Sam Zell says it’s not unusual for real estate developers to have huge deductions. : (Bloomberg)—Billionaire investor Sam Zell dismissed President Donald Trump’s tax records as irrelevant, saying that as a fellow real estate developer in the 1980s and ’90s, he used some of the same deductions to report losses. “Absolutely, as did every other real estate investor in the United States,” Zell said in an interview on Bloomberg Television from the SALT conference in Las Vegas.