Here's How Much Hunter Biden Is Really Worth
For some, Hunter Biden can be likened to Kendall Roy from "Succession." Yale-educated attorney, Navy vet, and first son, his net worth is estimated to be a mere $1 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He's a man of great appetites, born into the black cast of one of the largest shadows on earth. Being the son of a genuine historical figure appears to have done him both great favors, and, maybe, great harm.
Joe Biden's mired middle child began as a promising attorney. He even briefly served in the Navy. But a failed drug test for cocaine earned him a lenient "administrative" discharge in 2013. That was just the tip of the amphetamine iceberg jutting up below America's wild first boy. There have been drug binges and baby mamas, sex tapes, and rehab stints. Hunter's marriage would crumble from infidelity, including an affair with the widow of his own deceased brother. The chaos came in a haze of crack smoke -– with leaked photos to prove it.
Hunter has owned much of this publicly, particularly in his memoir, "Beautiful Things." He's been less candid, however, about his literal business. The accusation is all roads lead back to Papa Joe: millions in foreign financing reportedly built on the back of trading on the famous family name. And since Hunter's lifestyle is reportedly so lavish, he constantly needs cash to keep it going. For the troubled son of ol' Scranton Joe, it seems to be a story of easy come, easy go.
First jobs
To understand Hunter Biden's career arc, his education is relevant. He was initially rejected from Yale's vaunted Law School in 1993 — despite a call advocating on his behalf from then-sitting President Bill Clinton. However, Yale's Dean advised Hunter, psssst, to apply as a transfer, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Lo and behold, Hunter was accepted. He graduated in 1996 with high marks.
His first pro-move was working as a consultant at a massive Delaware-based financial services company called MBNA in late 1996. There he banked a very sweet $100,000 a year "retainer," according to The New York Times. Retainers are like salaries, minus definite responsibility –- though Hunter earned the vice president title in only two years. Notably, MBNA was a major Joe Biden donor at the time and was seeking favorable legislation in Congress.
Speaking of Joe, in the late '90s, Hunter also began raking in a second income working as a Washington lobbyist. He would found his own firm, Oldaker Biden & Belair. During Joe Biden's unsuccessful 2007 bid for the presidency – despite alleged discomfort with his son lobbying in D.C. — the future POTUS wrote at least one sizable check to his youngest boy's firm for a whopping $143,000 for "legal services," according to National Review.
Shady hedge fund millions?
Hunter Biden is a lawyer, by training at least, not a financier, but that didn't stop him from making his mark in the money market game, beginning in 2007 when he and his uncle, James Biden, purchased a hedge fund called Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an exposé in Politico, the purchase was a transparent attempt to evade campaign finance laws and cash in on Joe Biden's nearing position as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — and his upcoming presidential bid.
"Don't worry about investors. We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden," Hunter's Uncle James allegedly declared, according to an unnamed former executive. James also allegedly made it clear the firm was simply a clever way to extract cash from rich foreigners who couldn't legally fork over the bribes to Joe directly. "We've got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company." Both James and Hunter have denied any of this was ever said.
Hunter Biden's former business partner, Joseph Lotito, perhaps revealed how allegedly lucrative all this was for Biden when he sued the youngest son of POTUS 46 in 2007 for cutting him out of the purchase of Paradigm Global Advisors. According to court documents (via National Review), Hunter was raking in $1.2 million a year from his fledgling hedge fund endeavor.
Connections to a sex trafficking ring?
As if Hunter Biden's alleged hedge fund scheme to cash in on his father's Senatorial appointment wasn't enough to put a lump in the throat of Joe Biden's press staff, that story is positively wholesome compared to Hunter's alleged tab for sexual favors via the dark underworld of Eastern European organized sex trafficking.
In 2020, two Republican-led Senate committees released an 87-page report that claimed the younger Biden had sent "thousands of dollars" to sex trafficking and prostitution rings in the former Soviet Bloc. The report claims he sent the cash to women in Ukraine and Russia directly, who then forwarded the lucre to others. The report says specifically, via Daily Mail: "Hunter Biden sent thousands of dollars to individuals who have either: 1) been involved in transactions consistent with possible human trafficking; 2) an association with the adult entertainment industry; or 3) potential association with prostitution."
