“Taxation, in reality, is life,” said Sheldon Cohen, a former commissioner of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. “If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can tell their whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of life: greed, politics, power, goodness.”

A rich person’s tax affairs will tell you lots about him or her—but the reverse is fuzzily true, too. Though Donald Trump has refused to release his tax returns, we can get a good idea of what’s in there if we start with what we know about his character and business affairs, then mix these up with the vast rich pudding of loopholes, abatements, and gray areas that wealthy folk in America use to milk the tax system. All this provides an entry into understanding Trump’s bewildering, ever evolving global business affairs, and helps answer some of the great questions of the day. How much is he really worth? Has he broken any laws? How much tax does he pay? Does he use tax havens?

It’s hard to get your arms around Trump’s business conglomerate, which is a patchwork of disparate “artful” deals and raids, strategy changes, bankruptcies, carefully laid plans, and high-energy whims. “I play it very loose,” Trump wrote in his book Trump: The Art of the Deal. “I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops. There is no typical week in my life.”

Trump isn’t nearly the real-estate player he once was, particularly since some of his companies went through high-profile bankruptcies in the early 1990s. In a ranking of New York condominium developers last September, for instance, Trump didn’t even make the top 20. In Atlantic City, whose real-estate sector he once dominated, the Trump Plaza closed in 2014; he sold the Trump Marina (now the Golden Nugget) in 2011 to Landry’s, a Houston-based gaming-and-restaurant company; and activist investor Carl Icahn now owns the Trump Taj Mahal. (Trump is eager to point out, however, that he made money on his Atlantic City adventure. “I never went bankrupt,” he told me in the first of two telephone interviews. “I made a fortune in A.C., which a lot of people don’t understand.... I used a bankruptcy as a business tool: I made great deals.”)

Many bankers don’t lend to Trump now, burned by what some call “Donald risk,” a reference to the fact that some Wall Street banks have been left with pennies on the dollar through some of his maneuvers. (About his relationship with lenders, Trump says, “We have a lot of cash—we don’t need loans. Every bank wants to do business with us, literally every bank.”) There is still plenty of steel and concrete bearing his name in lights, but much of that is simply him taking licensing income and management fees from the people who actually financed, built, and own these properties. “People who are smart love my licensing deals because you don’t have any risk [and] you make tremendous amounts of cash,” Trump says.

In his 92-page financial disclosure to the Federal Election Commission (F.E.C.) in July 2015 and in a second, 104-page disclosure last May, in both of which he calls himself “President of the United States of America” (Hillary humbly calls herself “Candidate for President”), he lists at least $1.5 billion in hard assets. Of this, a minimum of $787 million is in hotels and real estate such as Trump Tower, in Manhattan. There are also 16 golf-related businesses valued at more than $550 million, aircraft worth at least $58 million, $6 million in vineyards, and $4.3 million in entertainment ventures. These are lower-bound numbers: categories include “over $50 million,” with no upper limit. (The main purpose of these disclosures isn’t to build a full picture of a candidate’s finances but to identify conflicts of interest.) Trump claimed to me that his net worth is “much more than $10 billion…. I don’t know how much more.” A Trump press release in July 2015 also claimed his net worth was “in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS,” though Fortune in May estimated it at $3.9 billion, and Bloomberg News reckoned it at $2.9 billion last July. (Michael Bloomberg, by comparison, is worth $45 billion, according to Forbes.)