Update (Nov. 4, 2024): Two years ago, JD Vance was an Ohio venture capitalist best known for writing a book that helped explain the rise of Donald Trump to liberal coastal elites. Today, he’s a firebrand senator whose first and only election victory was bankrolled by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel and who now has a shot of becoming Donald Trump’s heir apparent. Since we published his net worth estimate back in July, not much has changed on the financial front for him—media attention has mostly focused on past and present controversial remarks about abortion, women, immigrants and more. But a promotion to vice president would come with a compensation bump to $235,000 from his current Senate salary of $174,000. It would also set the 40-year-old up for a future White House run of his own—and all the monetary perks that come with it.
Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, come from two different Americas. In Trump’s, fathers start passing down real-estate fortunes to their kids when they are toddlers. In Vance’s, fathers don’t even leave kids with their last names.
Raised mostly by his mother’s parents, the Vances, J.D. Vance catapulted himself from Rust Belt poverty to coastal high society with a degree from Yale Law School, a marriage to another lawyer and the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir about Vance’s upbringing. The book came out in the summer of 2016 just as Donald Trump was surging in the polls, leaving liberals searching for something, anything, to explain Trump’s popularity in Middle America.
“Hillbilly Elegy” made Vance rich—it reportedly sold more than three million copies—and turned him into a national figure. Today, he is worth an estimated $10 million. Given where he started, it’s a remarkable sum, one that solidifies Vance’s place in circles that might have made his younger self uncomfortable.
Vance wrote in his book about how odd he found a particular kind of charity—wealthy families picking out gifts for low-income kids, not knowing what those kids actually wanted or needed. “I grew up in a world where everyone worried about how they’d pay for Christmas,” he wrote. “Now I live in one where opportunities abound for the wealthy and........