The report was ostensibly devised to ascertain "criminal concerns and extortion threats" aimed at the Biden family -– but perhaps the more likely motivation, considering the partisan origin, is revenge. Think Donald Trump's supposed "pee tape," which has not materialized, in partisan reverse. The documents that back up these claims are "unspecified," according to the New York Post. A Joe Biden campaign spokesman levied the slightly non sequitur charge that Senate Republicans were merely "diverting" attention from Trump's COVID-19 pandemic response.
The sex splurges
In 2021, a story broke that gave some context to the Republican-led allegations about Hunter Biden and "prostitution" in eastern Europe. This time it came from Biden himself when one of his missing laptops coughed up a shocking sex tape full of sordid confessions.
Biden's laptop became a contentious meme in the 2020 presidential election after he left one of his elusive computers in a Delaware repair shop. The contents ended up in the hands of Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and allegedly contained information about his scheming on the back of "the big guy," Joe Biden. However, the story was widely branded "disinformation" and "unsubstantiated" and was even suppressed on social media. But it turns out, "the Hunter Biden laptop is real," notes The Wall Street Journal –- and the damning email contents too. The New York Post celebrated vindication after their controversial Twitter exile.
In 2021, the Daily Mail obtained a video from the infamous laptop. It features a naked Hunter telling an "unidentified" sex worker about yet another computer that was "taken by Russian drug dealers." Biden explains he lost the laptop during an 18-day Vegas bender in 2018, when he spent nearly $200,000 on suites and sex workers. Biden admits he was blackmailed because his missing machine contains footage of him having "crazy" sex. This means Hunter lost three laptops, each uniquely costly: one in Delaware, one in Vegas, and another seized by federal authorities, according to Newsweek.
Hunter Biden's secret baby mama
In 2018, an Arkansas woman and exotic dancer named Lunden Alexis Roberts filed a petition against Hunter Biden to prove he fathered her child. Confident this was all a big misunderstanding — perhaps more disinformation — Biden agreed to take the test. The results didn't go as planned. Hunter, you are the father, the test established with "scientific certainty," according to the Arkansas Democratic Gazette.
Of course, Roberts wasn't just looking for validation. She was suing for child support. She'd been working at a Washington D.C. area club Biden frequented, according to Page Six, dancing under the stage name "Dallas." Joe's youngest son and legendary party animal, Hunter, was "well-known" as a regular patron of the haunt.
In 2020, news broke that Hunter agreed to pay monthly child support, including retroactive payments back to November 2018. However, Biden missed deadlines to submit documents to the court detailing how exactly he earns his money, including, "his source of income for the past over five years, an un-redacted copy of his tax returns from 2017 and 2018," according to Page Six. Roberts' attorney blasted Biden, saying he "has no respect for this court's orders, the legal process in this state, or the needs of his child support." In January 2020, Biden was even ordered to appear before the judge for his intransigence but ultimately settled for an undisclosed sum in March of that year, according to Courthouse News Service.
Crack ruined his marriage
Nothing can drain your bottom line like the old sniffle snacks — and other (high price point) drugs. Coming off one particular binge, Hunter Biden began dating the wife of his recently deceased brother, and got hit with costly financial filings in the process.
In 2015, Joe Biden's son Beau died of cancer at only 46 years old. Beau left behind his wife, Hallie. One year later, Hunter's own wife, Kathleen, kicked him out of the house for his failure to stay sober, according to a tell-all interview Hunter gave The New Yorker. Hunter confessed he then made plans to enter rehab in Arizona but got "sidetracked," as Page Six puts it, and ended up on a crack bender in Los Angles. When Hunter finally made it to his plush desert-resort detox, Beau's wife Hallie met him there, and they "decided to become a couple."
Kathleen filed for divorce in 2017 and did not hide behind irreconcilable differences. "His spending rarely relates to legitimate family expenses, but focuses on his own travel (at times multiple hotel rooms on the same night), gifts for other women, alcohol, strip clubs, or other personal indulgences," she said in court docs. She said Hunter's lavish spending left her unable to pay "legitimate bills." She sought to limit him to a $5,000 a month allowance — while asking for $20,000 a month for herself and the children.
