By the standards of the Trump administration, which features a billionaire president and a number of billionaire cabinet members and advisors including the world’s richest man, Vice President J.D. Vance is a comparative pauper.
As he narrated in his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was born into a troubled family in Appalachian Ohio only to be catapulted into the second most powerful position in the country by attending an Ivy League law school, working in venture capital, publishing a best-selling book about the white working class and then running for the U.S. Senate. While Vance and his wife, Usha, are very wealthy compared to most Americans, their fortune is more in keeping with the kind of money people stockpile by working very well-compensated 9-to-5 jobs than with the spectacular wealth of Silicon Valley investors.
From a difficult childhood to Yale Law School
While the exact circumstances of Vance’s childhood in Middletown, Ohio, are a matter of dispute and speculation, he certainly faced trying circumstances. His mother was addicted to painkillers and “raised her own children amid violence, chaos, drugs and strange men,” said The New Yorker. But despite the vice president’s frequent claims that he grew up in poverty, the Vances “never had to worry about money,” said The Conversation. On the contrary, his parents, despite their troubles, made good money and “at one point enjoyed a six-figure income” in addition to being able to draw upon a reservoir of family wealth from Vance’s grandfather, said Rolling Stone.
Vance attended Ohio State as an undergraduate and obtained his J.D. from prestigious Yale Law School in 2013. “In Vance’s final year at Yale, he convened a reading group” to look at the lack of mobility and poor social outcomes for white working class Americans, said The Washington Post. The group was where Vance began working on the ideas that would become “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” a book that “gave a voice to millions of forgotten Americans across the heartland,” said The White House. The book sold more than 1.6 million copies and brought in nearly $500,000 in royalties between its publication, in 2016, and 2025, many copies purchased by dispirited liberals hoping to understand how Donald Trump won the 2016 election.. “Hillbilly Elegy” was a “compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump,” said The New York Times. It enjoyed another run of success and interest when Vance was selected to be President Trump’s running mate during the summer of 2024.
How Vance’s career built his fortune
After law school, Vance served as a clerk for a conservative judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in northern Kentucky. Federal clerkships are prestigious apprenticeships that typically go to high-performing graduates of top law schools and are used as a springboard to launch various kinds of legal careers. “Law clerks’ salaries cannot match those of some private-sector lawyers,” but they are “reasonable” and “adjusted to account for cost-of-living differences nationwide,” said Cornell Law School. After the clerkship, Vance worked for Sidley Austin LLP, a law firm where “he focused on complex litigation and regulatory compliance matters, gaining exposure to high-stakes corporate legal issues,” said LawFuel. Glassdoor estimates that attorneys at Sidley Austin make an average of $246,000 a year, although that figure was likely lower in 2014.
After his short tenure at Sidley Austin, Vance moved to a biotech startup and then to Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital, in 2015. He was reportedly rarely seen there, and one colleague “recalled sporadic sightings of Vance” but noted that Vance’s “focus seemed to be promoting his book rather than engaging in the day-to-day operations of the VC firm,” said Yahoo Finance. In 2017, Vance then moved to “Steve Case’s Revolution venture firm,” which invested “in companies outside major tech hubs,” including in the Midwest, said Business Insider. Vance founded the venture capital firm Narya in 2019 and “still owns pieces of the funds that he helped advise.” Narya was “one of the top 10 investors in the video platform Rumble,” which “came to prominence as a haven for right-wing and conspiracy-minded users during 2020,” said The Guardian.
In 2022, Vance sought and won the Republican nomination for the Ohio Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Rob Portman and won both the GOP primary as well as the general election. Vance earned $174,000 a year as a U.S. Senator from 2023 to 2025. He now makes $235,100 as the vice president and, unlike President Trump, has yet to mint any meme coins or self-branded Bibles to capitalize on his new position.
In 2014, Vance married his law school classmate Usha Chilukuri (now Usha Vance), who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as well as for Brett Kavanaugh while Kavanaugh was an appellate court justice. Between 2018 and 2024, she worked as an attorney for Munger, Tolles & Olson, a San Francisco law firm specializing in “higher education, local government, entertainment and technology,” said Vogue. The median pay at the firm today is $239,000, according to Glassdoor. Usha Vance resigned from her position at Munger, Tolles & Olson “to focus on caring for our family,” said Vance in a statement to People Magazine.
In 2021, “taxpayers in the top 1% had adjusted gross incomes of at least $682,577,” said Investopedia, meaning that the Vance’s were likely among or near the top 1% of earners in the United States before he began his political career. They own two homes, one “East of the Capitol building” that is “worth about $850,000 today,” as well as “a $1.4 million home in Cincinnati’s left-leaning East Walnut Hills,” said Forbes. The Cincinnati home is a “five-bedroom property” with “over 6,000 square feet set on 2.29 acres overlooking the Ohio River,” said Business Insider.
Today, the Vances’ combined income and investments, including real estate and crypto, is “estimated at between $4.8 million and $11.3 million, according to federal disclosure forms filed in August” of 2024, said CBS News. Forbes estimates the couple’s net worth at $10 million.