The vice president has plenty of money, but she could be even richer if she had invested wisely. Forbes money in politics reporter Kyle Mullins joins "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2024/05/26/heres-how-much-kamala-harris-is-worth/
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NewsTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Hi everybody, I'm Brittany Lewis with Forbes Breaking News.
00:05 Joining me now is my colleague,
00:07 Forbes Money and Politics reporter, Kyle Mullins.
00:10 Kyle, thanks so much for joining me.
00:11 - Always great to be here, Brittany.
00:14 Thanks for having me.
00:15 - Of course, you have figured out the net worth
00:18 of our vice president, Kamala Harris,
00:20 but before we reveal the big number,
00:23 can you give us her backstory a bit for us?
00:26 - Absolutely.
00:28 So Kamala Harris was born in Oakland in 1964.
00:31 Both of her parents were well-educated immigrants.
00:35 They met at UC Berkeley.
00:36 Her dad was an economics professor.
00:38 Her mom was a breast cancer researcher.
00:40 She was raised mostly by her mother.
00:42 The pair divorced soon after they had
00:47 their second daughter, Maya,
00:48 who's Kamala's younger sister.
00:50 And from there, Kamala Harris grew up
00:53 in a fairly working class,
00:55 according to her, at least fairly working class family.
00:58 She went to the historically black university,
01:00 Howard University for undergraduate.
01:02 And she even interned in the senator's office
01:05 while she was there, whose seat she would later fill.
01:08 - And talk to us a little bit more about her law career
01:13 and more importantly for us,
01:15 how much she was making before she was elected
01:17 to the Senate in 2016.
01:19 - Of course.
01:21 So she went to UC Hastings in San Francisco for law school,
01:24 passed the bar on her second try.
01:26 And then she became a prosecutor in the Bay Area.
01:29 She worked in a couple different counties
01:31 in the Bay Area while she was there.
01:33 She ran for the district attorney of San Francisco in 2003.
01:37 And she beat a two-term incumbent for that.
01:41 And I have her salary here.
01:42 She ended up making as much as $200,000 a year in that role.
01:46 So pretty well-paid public sector job.
01:49 She won a second term there in 2007
01:52 and then became the attorney general of California.
01:54 She ran in 2010, won her election and became AG in 2011.
01:59 However, despite the fact that was coming
02:01 with a little bit more prestige,
02:03 she actually came with less money.
02:04 Her salary was down to $159,000
02:07 as the attorney general of California.
02:09 - And you've reported that the early 2010s
02:13 shaped her finances because of hefty pensions
02:16 amongst other things.
02:17 Can you expand on that for us?
02:21 - So we talked about these two-plus decades
02:25 that she already had before she was elected to the Senate
02:27 in public sector positions.
02:29 So we're looking at these very large pensions
02:32 that she built up over that time.
02:35 Those are worth, Forbes estimates,
02:37 around a million dollars today,
02:38 her local government pension
02:40 and her state government pension.
02:41 And then the other thing that the early 2010s
02:45 was really important for her
02:46 is her mom passed away in the early 2010s.
02:49 And it's not clear how much she inherited from her mom,
02:52 but we do know that her and her sister
02:54 ended up selling their mother's Oakland condo
02:57 for about $700,000 in 2012.
03:00 So we can assume that they made
03:01 at least some money off of that.
03:03 - And also during this time,
03:04 she married her husband, Doug Emhoff.
03:07 Can you talk about what he's bringing
03:08 to this partnership financially?
03:10 - We're on a lot more money, I can tell you that for sure.
03:14 So Emhoff was an entertainment lawyer
03:16 in the LA area at the time.
03:18 He and private sector law tends to bring in,
03:22 it'd be significantly more lucrative,
03:23 I would say, than public sector law.
03:26 So in addition to bringing more income to the partnership,
03:28 he also brought a larger retirement account.
03:31 He had a pretty sizable investment portfolio,
03:33 including some publicly traded stocks,
03:36 which he had to offload and replace with some index funds
03:40 and other conflict avoidant investments
03:43 once she became elected to the Senate.
03:45 - So now let's talk about that time
03:47 once she became elected to the Senate,
03:49 what did her finances look like?
03:51 What did her investments look like as well as her savings?
03:54 - So we'll start with her income.
03:57 She got a salary bump from that attorney general position
04:00 up to $174,000 a year as a senator.