The alleged Russian windfall
Another of the biggest stories from election 2020, Trump vs. Biden, was the allegation that Hunter received a $3.5 million windfall from the wife of the allegedly corrupt former mayor of Moscow. After four years of accusations Joe Biden rival Donald Trump was essentially a urine-soaked KGB cat's-paw, this story went viral.
In 2017, the same Republican committee that accused Hunter of having sent cash to Eastern European sex traffickers claimed one of Biden's companies, Rosemont Seneca, received the wire transfer for millions, on Valentine's day 2014, per Daily Mail. The source of the alleged largesse was Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia, worth an estimated $1.2 billion.
Baturina was the widow of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was fired by Vladamir Putin over unproven charges of corruption. The Republican report documents numerous wire transfers from Baturina to Rosemont, and then to an American bank. Despite the alleged influx, Seneca filed bankruptcy in 2019, with nearly $40 million in debts and less than $150,000 in assets. Biden's lawyer flatly denied Hunter had any relationship to the company or all those Russian rubles: "Hunter Biden had no interest in and was not a co-founder of Rosemont Seneca Thornton, so the claim that he was paid $3.5 million is false." However, emails from one of Hunter's missing laptops show Papa Joe hired a former Seneca staffer as a personal assistant when he was serving as VP.
The supposed Libyan shakedown
In 2015, longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a mob. The United States froze the former head of state's assets, which unleashed a frenzy of influence merchants grabbing at the cash for clients who could pay, according to Politico. In 2021, Business Insider obtained emails that showed Hunter Biden was one of those figures.
Hunter's dad was VP under Barack Obama at the time, and he allegedly hatched a plan to use his father's far-flung connections to dole out the dead dictator's dollars. In emails from a Hunter associate and Democrat donor with Middle Eastern business ties named Sam Jauhari, Biden allegedly required as follows for his help: "He wants $2 per year retainer +++ success fees. He wants to hire his own people — it can be close circle of people for confidentiality. His dad is deciding to run or not."
Jauhari sums up a list of Hunter's proximities to power as the benefit of collaborating with him but is honest about the drawbacks, including his frequent money troubles: "His negatives are that he is alcoholic, drug addict — kicked [out] of U.S. [military] for cocaine, chasing low-class hookers, constantly needs money — liquidity problems and many more headaches." A source told Insider these kinds of access deals with Hunter always started at $2 million annually. Though there's no evidence he ever delivered anything to clients, the emails offer a "glimpse into the way influence peddling works in Washington."
Hunter earns $50,000/month
Hunter Biden might not have any experience in the oil industry beyond occasionally pumping his own gas, but that didn't stop the first son from cashing in as an advisor to a Ukrainian petrol company — all while dad Joe Biden, then-Veep, was running foreign policy in the region under Barack Obama.
Hunter nabbed a board position with Ukraine's Burisma holdings in April 2014, in the direct aftermath of a Russian invasion. According to Burisma, Biden's role was giving advice on issues of "transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion, and other priorities," via Bloomberg News. They paid him upwards of $50,000 a month for these somewhat vague duties, according to The New York Times. Almost as nice as making more a month than most Americans make a year, Biden also had a pretty sweet work-from-home situation: not once did he visit the war-torn country, according to Reuters.
Many experts dubbed Biden's role suspect: "It's a big deal. It's the vice president, who is the point person of the Obama administration's policy on Ukraine, and his son is suddenly hired to be a director on the board of Ukraine's largest private gas producer," Yoshiko M. Herrera, professor and Russia expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told The Washington Post. When Hunter's suspect role began affecting Joe Biden's 2020 presidential aspirations, Hunter admitted to ABC News that taking on such a conflict of interest was "poor judgment."
Wildly lucrative art sales
Even the biggest dealers in the Art-Basel-adjacent arena think contemporary art is "almost fraud." One reason is prices have occasionally collapsed from under investors on these scribbles and doodles seemingly any child could do, which are sometimes sold for millions. Enter Hunter Biden.
You've got to hand it to Hunter. The Yale-trained lawyer with no background in finance or oil was able to make millions in those industries. But then The New York Times rebranded him as an abstract painter on the ascent. A 2021 profile features a charming photo of Hunter, arms crossed in his plush Hollywood Hills home studio alongside the headline: "There's a new artist in town. The name is Biden."
