Already a millionaire when he last left office, Chris Christie is one of the wealthiest people running for president this year.
Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
Christie’s net worth quadrupled after leaving the New Jersey governorship.
By Kyle Mullins, Forbes Staff
Plenty of politicians make big money after leaving office: Just ask Nikki Haley, Mike Pence or Joe Biden, who all tapped into tried-and-true moneymaking methods for political figures — writing books, giving speeches, doing consulting or sitting on boards. But of all the people running for president today, nobody has played the game better than Chris Christie.
The former New Jersey governor and his wife, Mary Pat, reported $1 million to $2 million in assets when Christie left office in 2018, plus a $1.3 million house in Morris County, New Jersey. Today, the couple is worth $15 million, according to Forbes’ estimates, meaning their net worth has roughly quadrupled. The Christies now have two homes in the Garden State, worth roughly $6 million total, plus a sizable portfolio of investments, a large pension from Christie’s law firm and two smaller ones from his time in government. How’d they build such a big fortune in such a short period of time? By doing what Haley, Pence and Biden did, but on a bigger scale. Christie, a lifelong public servant who was among the poorest 2015 presidential hopefuls, is now one of the richest people vying for the Oval Office in 2024.
Christie’s Cash
The former New Jersey governor and his Wall Street wife have two houses, three pensions and a big pile of investments between them.
Christie grew up solidly middle class. He was born in 1962 in Newark, but his parents moved to the suburbs in the mid-1960s. His father held a job at Peat Marwick, the “P” and “M” in what is today the accounting giant KPMG. His mother worked at a typewriter company. In his 2019 memoir, Christie credits his interest in politics to his grandmother, with whom he watched “Meet the Press” from a young age. He remembers identifying as a Republican after watching former President Gerald Ford speak at the 1976 GOP convention.
A political science major, Christie met Mary Pat, a business student who was a year behind him, at the University of Delaware (also Joe Biden’s alma mater). He was elected student body president as a junior, and when Mary Pat ran to succeed him the following year, Chris “persuaded” her challenger to step aside and let her win unopposed. “You really don’t want to run,” Christie told the other candidate, according to his book, “because, if you do, I’m gonna work as hard as I can to make sure you lose, and that would be humiliating.” When the predictable election results were announced, the student newspaper congratulated her, adding “the suspense was killing us.”
The couple married in 1986, when Christie was a law student at Seton Hall University. Money was tight—Mary Pat made $20,000 a year, roughly $56,000 today, working at a New York investment bank, and Chris worked nights at a small law firm while completing his degree. The strain of a new marriage got to them, especially after they moved into a fixer-upper starter home in Cranford, New Jersey in 1988. They separated twice and tried counseling, but it took three years, more financial stability and a new house to repair their marriage.
The Christies sold their Cranford place in 1991 for $17,500 less than they paid for it, but by then the couple could clearly take the hit, because they turned around and borrowed $300,000 to build a 3,700-square-foot home in Mendham, New Jersey. “We were socking money away,” Christie writes about this period, noting Mary Pat’s ascendency on Wall Street as a junk bond saleswoman and his budding career as a trial lawyer. Presumably wanting more space as they began to raise a family, the Christies sold their house in 1998 for $630,000 and bought a 7,000-square-foot home nearby for $775,000. They still own the property, which Forbes estimates is worth $2 million today before subtracting an estimated $500,000 left on their mortgage.
As Christie’s bank account grew in the 1990s, so did his political clout. He took a leave of absence from his law firm job to work for George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign in New Jersey in 1992. After a short stint in county government, he joined the campaign of H.W. ‘s son—which proved more successful. President George W. Bush rewarded Christie with an appointment as the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, and he took office in January 2002.
Under Christie, the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s office became known for public corruption prosecutions, securing 130 convictions of elected and appointed officials in seven years. He also had run-ins with two brash New York real estate barons that would shape his future in politics. The first was with Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, who Christie convicted for various financial crimes in 2005. The second was with Donald Trump, who he befriended in 2002 shortly after entering office.
