Hary Tanoesoedibjo: The Trump Clone

Hary Tanoesoedibjo Shares More Than Luxury Resorts With The 45Th President. The Indonesian Billionaire Has Turned Himself Into A Full-Fledged Mini-Trump, Down To The Beauty Pageants, TV Shows And Incessant Tweeting. And He’S Now Laying The Groundwork To Become President Of The World’S Fourth-Largest Country.

- Abram Brown

Indonesian billionaire Hary Tanoesoedibjo speaks halting English, but he knows one word very well: “Big”. The size of his palatial home in Jakarta? “Big.” His business empire? “Very big.” His vision for the new Bali resort he’s developing? “The biggest and the best.”

In the back of his car, a chauffeured Hummer H2, we’re returning from a visit to Lido, another of his developments, outside of Jakarta, that’s 30 times larger than what he’s doing in Bali.

“Big project, huh?” he asks. Keen for affirmation, he directs his driver to enter a competing resort, Rancamaya, about 30 minutes away. As we pass American-style McMansions, he wants me to understand that Lido’s villas will be, yes, “much bigger” than Rancamaya’s, which tend to be about 1,300 square feet. He’s planning Lido estates as big as 100,000 square feet. “It’s not bad, but ours is going to be better.”

Sound like any US president you might know? That’s not a coincidence. Tanoesoedibjo is Donald Trump’s partner in Indonesia, and the connection runs far stronger than that. Virtually all of Trump’s foreign business partners share a trait or two with him—primarily, a carnival barker’s knack for self-promotion—but for the 51-year-old Tanoesoedibjo, Trump is a 360-degree role model that he emulates in every way conceivable.

Like Trump, he built his fortune— an estimated $1.1 billion—in real estate and media on a mountain of debt. He tweets non-stop to more than 1 million followers. He stages beauty pageants. He loves reality TV. He has a glamorous wife. Just as the tabloids boiled down Trump into a first name, The Donald, the Indonesian press likes to refer to Tanoesoedibjo simply as Hary.