Pam Bondi, America’s newest attorney general, can thank rising Florida real estate values, a few years of lobbying and a wealthy husband for her increasing fortune. Forbes money in politics reporter Kyle Khan-Mullins joins "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss Bondi's net worth.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2025/03/18/how-pam-bondi-got-rich-in-just-six-years-out-of-office/
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now
00:07is my Forbes colleague, money and politics reporter, Kyle Kahn Mullins. Kyle, thanks
00:11so much for coming back on. Always great to be here, Brittany. Thanks for having me.
00:16I always love our conversations because they always end up in the intersection of money
00:21and politics. And this conversation really is no different. Today, we're going to be
00:25talking about Pam Bondi, President Donald Trump's new attorney general. So first, to
00:30start off the conversation, I want to talk about just who is Pam Bondi? What was her
00:34career like before becoming the nation's top attorney?
00:39Pam Bondi, fourth generation Floridian, daughter of two educators in Florida from Tampa Bay,
00:46my hometown, by the way, she's from Tampa. I'm from St. Petersburg, just across the water.
00:51So she's a she's a hometown name for me. I grew up reading about Pam Bondi in the papers
00:55in the Tampa Bay Times when she was my attorney general and I was in high school.
01:02But yeah, she was born to, like I said, two educators. Her dad was actually a pretty high
01:07profile professor at the University of South Florida who was very instrumental in the middle
01:12school movement, which I didn't even know was a thing that existed, but basically established
01:17the creation of middle schools as opposed to junior highs as the primary education model
01:22in the United States. So he's actually a very well-known educator. Her mother was an elementary
01:26school teacher for much of her career. She went to college and got her law degree all
01:32in the state of Florida. And then after that, Pam Bondi became a prosecutor in Hillsborough
01:38County, Florida. That's where Tampa is. And she was in the prosecutor's office in a state
01:43prosecutor for 18 years.
01:46And so then that leads her to becoming Florida's attorney general. I want to know more about
01:51her tenure as attorney general in the Sunshine State. So maybe we can get a better understanding
01:56of what she's going to be like as the nation's attorney general. What was her salary and
02:00what was her legacy in that position?
02:03So on $29,000 as Florida's attorney general, she was turned down for eight years and her
02:10salary did not change during that time. Salaries did flop. She was elected in 2010 in that
02:15part of that big Tea Party wave that happened that year. She was a conservative attorney
02:19general. She was swept into office on this Tea Party wave. And she really ran in part
02:24on a platform of trying to running against the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. This
02:30was President Obama's signature health care law. It was passed just before the Tea Party
02:34wave and the Tea Party wave is kind of a backlash to the law. So she actually led a lawsuit,
02:39a coalition by a bunch of Republican led states trying to invalidate that law on constitutional
02:45grounds. She was struck down by the Supreme Court in a pretty shocking 5-4 decision where
02:51John Roberts upheld the side of it the liberals on the court to uphold the constitutionality
02:57of the Affordable Care Act. She didn't give up. She tried again after President Trump
03:00was in office, suing again to try to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but the Supreme Court
03:05slapped that suit down too.
03:07But besides that, she won two terms as attorney general and ran a pretty standard, somewhat
03:14conservative legal operation while she was attorney general. Cracked down on the illegal
03:18drug trade in Florida. She focused on prosecuting fraudsters and drug traffickers and human
03:25traffickers. She also was a part of several big settlements that brought a lot of money
03:29to Florida. That includes a $3 billion settlement from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that
03:35really affected the Floridian economy and Florida's tourism, and an $8 billion settlement
03:40from a national mortgage settlement in the wake of the Great Recession.
03:44So I love talking politics, but also we're Forbes, so we love talking money. So let's
03:49get into the numbers here. She leaves office in 2019. How much was she worth then? And
03:54then fast forward six years later today in 2025, how much is she worth now?
03:58Yeah, we have a pretty good sense of what she was worth when she left office. Florida's
04:03disclosures, financial disclosures for politicians are some of the best of the nation in terms
04:08of their level of transparency and detail. So we know she was worth a little over $1.5
04:12million when she left office. Almost all of that was her home in Tampa, which she had
04:17bought back in the late 90s and that had appreciated enormously in value since then. And then she
04:23also had over almost $600,000 in personal effects and household goods, which is pretty
04:30high for someone of this level of net worth. We were a little bit surprised to see that.
04:35She didn't really have any savings, it appeared. She had a checking account with $4,000 in
04:39it and that appeared to be the extent of her liquid assets. Fast forward to today, we look
04:45at her financial disclosure today and we are estimating she's worth at least $5 million
04:50and probably more, though there's some uncertainty that we're going to get into. So that's a
04:54pretty big jump in just six years.
04:57So she's added multi-millions to her fortune. And I think in the past six years, her time
05:03could be divided in a few buckets. So I do want to talk about the first bucket being
05:07her time as a lobbyist. What exactly was she doing here and how much was she making?
05:12Yeah, Pam Bondi left office in early 2019 and walked straight into that revolving door
05:18between the private sector and the public sector. She became a lobbyist for Ballard
05:21Partners. It's a Florida-based lobbying firm, but it's a global lobbying firm with clients
05:27all over the world. Her clients over the last six years while she was working at Ballard
05:31include General Motors, Carnival, Amazon, Uber, very big names you might know. Also,
05:39the nation of Cotto at one point hired her to be their lobbyist for the Trump administration.
05:47And it seems like the assumption here, at least, is that these companies were hiring
05:51her because she was a well-known conservative at this point. She was a prominent Trump defender.
