Net Worth of Every U.S. President from Washington to Obama | Hacker News Reader

Net Worth of Every U.S. President from Washington to Obama

theatlantic.com

80 pointsmetamemetics27 comments

The calculation is the peak worth of the president, which would include wealth accumulated after becoming president. Particularly for the modern presidents, I'm more interested in seeing the peak estimate up until they become president.

In the introductory section, they say -- in italics -- "One of the most important conclusions of this analysis is that the presidency has little to do with wealth."

And then they list 43 presidents' net worth; their lowest (and quite sparsely populated) category is "less than $1M" and from a quick glance I think the median is somewhere around $10M.

Yup, sure looks to me as if the presidency has little to do with wealth.

(Perhaps what they mean is that there's no single simple strong connection: being president doesn't mean that you instantly become rich, and also doesn't require you to have been rich first. Well, sure, but so what?)

I agree - as worded, that sounds ridiculous. A majority of them were multi-millionaires according to the list. As if you would encounter such a thing in a random sampling of 43 people! I wonder what they meant by that line.

I assumed they meant that the quality of their term as president wasn't a factor in their wealth.

The presidents are hardly a random sample of 43 people. They represent some of the best people of their generation, so you would expect them to have more money than the average person.

It's a little misleading, since many of the figures were calculated after they left office -- being president opens lucrative book and speaking opportunities (for instance, and surprisingly to me at least, most of Nixon's wealth came from the Frost/Nixon interviews).

Barack Obama appears on the list as the poorest US president since Truman, but that's only because his earnings after he leaves office haven't happened yet.

Truman was also the last president to not receive a salary for life. I always thought it was interesting that until Truman, it was never an issue. Every previous president was loaded. Then, when congress saw their most recent ex-president driving around the country in near poverty, they immediately realized that was a little embarrassing.

1. Odd statement on JQ Adams: "He devoted most of his adult life to public service, notably after leaving office." True, but clearer if one said "notably as a congressman after his single term as president".

2. The statement that Cleveland's estate was outside Washington, DC, is I think incorrect. It is the neighborhood now called Cleveland Park, well within city limits but then I suppose newly developed.

3. The calculation on Hayes makes me wonder whether they are including real estate valuations at current prices. That's fine if an area is still planted in corn or tobacco, less so if it was crops and is now built up.

Annoying: the link takes you to the middle of the 5 page series.

Here's the link to the first page: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/the-net-...

Even better.. A single page:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2010/05/the-net-wo...

Google spreadsheet:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ak_L_zLqm09sdGQ0bXBC...

Google chart:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvg&chs=500&c...

I put 500k for the < 1 million people. I didn't know what to do with JFK, so I put him as 500k too. I duplicated Grover Cleveland so that the count would be correct. When I tried to add axis labels google said the url was too big.

Would a log scale on the y-axis make the data clearer?

What amazes me is how many of them died penniless, despite having once held huge fortunes!

I find it odd that George Washington was worth half a billion dollars. It makes me wonder if his motive for revolution was extravagant wealth (Edit: In the sense that he amassed this fortune through the revolution, not so that he could help create a place where you were free to amass that wealth).

George Washington amassed most of his wealth through his marriage to Martha (1759), not through the revolution. Prior to that, he was a deeply indebted commissioned soldier and former small-time planter.

I would love to read more about this. Do you have a good source? I don't know much about Washington besides some hazy memories from reading 1776.

http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&f... ?

I know how search works on Amazon. I was asking for specific recommendations.

Each snippet is too brief and breazy to have much redeeming value. For instance while Washington was the richest man in the 13 colonies at the time of the Revolution, he was land-rich and controlled some significant means of production, but like everyone else in the colonies he would have difficulty raising cash.

Also it's easy to overlook the significance of the several presidents, Lincoln included, whose peak assets, including the equity in their residences, was less than $1 million in today's money. Can you imagine electing a president like that today? Also note how they are clustered around the Civil War. I don't know what the significance of that is, if any.

I can't find anything on what Clinton's worth was before he became president, but I don't think it was that much. My understanding is that most of his wealth came after.

This article claims that the Clintons' net worth in 1992 was $700k (about $1m in 2010 dollars), most of it from Hillary: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/199...

So, not poor, but as far as I can tell, the lowest starting net worth of any recent president. I had thought Carter might have been poor too, but apparently his peanut farming wasn't a tiny operation: he had a net worth of $811,000 in 1975, or $3.2m in 2010 dollars, according to the footnote at the end of: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,947792,00.html

Ford is another candidate, but I can't seem to find info on his 1974-or-earlier net worth.

Edit: Ford's net worth in "late 1973" was apparently $256,000, or $1.2m in 2010 dollars. So that'd put him roughly on par with Clinton. Source: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/199...

"Each snippet is too brief and breezy"

"Obama is the grandson of a goat herder." -- brief, yet complete.

> Also it's easy to overlook the significance of the several presidents, Lincoln included, whose peak assets, including the equity in their residences, was less than $1 million in today's money. Can you imagine electing a president like that today?

I think a more interesting list would be net worth on the day they were inaugurated the first time. Lincoln never got a chance to make money after office, but many others did. In the modern era much of the money has kicked in after office.

This would be so much more awesome in visual form. As a five-page table, it's impossible to extract any conclusions from.

What visual form would you use to express prose? The writing on the right provides context.

I'm interested in visualizing the data, not graphing the prose. A line graph would work great, with the y axis representing dollars and the x axis representing time labeled with each President's name.

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