04:04 She had about $250,000 to $500,000
04:06 in a savings account at the time.
04:09 These disclosures only require politicians
04:11 to disclose ranges,
04:11 so we don't know exactly how much she had.
04:14 She also had a similar amount in retirement accounts.
04:17 Plus she had those two really big pensions.
04:19 And then everything else on her disclosure at the time
04:22 was Doug Emhoff and his large investment portfolio
04:26 and retirement accounts.
04:27 And then additionally,
04:29 I should also note that soon after she was elected
04:31 to the Senate, she and Emhoff bought
04:34 a $1.8 million apartment in DC.
04:36 So they kind of added that real estate
04:38 to their portfolio as well.
04:40 - So then let's fast forward three years.
04:42 She announced she was running for president in 2019.
04:46 How much did Forbes estimate she was worth then?
04:48 - Yep, so we valued all the presidential candidates
04:51 in 2019, 2020.
04:54 In 2019, we put her net worth, which again,
04:56 includes Emhoff at about $6 million.
04:59 And then when she became vice president in 2021,
05:02 we bumped that up to $7 million.
05:04 So, you know, you're starting to see that pattern
05:07 of her fortune start growing over previous valuations.
05:10 - Now let's talk about present day.
05:12 Kamala Harris, as we know, has made history
05:15 as the first woman vice president,
05:17 as well as the first person of color to be vice president.
05:20 How much is she worth?
05:21 - We're estimating that Kamala Harris today
05:25 is worth about $8 million.
05:27 Again, that includes her husband.
05:29 And that increase, which, you know,
05:31 up from 7 million in 2021, up from 6 million in 2019,
05:35 that's largely due to an increase in the value
05:37 of the LA home that she shares with her husband, Doug Emhoff,
05:41 as well as the addition of a federal pension
05:43 that she recently became eligible for.
05:45 The rest of her fortune actually looks remarkably similar
05:47 to where it was in 2021.
05:49 - So can you talk about the other assets
05:52 that make up this net worth?
05:53 - So we already talked about this roughly $1 million
05:57 of pensions that she has from state and local government.
05:59 There's also a federal pension
06:00 that she recently became eligible for.
06:02 That's worth about $150,000.
06:04 The biggest asset in their portfolio
06:06 is their Los Angeles home.
06:08 It's their only piece of real estate
06:11 left in their portfolio right now.
06:12 It's worth about $4.4 million, Forbes is estimating,
06:15 with about $2 million of debt on it.
06:18 The rest of that is all, you know,
06:20 variety of investments in retirement accounts,
06:23 you know, in her husband's IRA, that kind of stuff.
06:26 They've got, you know,
06:27 several million dollars of that kind of thing.
06:30 - And what is her salary as vice president?
06:33 - Harris makes a little over $235,000 as vice president.
06:38 And that salary has actually been frozen at that level
06:40 since at least 2019.
06:42 - And her and Doug Emhoff
06:44 moved into the vice president's residence
06:47 when she and Joe Biden took office,
06:50 but they ended up selling some of their real estate.
06:52 Talk about that and the money behind there.
06:55 - Yep, so they sold two properties
06:59 soon after Harris became vice president.
07:02 You know, they were able to move
07:02 into the vice president's residence, which they don't own,
07:04 but they also don't have to pay for.
07:06 So they offloaded some of their extra real estate.
07:09 Harris had an apartment in San Francisco,
07:11 where she, you know, this is where she grew up.
07:12 This is where she rose in politics,
07:15 but she sold off her last piece of real estate there
07:17 in 2021 for $860,000.
07:19 That's a pretty hefty profit
07:21 over what she paid for it 23 years earlier.
07:23 She sold it for $560,000 more.
07:27 And then the next thing that was sold also in 2021
07:29 was that same DC apartment.
07:30 And she sold that one for about what they paid for it.
07:33 So in actuality,
07:34 they probably lost money on that apartment
07:36 because of interest payments
07:38 that they had to pay on their mortgage.
07:40 - She's written some books between 2009 and 2019.
07:44 How much money did she make from those?
07:46 - Yep, I've got her book list here.
07:49 So she's got a 2019 memoir called "The Truths We Hold."
07:52 She's got a 2019 kids book called "Superheroes Are Everywhere."
07:55 And she's got a 2009 criminal justice policy book
07:59 called "Smart on Crime."
