Net worth: Over $700 Million (As of December 28, 2024)
- Billionaire Scott Bessent is the pro-tariff hedge fund manager currently serving as Treasury Secretary. Less than a week into his term at Treasury, Bessent collaborated with DOGE head Elon Musk to give representatives of the “agency” access to the federal payment system.
- Bessent also briefly served as Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he also collaborated with DOGE to effectively “delete” the watchdog agency. In his week-long stint in charge, Bessent:
- Immediately imposed an activity embargo at the agency, freezing public communications, enforcement actions, rulemaking, litigation, and guidance.
- Halted oversight of non-bank fintechs—like Elon Musk’s X—by barring the CFPB from initiating “supervisory designation proceedings or designat[ing] any nondepository institution for supervision.”
- Bessent spent over a decade working at Soros Management Fund, where he notably helped George Soros successfully exploit economic turmoil in Britain and Japan for profit.
- In 2015, Bessent started his own hedge fund, Key Square Group. Oil and natural gas markets (Transocean LTD, EQT Corp, and Noble Corporation) are an explicit focus of Key Square’s investment strategy, but the firm’s portfolio also includes investments in BigTech (Meta and Palantir) and BigAgriculture (Monsanto).
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Billionaires in Trump World tracker.