Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.

In this remark, Trump frames wealth less as an end in itself than as a metric of competitive success. “Keeping score” casts money as a quantifiable proxy for winning—status, dominance, and proof of performance—rather than as a means to security or comfort. The “real excitement” being “playing the game” emphasizes process: deal-making, risk, negotiation, and public victory. Read this way, the quote expresses a worldview in which business functions like sport, with money serving as the scoreboard. It also works rhetorically to recast acquisitiveness as passion for competition, implying that ambition is driven by challenge and recognition more than by material need.