Rich Dad Poor Dad Author Highlights Decade-Old Bitcoin Bet as $1.2 Billion Debt Claim Draws Scrutiny

NEW YORK — Robert Kiyosaki, the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” used a weekend social-media post to spotlight an old Bitcoin purchase even as a Vanity Fair profile and a string of follow-up stories put a $1.2 billion debt figure back in circulation.

TheStreet reported that on Sept. 5 Kiyosaki wrote on Facebook that he once paid $400 for a single bitcoin. He framed the holding as proof that buying early and waiting matters more than chasing a peak. The same report said commenters immediately pressed him about the debt number he has repeated for months. TheStreet also noted that some of the price details in that post did not match market records: Bitcoin’s high near $126,080 on Oct. 6, 2025, left the coin well above $20,000 even after a steep pullback.

The debt figure is not new. Kiyosaki has used it on podcasts and on social media since at least 2025. On the “Get Rich Education” podcast in June he said, “So, I’m a billion two in debt.” He added a warning in the same breath: “Should not do what I do, right? But I studied it since 1974… If you’re going to learn to use debt, you’d better take some education.” He has said Dave Ramsey’s stay-out-of-debt message “is good for most people.”

In an earlier appearance, when asked whether that much leverage made him nervous, he laughed. “Are you shitting me?” he said. “No. I’ll tell you why. If you owe the bank $20 million and you can’t pay it back, you got a problem. But you owe the bank $1 billion and you can’t pay it back, it’s their problem.”

That line is a modern version of an old banking joke. It is also the core of the argument he has sold since “Rich Dad Poor Dad” first appeared in 1997: treat borrowing used to buy income-producing assets as different from borrowing used to fund a lifestyle. On “The Hannah Hammond Show” he put it this way: “Debt is money. My poor dad always says, ‘Get out of debt.’ Dave Ramsey says, ‘Get out of debt.’ My rich dad says, ‘Only lazy people use their own money — your job is to borrow money.’” In a March 2025 post he posed the contrast as a contest. “My friend Dave Ramsey says ‘Live debt free.’ I say ‘I use debt to invest. I am $1.2 billion in debt.’ Again, who is right?”

Kim Kiyosaki, his former wife and still a partner in the businesses, told Vanity Fair the headline number is “widely misunderstood.” She said it is the total debt on a real-estate portfolio owned with partners, not a personal unsecured tab. “We have a lot of apartment houses with our partners,” she said, putting the count at about 1,500 units. “So technically, yes, we have all this debt,” she added, but it is attached to those assets. Vanity Fair, working from Kiyosaki’s own claim that he earns about $3 million a year, estimated his personal slice could be in a range of $30 million to $60 million. “He loves to say things that shock,” Kim Kiyosaki said, so that he can then “explain it in more detail, why investment debt is good.”

Kiyosaki described the legal structure in the same profile. “If it all comes to hell, you can talk to my attorney,” he said. “Firewalls — that’s the way the rich play the game.” The magazine said properties sit in separate limited-liability companies, a common real-estate practice meant to isolate one building’s problems from the rest of a portfolio.

That is leverage on apartments. The weekend Facebook post was about something else: a scarce digital asset he has promoted for years as a hedge against what he calls “fake” dollars. On X he has written, “The rich do not save money. Since 1965 I have saved real silver. Since 1971 I have saved real gold. Since 2012 I have saved Bitcoin. Since 2022 I have saved Ethereum.” He has also said he later stopped buying at certain prices — silver near $60, bitcoin near $6,000, gold near $300 — and that he has sold some bitcoin and gold because he dislikes capital-gains taxes. Those posts sit alongside other messages in which he told followers he keeps buying. The record is not a single, tidy trading log. It is a public sales pitch that has shifted with the market.

He has attached large price targets to the same assets. After what he calls a crash, he has predicted gold at $35,000 an ounce, silver at $200, bitcoin at $750,000 and ether at $95,000. He has separately talked about bitcoin at $250,000 in 2026. Those forecasts have missed earlier deadlines. In 2024 he said bitcoin would hit $350,000 by late August of that year. It did not.

The tension in the current coverage is therefore not whether Kiyosaki likes debt. He has said so for decades. It is whether a $1.2 billion partnership liability and a $400 bitcoin souvenir belong in the same sentence as proof of the same method. One is borrowed money sitting on rental buildings whose tenants, in his telling, service the loans. The other is an unlevered bet he says he made when the coin was cheap. Mixing them makes for a sharp headline. It does not make them the same risk.

“Rich Dad Poor Dad” has sold more than 40 million copies and turned a parable about two father figures into a seminar, radio and product business. Kiyosaki, 79, co-wrote books with Donald Trump, including “Why We Want You to Be Rich.” He still tells audiences that cash savers are “the biggest losers” and that U.S. national debt — now above $40 trillion on Treasury’s published totals — will punish people who hold dollars. He has called the 401(k) “the biggest mistake I think ever made” and said it will “decimate” baby boomers.

Critics answer that his crash timetable has slipped for years, that bitcoin remains volatile — it has fallen tens of thousands of dollars from its 2025 high — and that most households cannot borrow against apartment blocks. Kiyosaki himself has said they should not copy him without education. “If you can’t manage debt — live debt-free,” he said on another podcast. “But the opposite side of that is to learn to handle debt.”

What the latest cycle of stories actually established is narrower. Kiyosaki keeps advertising a $1.2 billion debt total. His longtime business partner says the number belongs to a group that owns about 1,500 apartments, and that his own share is far smaller. He keeps pointing to hard assets and to an early bitcoin purchase he now values as a lesson in timing. Followers used the comment thread on that purchase to ask about the debt. He has not posted a personal balance sheet that would settle the argument. Until he does, the public record is the one he chose: a shocking figure, a partner’s clarification, and a $400 coin he wants remembered as the smart side of the ledger.