my highly educated dad’s advice and attitude about money was a painful decision,” he writes, “but it was a decision that shaped the rest of my life.” The power of Kiyosaki’s book may ultimately be ancient: Few stories are older than one about a man bound by fate to destroy his father.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a hodgepodge of financial advice and confusing diagrams held together by anecdotes from Kiyosaki’s childhood. Poor Dad advocates for a conservative path to success familiar to parents everywhere: study hard and find a job with good benefits. Kiyosaki resoundingly rejects these ideas. “By relying solely on a paycheck from a corporate employer, I would be a docile cow ready for milking,” he writes. Rich Dad’s advice, by contrast, is appealingly simple and cutthroat: invest in assets like real estate that produce positive cash flow, do everything you can to avoid taxes, and always make sure you get paid first at the end of any deal.

Lechter, the book’s coauthor, says that when she got involved, Kiyosaki had written 600 pages spread across multiple files and floppy disks. “He did a whole series of, like, children’s fables” that ultimately got cut, she tells me. Lechter selected the best bits and organized them into six lessons spread over 10 chapters. Whatever the literary value of the final product, it’s an incredible achievement: a book that’s sold steadily—more than steadily—for 30 years. “I wish my English teacher was alive,” Kiyosaki told an interviewer. “I’d rub it in his face.”

Rich Dad was long anonymous, but in 2018, Kiyosaki admitted on his podcast that the model for the character was Richard Kimi, who owned a chain of hotels in Hawaii that once included the Waikiki Biltmore Hotel. Ralph may be the book’s foil, but Kimi is hardly the hero. His character is a severe, hectoring figure; his lessons amount to an exhortation to be as mean as possible when money is concerned. “Some people say I exploit people because I don’t pay as much as the sugar plantation or the government,” Kiyosaki quotes Kimi as saying. “I say the people exploit themselves. It’s their fear, not mine.” When Kiyosaki was starting his wallet business in the 1970s, Ralph took out a second mortgage to loan him $100,000. Kimi gave him nothing.

Rich Dad’s philosophy, hammered home over and over again in the book, is a fundamentally impoverished way of looking at the world. It’s striking that the one moment in which he’s shown to be generous—Kiyosaki’s claim in the introduction that he left “tens of millions of dollars to his family, charities, and his church” when he died—is a fiction: The book was published in 1997, and Kimi died in 2008. Kiyosaki may also have overstated Kimi’s importance in his life. Tenzin says that she never met him; Kiyosaki says he didn’t go to Kimi’s funeral.

Reading between the lines of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you can see two things: a son having an argument with his dead father, and the mixture of awe and love that said son still feels for him. Kiyosaki writes that he was “a product of two strong dads,” and that though “one part of me is a hardcore capitalist who loves the game of making money, the other part is a socially responsible teacher.” Kiyosaki tells me that his father gave him his heart, as well as a great social compass. Kim agrees. “Poor Dad was poor, but he was very rich in other ways,” she tells me. “He was a very good man, a value-based, principled gentleman.”

The first edition of Rich Dad, Poor Dad was self-published. “We never expected it to take on a life of its own,” Lechter says. In a bit of fortune most authors could only dream of, the book was then picked up by Amway, the multilevel marketing company. When Rich Dad, Poor Dad subsequently appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, an editor at Warner Books offered to rerelease it. The mother of a producer on The Oprah Winfrey Show read the book, then recommended it to her daughter. After Kiyosaki appeared on Oprah in the spring of 2000, the book was unstoppable.

So, about that $1.2 billion in debt. Kim, who remains a partner in Kiyosaki’s businesses despite their divorce, confirms the number but says it was widely misunderstood. Kiyosaki doesn’t personally owe that amount; $1.2 billion is the total debt held by a group of real estate investors. “We have a lot of apartment houses with our partners,” she explains, some 1,500 units. “So technically, yes, we have all this debt,” but it’s attached to real assets. And Kiyosaki’s personal share of the debt is small. If his income is, as he tells me, about $3 million a year, that implies his portion could be $30 million to $60 million.