Hunter told The Times painting is keeping him "sane" after, as they write, "years of addiction and poor choices." But quick to follow were more allegations that Hunter's art was yet another suspect choice. A trendy NYC gallery listed Biden's blotches for as much as $500,000, raising "questions in Washington about whether the works might attract buyers seeking to curry favor with the Biden White House," writes NYT. Barack Obama's former ethics czar condemned the sale, tweeting, "Hunter Biden should cancel this art sale because he knows the prices are based on his dad's job. Shame on POTUS if he doesn't ask Hunter to stop." The Biden White House pledged buyers' identities would be kept secret, but House Republicans opened an investigation in 2021.
The $12,000/month L.A. pad
Hunter Biden might be Deleware-born and bred, but the president's wayward son has long since left the diamond state for Tinseltown. In 2021, Biden rented a 2,000-square foot Hollywood Hills home just off Los Angeles' iconic Mulholland Drive, according to The New York Times.
Hunter rented the plush three-bedroom pad for $12,000-per-month and shared the home with his third wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, whom he wed in 2019, six days after they met, according to ABC News. The house has "plenty of natural light," and Biden has transformed the pool house into his art studio. The property is sloped, with panoramic views into the San Fernando Valley: Burbank and Hollywood's movie studios like Universal are to his east, L.A.'s snarled 405 highway to the west. Visible from Hunter's perch, on an adjacent ridge, sits the red barn-like farmhouse home of fellow prominent painter David Hockney. Hunter is also fond of a local flock of red-tailed hawks who daily dip and soar past this hilly little haven. "I love watching them," the artist says.
Also featured in this tableau is Hunter's white Porsche Panamera GTS pulled up in the driveway. The high-performance sports car, best peeped here, starts at $129,300, according to The Washington Examiner but can be custom-configured down to the last lug nut, going well beyond $200,000.
The huge tax problem
The U.S. tax code is such a labyrinthine maze of exceptions, loopholes, and write-offs, tax troubles can trip up even the most conscientious citizen. But also Hunter Biden, who in 2020 was hit with a whopping $450,000 lien for unpaid state income taxes in the non-state of the District of Columbia, where Biden has often resided.
Biden owed the nearly half a million dollars in back taxes from income dating to 2017 and 2018, according to The Washington Free Beacon. Fortunately, for this fortunate son, Hunter wiped clean the hefty tab in just six days, "despite having no discernible income." The outlet notes Biden told a D.C. superior court judge in a paternity case just the previous year that he didn't have a job and was broke.
Biden's "tax issue was resolved" in July 2020, according to D.C.'s Office of the Chief Financial Officer, but they would not say whether it was Hunter himself who paid the debt. A tax expert told The Beacon these kinds of liens can take months or years to squash and usually involve a repayment plan. "It drags on," Harvey Bezozi, a large-scale tax debt negotiator, told the site. "Six days had to be some kind of expeditious process for this." Additionally, Hunter had a $112,805 federal lien filed against him in 2018, also resolved in 2020, according to public records.
Hunter Biden's China connections
Historians might look back on the 21st century as a kind of gold rush. But instead of shiny little minerals in a creek, the resource is the nearly 1.4 billion increasingly affluent Chinese consumers every good "Atlas Shrugged" aficionado wants in on. And in 2020, news broke that the U.S. Justice Department was looking into Hunter Biden's efforts to get his piece of the emerging mega-market.
Biden confirmed the existence of the tax investigation and claimed a thorough review would "demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors."
It's not clear which Hunter Biden enterprise has gotten Justice Dept. attention, but the president's son told the New Yorker about some of his dealings in China, including a 2013 trip to Beijing with his dad in which a Chinese energy tycoon interested in a liquified natural gas project simply handed him a diamond. Hunter had also invested just under half a million in a Chinese private equity firm but stepped down from the board ahead of the 2020 presidential election and vowed to cease his foreign ventures, according to Newsweek. However, business records reviewed by the Daily Caller in 2021 revealed Hunter still had a 10% stake, despite Joe Biden's 2019 campaign pledge that "no one in my family ... will, in fact, have any business relationship with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign country. Period. Period. End of story."