Following Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, Christie resigned as U.S. Attorney, leaving him with a federal pension worth around $90,000 today. In November 2009, he was elected New Jersey governor, beating a Democratic incumbent. The office came with a $175,000 salary and an official residence in Princeton, though the Christies kept the family in Mendham so the kids could stay in their schools. Mary Pat, who at this point was making more than $500,000 a year as a vice president at a Wall Street investment firm, was the family’s main breadwinner.
As governor, Christie quickly built up a national profile picking fights with teachers unions, refusing to raise taxes and going viral for combative exchanges with reporters and voters. The blue-state governor won reelection in 2013 in a landslide, overcame the “Bridgegate” scandal and announced a run for president in 2015.
Chris Christie’s first run at the presidency ended with him endorsing his then friend, Donald Trump.
(AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
It went poorly. Christie’s old friend, Trump, grabbed hold of the party and never let go. Christie dropped out after the first two primaries, then joined the Trump campaign as an advisor and head of the transition team. Squabbles with Jared Kushner—who, in Christie’s telling, never truly forgave him for prosecuting his father a decade before—and other campaign staff ultimately led to his sidelining. When Trump shocked the world in November 2016, and Christie wasn’t offered the attorney general spot he wanted, he returned to New Jersey for his final year as governor.
The Christies were doing just fine when he left office, given the $2 million or so in assets they reported at the time. Mary Pat earned more than $500,000 that year in deferred compensation from another Wall Street firm, which she left in 2015 to stay at home with her kids.
But, evidently, it wasn’t enough. “I want to have fun, and I want to make money,” Christie told The New York Times in 2017 before leaving office. He got to work quickly, signing onto ABC News as a contributor in January 2018 and starting both his own law firm and a consulting and lobbying shop called Christie 55 Solutions within three months. Apparently his businesses were a quick success, because one of the first things he and his wife did was sink $2.9 million into a beachfront house in Bay Head, New Jersey in June 2018, borrowing $1.7 million to pay for it. They paid off that loan by 2020. It’s been a good investment: The house is worth over $4.3 million today.
The cash kept coming. The Christies’ consulting and lobbying work paid the couple $3.2 million between January 2022 and mid-2023 alone; clients have included big hospitals, Puerto Rican government entities and pharmaceutical company Pacira BioSciences—on whose board Christie sits. They’ve also made plenty from the Christie Law Firm, which paid the former governor about $700,000 during that time period and gave him a pension that Forbes estimates is worth between $1 million and $4 million. (The Christie campaign did not answer a list of questions about his income and assets.)
The couple reported income from a combined six corporate boards—four private companies and two that are publicly traded, Pacira and a Swedish pharma firm named Orexo. They earned roughly $600,000 from those boards between early 2022 and the middle of 2023. Christie raked in $475,000 from the commentator gig at ABC and more than $400,000 in speaking fees over the same time period. He’s also published two books, his memoir in 2019 and a “guide for recapturing Republican glory” in 2021. His contract details are unknown, but the two have sold 33,000 and 9,100 copies respectively, according to data from BookScan.
The Christies have plowed the rest of their cash into an investment portfolio that includes hundreds of different stocks, bonds and index funds, including sizable holdings of blue-chip tech companies like Apple and Microsoft. That pile of investments threw off more than $250,000 in dividends and other income since January 2022, according to Christie’s most recent financial disclosure. The couple also reports capital gains of between $200,000 and $2 million from selling two holdings in the last year and a half. All told, the Christies’ fortune has ballooned to an estimated $15 million, more than every Republican presidential hopeful except North Dakota governor and software mogul Doug Burgum and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
And, of course, his former friend, Donald Trump, who has far more money—and support—than any other Republican candidate. The Christie-Trump relationship has soured since the January 6th riots at the Capitol and Trump’s various indictments. If Christie continues to poll in the single digits, though, at least his family is set up for a very comfortable second political retirement.
MORE FROM FORBES
Source link
#Heres #Chris #Christie #Worth