7 days ago
The Vice President's Net Worth Has Increased Along With His Fame
Vance's investment holdings include market-tracking funds, a gold fund and over $250,000 of Bitcoin. Saul Loeb/Pool via AP
In April, J.D. Vance wrapped up a visit to India with a speech about Indian-American cooperation. Drawing comparisons between Indian nationalism and his own, he reminded the assembled crowd of politicians, diplomats, industrialists and other movers and shakers of his background growing up in a deindustrializing Ohio town raised in part by his factory-worker grandfather. 'By the time I came around, money was awfully tight, but he worked hard to make a good living for all of us,' Vance said.
It goes without saying that money is no longer tight for Vance, who Forbes estimates is worth some $12 million. That's $2 million more than a year ago, when Trump picked Vance as his running mate and Forbes estimated the Ohioan was worth $10 million. That earlier figure had been based on his 2022 financial disclosure—the most recent available at the time—reflecting his financial position before he was even sworn into the Senate. The increase this year thus doesn't come from a sudden windfall for Vance after taking office; rather, it reflects what's revealed in updated financial disclosures, a clearer view of his assets and growth in the stock market.
For starters, after being elected to Congress in 2022, Vance sold his ownership stake in Narya, the venture capital firm he started in 2019 that focused on investments in 'alternative economy' companies—conservative-leaning ventures like video-sharing platform Rumble and Vivek Ramaswamy's Strive Asset Management that are taking on established companies like YouTube and Vanguard, respectively. The venture capital firm was lucrative for Vance, throwing off around $1 million in profit for him in 2021 and 2022. Yet its value on his disclosures those years was listed at $0. Clearly, that wasn't quite right: When he sold his stake in September 2023, he reported getting between $1 million and $5 million for it. On his latest filing, Vance revealed that the sale actually came in the form of a promissory note from Narya worth between $1 million and $5 million, which he had previously reported incorrectly. That's money, due by 2028, owed to him—and thus counts as an asset toward his net worth.
Our estimate has also increased due to a booming stock market. At the end of 2022, Vance held stakes worth between $500,000 and $1 million of SPY, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the S&P 500; and QQQ, a tech-heavy ETF. Vance hasn't bought more since, except for one purchase of $50,000-$100,000 of SPY in October 2023, but those funds shot up by 53% and 95%, respectively, between the end of 2022 and the end of 2024.
Adding a bit more uncertainty, though, the vice president reports on his latest disclosure that he took out a loan, at 6.58% interest, against his brokerage account in 2023. He does not say why, nor is he required to do so, but it was the same year he moved to the Washington D.C. area to start his term in the Senate and spent $1.6 million on a house in nearby Alexandria, Virginia. As of the end of 2024, the principal on the loan was between $1 million and $5 million.
Vance's family didn't live there very long. After moving into the vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, he sold the Alexandria, Virginia home for $1.9 million, about $300,000 more than he paid for it. Meanwhile, Vance's Cincinnati, Ohio home has appreciated by about $100,000 to an estimated $1.9 million since Forbes ' last estimate. Vance's net worth also gets a boost due to two pieces of real estate that he 'inadvertently' left off of previous disclosures. The first is around 100 acres of land in eastern Kentucky he reportedly purchased for $70,600 in 2017 to protect the cemetery where his grandmother is buried. The second is a residential property in his childhood home of Middletown, Ohio worth between $50,000 and $100,000, according to the disclosure.
A jump in sales of his bestselling 2016 memoir 'Hillbilly Elegy' helped, too. Vance earned between $50,000 and $100,000 in income from book sales in 2024. Total copies sold—including digital and audiobooks—reportedly exceed three million, including 750,000 in the two weeks after his elevation to vice presidential candidate, prompting a new print run by the publisher, HarperCollins.
Put it all together, and the newly reported assets and liability, the stock market boom and the real estate boosts add up to a net worth around $12 million. Vance spokesperson Buckley Carlson declined to comment.
It is a long way from where Vance started as a child in Middletown, as he writes in 'Hillbilly Elegy'—marked by instability, drug abuse, occasional violence and other poor decisions by his mother and other figures in his life. His maternal grandmother set him straight, forcing him to get his grades up. By his high school graduation, he was able to consider college, but opted for the Marines instead, serving in Iraq and learning life skills like saving money, balancing a checkbook and investing.
When he finished his service in 2007, Vance enrolled at The Ohio State University. He sped through school, graduating in less than two years. That degree was a ticket into the elite; he headed to Yale Law School in 2010, where he met his now-wife, Usha. They both clerked in Cincinnati, tied the knot and then headed to D.C., where Usha clerked for then-circuit court judge Brett Kavanaugh and J.D. started at a corporate law firm. In 2014, they dropped $590,000 on a D.C. home they still own. Forbes estimates that it's worth about $780,000 today before a roughly $320,000 mortgage, the only other liability disclosed on Vance's filing.
Next, the Vances moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where J.D. worked at a biotech outfit and then a venture capital firm founded by Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel. The success of 'Hillbilly Elegy,' published in 2016, catapulted Vance into the conversations of the liberal coastal elite, a role he never became fully comfortable with and now emphatically rejects.
After moving back to Ohio in 2017 to run a nonprofit that flopped, Vance joined another billionaire-founded venture capital firm, Steve Case's Revolution. In 2018, J.D. and Usha bought their Cincinnati home, and in 2019 Vance started venture capital firm Narya. But even investing in conservative companies couldn't scratch his political itch, so Vance remade himself again—this time as a pro-Trump populist—and ran for Senate, carried to victory in part by $15 million in super PAC contributions from his former employer, Thiel.
Just three years later, the kid from hillbilly country is living in a government-provided mansion, drawing a $235,000 salary and railing against those who, in his view, sold out the American heartland. 'There are tens of millions of Americans who, over the last 20 or so years, have woken up to what's happening in our nation,' he told the crowd in India. 'But I believe they woke up well before it's too late.'
