No, AOC Isn’t Rich, Yet — Here's How Much The New York Democrat Is Worth - video Dailymotion

Forbes Breaking News

34-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lives a high-profile life—attending the Met Gala and driving a Tesla—but she also has college loans and little savings. Forbes money in politics reporter Kyle Mullins joins Brittany Lewis on "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss the net worth of the New York Democrat.   Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2024/05/03/no-aoc-isnt-rich-yet-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript   Stay Connected Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com

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00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis with Forbes Breaking News. Joining me now is my colleague,

00:07Forbes Money and Politics reporter Kyle Mullins. Kyle, thanks for joining me once again.

00:13Always great to be here, Brittany. And it is really good timing that you and I are speaking

00:18today because as you point out in your reporting, just a few Met galas ago back in 2021,

00:24Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a dress that said, tax the rich on the back.

00:31I'm sure everyone can remember. It was a very memorable moment on the carpet. So you're

00:35actually reporting on her net worth. So first point blank, is she rich? What does her fortune

00:41look like? Yeah, that's that's one of the things I wanted to point out is it's really easy to call

00:46for taxing the rich. She's not that rich. And that certainly helps. We are estimating that

00:53Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez's net worth is about one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars.

00:58So before we get to what assets make up that one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars,

01:03take us back to the beginning, her life before politics and what her financial

01:08situation looked like in those formative years. Absolutely. So Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York

01:16and she grew up in, I would say, a working class family. They weren't in poverty. I would say her,

01:23her father was an architect and her mother was a first generation immigrant who cleaned houses. So

01:29definitely firmly working class family there. She went to college in 2007 off to Boston University.

01:37And while she was there, her sophomore year, her dad suddenly died of cancer. It was very

01:44dramatic and very sudden. And her family really struggled after that. So once her dad passed away,

01:52they lost all of that income. He owned a house in just north of New York City and also owned a

01:57small apartment in the Bronx. And they had kind of a custody battle over both of those properties.

02:02And really, that home in the Bronx took four years for them to sort that out. That was a

02:05very expensive legal process for them. And additionally, they had all these medical

02:08bills that had built up while he was being treated for cancer. And so she graduated into a pretty

02:15horrendous job market right after the Great Recession, even for college graduates,

02:20was really struggling to find. So she ended up working as a waitress. Her mother took a second

02:24job as a bus driver. So they really started out better than they were doing when she graduated

02:30college. Definitely. If we can remember back in 2011, that was a really grim time financially.

02:36The Great Recession just about ending there. So what made her take the leap from graduating

02:42college, waiting tables to then join politics? The way she tells it, she was always active in

02:48community organizing. But she was really constrained in part because of her need to work

02:56low-wage jobs in order to support her family. But it was really Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2015,

03:022016, his first run at the presidency. Remember, Bernie Sanders is an independent senator from

03:06Vermont. He's probably the furthest left member of the United States Senate. And he usually caucuses

03:13with the Democratic Party. But he self-identifies as a Democratic Socialist, which is not something

03:17that we've seen on the political scene in the United States in many, many decades,

03:22at least before 2016. So she worked with his campaign, volunteered for his campaign,

03:27was very active in that. And she also got involved in activism in the Dakotas around

03:32in Standing Rock, protests over an oil pipeline there. And so the combination of those two things,

03:39apparently, I gotta point to her, inspired her to run for office.

03:42So now let's go to the 2018 midterms. When she was running for office,

03:46she was primarying a very seasoned, a top Democrat in the House, Democrat Joe Crawley.

03:52She ended up winning in an upset victory there. What did her financial situation look like then?

03:59According to her earliest disclosures that we have access to,

04:02she did have some savings there that she was using in part to fund her campaign.

04:06But she was making less than $30,000 a year from her restaurant job, her main job.

04:10And so she didn't really have a lot to work with. And this is especially in comparison to somebody

04:15like Joe Crawley, who at the time was a 10-term Democratic incumbent, the chair of the Democratic

04:20Caucus in the House of Representatives, and a very seasoned veteran of the New York politics scene.

04:29She was wildly outspent, but in the end actually managed to win the primary,

04:33which was a kind of a shock political victory. It was compared to Eric Cantor,

04:38was a Republican in 2014 who lost to a sort of unknown Tea Party challenger. It was kind of,

04:44you know, similar energy there. And it was seen as sort of the rise of a progressive

04:49wing of the Democratic Party in the 2018 midterms. So she was elected before she was sworn in,

04:54before that congressional salary kicked in. How much money was in the bank for her?

04:59Her campaign manager said after, shortly after she actually won her general election,

05:03which was not really much of a competition, given her extremely blue district in New York City,

05:10her campaign manager said that she had less than $7,000 in savings left, which is not,

05:14again, not a lot to work with. And she told the New York Times that she was struggling to find

05:20an apartment to rent in D.C. in addition to the apartment that she was already living in New York.

