Meet the Billionaires & Multi-Millionaires Trump Is Putting In Charge of Our Government & Economy

President-Elect Donald Trump, a billionaire himself, is stocking his new administration with an extraordinary number of billionaires and multimillionaires who bring a slew of potential conflicts of interest to their jobs. These appointees have a clear incentive to pursue economic policies that further enrich themselves, their rich friends and especially their boss. The question is whether the needs of hard-working families will get any attention in the incoming administration’s policy-making process.

The report reveals that the combined wealth of President-elect Trump’s wealthiest nominees and transition team officials–along with himself and his Vice President, JD Vance–amounts to over $313 billion. In contrast, President Biden’s cabinet was estimated to have a combined net worth of $118 million, or more than a thousand times less. Even excluding Elon Musk—the world’s richest man and Trump’s Co-Director of the Department of Government Efficiency—the average net worth of Trump, his vice president and top appointees is $616 million. This figure is over 616 times higher than the mean average wealth of the typical American household, which is a little more than $1 million.

(A million dollars may sound high for the average American’s net worth, but this figure represents the arithmetic mean—total national wealth divided by the number of households. The mean is skewed high due to the ultra-wealthy. The median—the point at which half have more and half less—is about $192,000. However, the median isn’t useful for averaging a small group like the Trump appointees, so for consistency, we used the mean for both groups.)

Following are profiles of Trump’s richest nominees, followed by a table listing them all, plus the incoming president and vice president.

Elon Musk
Co-Director
Department of Government Efficiency
Estimated Net Worth: Over $300 billion

Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, is the richest person in the history of the world by far–worth more than $300 billion. His super PAC reportedly spent $200 million to help get Donald Trump reelected and inserted himself into the center of American government. Trump has chosen Musk as co-director of the newly created “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Despite his wealth, Musk paid zero federal income taxes in 2018. Even when he did pay tax in 2021, the amount was only 10% of his wealth increase that year–and growth in investment value is the main source of income for the hyperwealthy. The average American family in 2021 paid a tax rate of 14.9% on their income. 

Musk has vowed to cut $2 trillion from federal public services–which include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, other healthcare, education, national defense, food assistance and housing. He has warned these drastic cuts will cause “hardship” for the American people. He’s mentioned nothing about super wealthy people like him, or the corporations they own, paying any more in taxes. In fact, Musk is among the ultra-rich who will benefit most from the extension Republicans have promised of the expiring 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts.

Linda McMahon
Co-Chair, Trump Transition Committee
Education Secretary Nominee
Estimated Net Worth (with her husband Vince): $2.6 billion

Linda McMahon and her husband, Vince, built up WWE professional wrestling. She is co-chair of the current Trump transition committee, served as Small Business Administration director in the first Trump administration and now has been nominated to be Education Secretary in the new one. 

Both McMahons have been accused of allowing sexual abuse of young boys employed in their wrestling business, claims they have denied.

WWE wrestlers, despite their dangerous and exhausting work, enjoy no workplace protections because they are classified as independent contractors. That means they are not entitled to any overtime, retirement benefits, or worker’s compensation. They must pay for their own travel in a business that involves constant touring.

Howard Lutnick
Co-Chair, Trump Transition Committee
Commerce Secretary Nominees
Estimated Net Worth: $2 billion

Howard Lutnick, the chairman and CEO of Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, has been nominated to be Trump’s Commerce Secretary. 

Lutnick is a big backer of Trump’s plan to raise tariffs on foreign goods, which it’s estimated would cost the average American family up to $4,000 a year in higher prices. Another estimate that considers all of Trump’s proposed tax-and-tariff policies found that in 2026 only the highest-income 5%–households making over $360,000 a year–would come out ahead, with all other families losing between roughly $600 and $1,800. The benefits of Trump’s agenda would be particularly concentrated among the highest-income 1% (you’ll need income of nearly a million dollars to qualify): they’d gain on average almost $40,000 in 2026 alone. 

As co-chair of Trump’s transition team, Lutnick has made clear that personal loyalty to Trump is one of the most important criteria when choosing administration staffers. 

Lutnick is a proponent of cryptocurrency and has specifically recommended the digital coin Tether, which has reportedly been under federal investigation for facilitating payments by drug dealers and terrorists. 

Lutnick has been accused of exploiting his position as co-chair of Trump’s transition committee to promote his private business interests, a charge he has denied. 