“He loves to say things that shock,” Kim says. In this case, he knew the number would get people’s attention—cue me, running over the fields—“and then he can explain it in more detail, why investment debt is good.” The Rich Dad, Poor Dad philosophy has always described a particular way of being wealthy, one familiar to real estate investors but different from, say, owning a lot of stock: It doesn’t matter how much debt you have as long as banks are still willing to lend to you. And banks, it turns out, are almost always willing. “Bankers never asked for a report card yet,” Kiyosaki says. It could be called the Donald Trump method.

The trick is to always stay one step ahead of your creditors. When the value of a property rises, Kiyosaki borrows more money against that equity, then treats that loan like tax-free income. Each investment is cordoned off from the others inside an LLC. If one fails, the bank may be in trouble—but he is protected. “If it all comes to hell, you can talk to my attorney,” he says. “Firewalls—that’s the way the rich play the game.” You can lament that the system works this way, or you can figure out how to join the winning side.

The night before our meeting in Phoenix, Kiyosaki went to dinner with some of his financial advisers. “It’s a very healthy team—accountants, attorneys, real estate, oil guys,” he says. They talked about Nostradamus and the Iran war, the price of a steak and the price of crude. That’s Kiyosaki’s chosen family, and it’s the one the world knows best.

It would be a mistake, though, to think that his real family doesn’t still have a hold on him. I heard Tenzin’s influence in his declaration to me that “the gap between rich and poor is too wide, and that’s why I do what I do. It’s not about me getting richer. It’s, ‘How do we close this gap?’” In Rich Brother, Rich Sister, he occasionally sounds more like Bernie Sanders than Bernie Marcus: “America is a great country if you have money. If you are poor, America can be a tough place to live.”

Increasingly, I think the dedication in Kiyosaki’s first book was right: Ralph Kiyosaki—“the best teacher I ever had.” The younger Kiyosaki didn’t always obey his father, but he’s always been in dialogue with him. In the book Synergetics, Buckminster Fuller talks about the idea of “precession.” The term describes how one’s actions have side effects that might be more valuable than the actions themselves, like a bee pollinating the world’s flowers while making honey for its hive. If you’re smart, you can arrange your life such that what seems like a side effect is your true goal. “We’ve really lived our life according to that principle,” Kim says.

If one were to develop a unified theory of Robert Kiyosaki, it might go something like this. The debt, the posturing, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad itself were all vehicles for a hidden goal, one that solidified in his mind when his father was at his lowest point—and he met Fuller for the first time. “I wanted to save others from what my dad was facing,” Kiyosaki writes in Rich Brother, Rich Sister. “I wanted to save him, too.” According to the principle of precession, the ways to achieve that end might take some unexpected forms, like writing a book that attacks the very man you’re trying to rescue. In that light, the book and everything that followed are not a betrayal but a fulfillment of his father’s legacy.

Recently, Kim has been asking her ex-husband when he’s finally going to retire. “I’m like, ‘Why don’t you stop traveling and take a break?’” she says. “And he’s like, ‘I love teaching. I love teaching.’ If he dies on the road teaching, he’ll be happy.” The two don’t have children, but they have plans to create a foundation dedicated to financial education and personal development that will take over their assets when they die. It will take careful stewardship to manage the debt, to make sure that the cash flow always stays positive. A steady stream of income from the books will help.

In Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Kiyosaki uses “The Road Not Taken” as a symbol of his decision to choose his rich dad over his poor dad. Even in that moment of defiance, though, he is drawn back toward his actual father. According to Tenzin, when Ralph was on his deathbed, dying of lung cancer, overcome with pain, only one thing gave him “a brief sense of peace and acceptance.” It was “The Road Not Taken,” and he asked his daughter to read it to him again and again.