05:56She had ties to the administration. Trump was president at the time, so they were hoping
06:00maybe they could leverage some of those connections to get what they're looking for out of the
06:04government, right? She also, separately from that, did a little bit of lobbying for Pfizer
06:08through a separate law firm. And so put that all together, her disclosures that we have
06:13only look at 2023 and 2024, but we know she made over $1.2 million from lobbying in those
06:20years.
06:22Pretty lucrative gig there. Now I want to talk more about her ties to the Trump administration.
06:27She was involved in work in the Trump slash MAGA orbit. Talk to us about what exactly
06:32she was doing there, as well as the price tag associated with that work.
06:36Totally. So I think there's like two elements here. The first one is a little bit smaller.
06:41She did a lot of legal work for the America First Policy Institute. It was a MAGA think
06:46tank started and run by Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins. You might recognize those
06:50names. Linda McMahon, now the secretary of education, and Brooke Rollins, now the secretary
06:54of agriculture. So Pam Bondi joined up as their basically their head of litigation,
07:00and she and their team filed a number of legal actions, lawsuits, and amicus briefs, those
07:06kinds of things, basically trying to support various MAGA causes. A lot of it was supporting
07:11President Trump, or now at that point, former President Trump, in his various criminal and
07:16civil cases that he was battling at the time. But they also filed stuff related to free
07:21speech and stuff related to vaccine mandates and really trying to push sort of the man
07:26on those items. And she made some about a hundred, a couple hundred thousand dollars
07:29from that over 2023 and 2024. Definitely nothing to sneeze at. The other thing that was much
07:34larger, though, was she did a bunch of consulting in connection with Trump Media and Technology
07:40Group's SPAC merger. That's how they went public and started trading publicly on the
07:47NASDAQ. Trump Media and Technology Group is TruthSocial's parent company. That's Donald
07:53Trump's, you know, basically personal media empire at this point. It's a very big chunk
07:59of his net worth. When that company went public, it immediately was worth billions, despite
08:05the fact that it only has a couple million dollars in revenue annually. She was paid,
08:10she declares 2.9 million dollars of compensation from that consulting on her disclosure. However,
08:19we are estimating that it was all in stocks of warrants and we're estimating that those
08:24are worth closer to 1.9 million today. I want to talk about this third bucket, which is
08:29marriage. And you and I have talked about this before. She's not the first Trump cabinet
08:34official to benefit financially from a marriage. We talked about that with Defense Secretary
08:38Pete Hegseth. Her net worth skyrocketed in part because of her latest marriage. So talk
08:43to us about that.
08:45Yeah, so she recently married a guy named John Wakefield. He's a former wealth manager,
08:52former corporate banker, and now he owns a real estate, co-owns a real estate private
08:55equity company. They own a couple of properties that they recently purchased in Florida and
09:01in South Carolina. There's two apartment complexes and there's one shopping plaza that
09:08they own. It's just commercial real estate investments. And what's a bit odd is those
09:14assets, we can see how much they were purchased for in 2023 and 2024. All three of them were
09:19purchased over the last couple of years and two of them were between six and seven million
09:24and then one was something like twenty eight million dollars. But his personal shares on
09:29the disclosure are much smaller than that. And so we're not 100% sure why. We don't know.
09:33Maybe he only owns a small actual stake in those properties himself. Maybe his co-partner
09:39in the private equity firm owns more. We're still not sure exactly how that works. And
09:43so because of that, this is where a lot of the uncertainty comes from. It's actually
09:46not clear how big John Wakefield's fortune is and how much that is contributing to PAM
09:51money. We know he's got money. We know he's got investments and he's got this lucrative
09:54private equity firm, but we don't know exactly how much it's worth. And we're still working
09:58on digging into that. So as you noted in the past six years, she went from the public sector,
10:03went into that revolving door in the private sector, made a couple million, now is back
10:08in the public sector, back as attorney general. How much will she be making in this position?
10:14Her salary is two hundred and thirty five thousand one hundred dollars, which sounds
10:18pretty good to me, but is a lot less than she's been making as a lobbyist the past couple of years.
10:23As we know, President Trump, especially for his second term, ran on a platform that he
10:28touted as restoring law and order. How is Pam Pambani doing that as she serves as attorney
10:34general? So she's already taken a bunch of actions as attorney general. A couple of things
10:40I'll highlight. Some big headline grabbing things include releasing a bunch of documents
10:46related to Jeffrey Epstein, related to the JFK assassination that the U.S. government
10:52has been sitting on for a while, keeping in classified false. She's released those.
10:56But some of the stuff she's done on the law and order thing, like you mentioned,
10:59she's brought actions against several blue states regarding immigration enforcement,
11:03trying to force them to cooperate more with the federal government on enforcement of
11:08immigration law in the United States. And then she has also really taken a hard line on what
11:14President Trump calls the weaponization of the Justice Department. He alleges that under Joe
11:19Biden and even under previous presidencies, the DOJ was out to get him personally and out to get
11:25conservatives and MAGA folks in general. And so Pambani has announced a number of investigations
11:32into some of the lawyers that previously were on the investigations into President Trump,
11:36including the criminal investigations into President Trump, and has also announced a
11:40number of initiatives trying to weed out potential people who were oftentimes career
11:49Justice Department officials who were involved in those investigations. And so critics have said
11:54that this is them trying to stack the Justice Department with their own cronies. You know,
11:59she's obviously not assenting to that point of view on it, but that's the that that that that's
12:06how she's coming into the Justice Department. She's been in the job a little over a month now,
12:10I think. So we will see how things go. Kyle, per usual, I appreciate all your
12:16reporting. Thanks for coming on. Always great to be here, Brittany. Thanks for having me.