05:26In New York, if you're renting in both cities, that gets very expensive very quickly. And she

05:30didn't have much of much in the way of savings to go off of there. And as anyone knows who apartment

05:36hunts, New York and D.C. are two of the most expensive cities to rent an apartment in. But

05:42tell us now, as you've reported, her net worth is now $125,000. What assets make that up?

05:50So the vast majority of that, about $100,000 or so, is actually our estimate of how much she's

05:56put away in retirement savings. It's tough to know because Congress people don't actually have

05:59to disclose the balances in their thrift savings accounts, which is the sort of the 401k equivalent

06:07for government employees. But we estimate that if she's been meeting her match and she's been

06:13getting those matching funds that people who get 401ks also typically get, she gets 5% match,

06:20that would be about $100,000 as of this year. The other assets in that that we're talking about

06:25when we make up that fortune of hers, we have a couple of cash accounts, savings accounts,

06:31that kind of thing. None of them are larger than the sort of smallest bracket that they

06:36have to disclose, which is between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of value. That's a pretty big

06:41range, of course. It's hard to know exactly where that sits in there. So we usually take the

06:46median. And then besides that, it's her pension, which she became eligible for this year after

06:52five years of service in Congress. And that's only worth about $15,000 right now. But of course,

06:58the longer she stays in Congress, the more and more that that will grow.

07:03You mentioned that when she first was sworn into Congress, she couldn't afford an apartment.

07:08Does she own any real estate now?

07:12She doesn't. As far as we know, she still rents in both New York and D.C.

07:17And she's a big proponent of student loan debt cancellation. How much does she owe in student

07:23loans? So she doesn't have an enormous amount anymore. She's talked about this publicly,

07:28and she said in 2021 that her balance was around $17,000. We're estimating that,

07:32assuming she's been making regular payments, it's around $15,000 these days.

07:36That's also the range that we have on her disclosure, and it starts at $15,000. So we're

07:42assuming it's pretty close to the lower end of that range there. But I mean, other than that,

07:46she doesn't have any other debts that she's reporting. When you were reporting on her

07:52waitress salary, you said she was making $27,000 a year. What is her congressional salary today?

07:58Congressional salaries are $174,000 for your everyday member of Congress. That actually

08:04hasn't changed in about a decade or over a decade. Congress has routinely paused the sort of annual

08:13increase that would come with cost of living. And AOC has actually been a vocal proponent of

08:17raising congressional salaries. She argues that if you keep the salaries too low, people are more

08:25likely to go try to find more corrupt income elsewhere. So maybe they go trade stocks that

08:30they aren't supposed to that's out of trading, or they try to go do other various deals. She

08:35refuses to own private stocks. That's something that she has made part of her persona. But she

08:40has argued that Congress should be paid more than they are today. You and I have talked about the

08:45net worths of a lot of political leaders, and a lot of the times their marriages impact their

08:52fortunes. We know that she's engaged. So is there any indication of how much her partner is worth?

08:59So members of Congress do not have to report non married partners, which, you know, in this case,

09:05describes her fiance, Riley Roberts. They don't have to report them on their disclosures or their

09:10assets. And so because of that, we don't really have a great sense of things. Riley is kind of

09:14a black box in this in this whole situation. But, you know, he's been working in tech for

09:21years and years now. You know, our best guess is that he probably has some savings, but until they

09:26are married, and they've been engaged for over two years, so I assume the wedding's coming at some

09:29point. You know, once they're married, we'll get a better sense of exactly how much he's making and

09:35how much he's saved up over the years. I am curious about how much her fortune stacks up to other

09:41members of Congress. So we haven't done valuations of every member of Congress, we're only getting

09:46started here. But I would say that her, you know, excuse me, her assets are significantly

09:54lower than the average member of Congress. But I think it's notable here, the average member of

09:58Congress is a lot older than Ocasio-Cortez. You know, she's only 34 years old, and the average

10:04member of Congress is well into their 50s. So they've had many more years to sort of put money

10:08away in savings and in retirement accounts and that kind of thing. She also doesn't own any real

10:13estate, a lot of members of Congress own a house, but she lives in sort of two areas of the country

10:18where it's much more common to rent, New York and DC. So there's a lot of things that are kind of

10:22working against her in this case, in terms of actually building wealth, in comparison to other

10:26members of Congress. That said, she's in a very safe blue district, assuming that she stays in

10:31Congress for, you know, decades to come, as she potentially could. You know, she's going to have

10:36plenty of time to put money away in that savings account, plenty of time to put money away in

10:41savings accounts, and maybe eventually buy some real estate that can grow as well.

10:45Kyle Mullins, per usual, I enjoyed our conversation. Thanks so much for joining me.

10:50Thank you, Brittany. Always great to be here.

No, AOC Isn’t Rich, Yet — Here's How Much The New York Democrat Is Worth

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