08:00 And so those three titles,
08:02 they made her quite a bit of money in 2020 and 2021.
08:05 She made $350,000 approximately in 2020,
08:09 $450,000 in 2021.
08:12 But after the sort of hype of her becoming elected
08:15 or being elected vice president died down a little bit,
08:17 that income stream was cut off significantly.
08:20 And so that trickled to $80,000 in 2022
08:23 and just $8,500 in 2023,
08:25 which is our most recent disclosure.
08:28 - So is there any indication of what she did with that money
08:31 as well as the money that she made with Doug Emhoff
08:34 from selling those properties?
08:35 - It's kind of unclear.
08:37 It doesn't really show up very well in the disclosures
08:40 that we have since she became vice president.
08:42 On the one hand, these disclosures are pretty opaque.
08:46 They only have to,
08:48 politicians only have to report these sort of broad ranges.
08:51 And so we don't actually know exactly how much she,
08:54 maybe if it had been distributed
08:56 across a number of different investments,
08:57 it might not show up very easily.
08:59 So it's difficult to say,
09:03 but suffice to say most of her financial assets
09:05 look fairly similar to what they looked like in 2021.
09:08 - So since she's taken office in 2021,
09:11 Forbes estimates that her net worth grew a million dollars,
09:14 which is pretty good,
09:15 but you're reporting it could have been even bigger
09:17 if she invested her money differently.
09:19 How so?
09:20 - Yeah, I mean, like I said earlier,
09:23 that increase is mostly due to an increase
09:25 in the value of their Los Angeles home.
09:27 And that's not really something
09:29 that they had any sort of say in.
09:33 A lot of that cash,
09:34 if they had,
09:35 they hold a lot of their overall portfolio in cash,
09:39 which doesn't grow with the market,
09:40 even though the market is up almost 40%
09:42 since she took office.
09:43 So maybe if she had put some of that cash
09:45 that she currently has in sort of checking
09:47 and savings accounts,
09:48 if she instead put that into funds to track the market,
09:51 she might've seen a larger increase in her net worth.
09:54 That said, it's also worth noting
09:56 that they were making a lot more money,
09:58 Harris and Emhoff,
09:59 before she became vice president.
10:01 Emhoff was still working at a law firm.
10:03 He was raking in upwards of a million dollars a year.
10:06 Harris, of course, was writing books.
10:08 She had lots and lots of book income.
10:11 But then after she became vice president,
10:13 she wasn't writing books anymore.
10:14 Emhoff stopped working as a lawyer.
10:16 He became the second gentleman.
10:17 And he has a number of official duties that come with that.
10:20 He also became a law professor at Georgetown Law,
10:23 but that doesn't pay quite as much
10:25 as a private sector legal position.
10:27 So overall, they may have just gotten used
10:30 to having more income.
10:31 And when that income stream was largely cut off,
10:36 maybe they're spending more or they're saving less.
10:40 That could have changed.
10:42 - But no fear, because you're reporting
10:44 that there's some optimism in her financial future.
10:48 What could potentially make her fortune grow in the future?
10:51 - Yeah, I wouldn't say Harris and Emhoff
10:53 are risking homelessness or anything like that.
10:56 They're gonna be just fine
10:58 even if they never make another dollar.
11:00 And that seems pretty unlikely.
11:01 So first off, Harris is gonna be eligible
11:04 for payouts from those pensions pretty soon.
11:07 So she's gonna have a steady source
11:08 of regular income from those.
11:10 And then additionally, she and Joe Biden,
11:13 if they win the election in 2024,
11:15 she's gonna keep working as vice president.
11:18 If maybe she goes on to become president one day,
11:20 that tends to, the vice presidency
11:22 tends to be a potential springboard for the presidency.
11:25 If she loses, that could actually
11:26 be pretty good financially.
11:27 She can do what her predecessor, Mike Pence, did
11:30 and what plenty of other politicians do.
11:32 She can go write books, go on speaking tours,
11:34 sell consulting services, generally cash in on her fame.
11:37 And she could potentially make a lot of money doing that.
11:41 - Kyle Mullins, per usual, I appreciate the conversation.
11:44 I hope to see you again soon.
11:46 - Always great to be here, Brittany.
11:48 Thanks so much.
11:49 (air whooshing)
11:51 (air whooshing)
11:54 [BLANK_AUDIO]