Vivek Ramaswamy
Co-Director
Department of Government Efficiency
Estimated Net Worth: $1 billion

Failed 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made his fortune in pharmaceuticals. Though he describes himself as a “scientist” he is instead a salesman and financier who made hundreds of millions of dollars from selling parts of his businesses even after an Alzheimer’s drug he had hyped failed and other investors lost money. Trump has appointed him co-director of the newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency”. 

During his unsuccessful run for president in 2023, Ramaswamy proposed replacing the current tax system–under which higher-income people like him pay higher rates of tax–with a flat tax of 12% and allow no deductions. Flat taxes can benefit rich people like Ramaswamy at the expense of lower-income families who can wind up paying more. Also, because flat taxes usually raise less revenue, working families suffer a double blow through cuts to vital public services like healthcare, child care, education and housing. Ramaswamy’s plan would also have eliminated the IRS, making it easier for rich cheats to get away with hundreds of billions of dollars of illegal tax evasion.

Scott Bessent
Treasury Secretary
Estimated Net Worth: $1 billion

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent, Trump’s choice for Treasury Secretary, is pushing a plan to cut the annual federal budget deficit by almost a trillion dollars. Since Trump and his fellow Republicans are opposed to raising taxes on billionaires like Bessent–or on the huge corporations they control through their stock holdings–that proposed reduction in the deficit would mostly come from cuts to vital public services working families rely on, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, other healthcare, housing and education. Bessent, of course, doesn’t have to worry about those programs: he has enough money to have donated $1 million to Trump’s first inauguration in 2017.

Steven Witkoff
Co-Chair, Trump Inauguration Committee
Special Envoy to the Middle East
Estimated Net Worth: $500 million

Trump has tapped Steven Witkoff, his fellow New York City real-estate investor and golfing friend, for two roles: co-chair of his inauguration committee and, longer term, special envoy to the Middle East. 

Though Witkoff apparently lacks any diplomatic experience, he was a major fundraiser for Trump, boasting of securing six- and seven-figure donations for his campaign.

Chris Wright
Energy Secretary Nominee
Estimated Net Worth: $171 million

Fossil fuels executive Chris Wright has been chosen as Trump’s Energy Secretary. Wright, whose oil firm practices fracking, has called the term “climate crisis” deceptive and said there’s no such thing as “clean energy.”

Wright contributed over $200,000 to one of Trump’s campaign committees this year.

Doug Burgum
Interior Secretary Nominee
Estimated Net Worth: $100 million

North Dakota governor and former Republican presidential candidate Doug Burgum has been selected by Trump to be Secretary of the Interior. Burgum became rich in the tech sector.

In estimating his net worth, Forbes suggests he may be much wealthier than their calculation of $100 million if money put in trust for his adult children is included. Super-wealthy families often use special trusts to avoid income and estate taxes by blurring the ownership of the assets. 

Burgum literally tried to buy himself onto the debate stage during his unsuccessful run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2023. One of the qualifications for participation in the debates was a minimum number of individual donors. Burgum offered to send $20 gift cards to the first 50,000 donors who gave at least a dollar to his campaign. This novel arrangement raised concerns in some legal quarters that he was essentially donating to himself through other people, turning them into forbidden “straw donors.”

All of these appointees have signed onto the Trump administration’s plan to extend the parts of the Trump’s 2017 tax law that expire at the end of 2025. The benefits of that extension would be heavily concentrated among wealthy people like them and hike the public debt by some $5 trillion. Trump has also proposed cutting the corporate tax rate to 15% for some corporations, which would cost some $200 billion more. Republicans consistently use deficits as an excuse to cut public services they don’t like, including Social Security and Medicare. 

In stark contrast, President Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act that included several provisions to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, including a minimum tax on the biggest firms and levy on stock buybacks. Throughout his term, Biden also proposed more extensive tax reforms. Those reforms would hike taxes on Trump and his wealthy appointees while raising revenue to lower prices and improve services for working families. 

The reforms Biden proposed include: raising the corporate tax rate to 28%; increasing health-care taxes on high-income investors and wealthy business owners; creating a special tax on the handful of wealthiest Americans, who can now go years paying little or nothing; eliminating the nearly half-off tax-rate discount on the biggest forms of investment income for the wealthiest investors; and closing the loophole for the richest families that allows investment gains to go completely untaxed. 

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