Andrew Yang Is Not Nearly As Rich As You'd Think [View all]

[redqueen]

Those familiar with the rough outlines of Andrew Yang’s business career would be forgiven for thinking he’s a savvy tech billionaire. A “serial entrepreneur” who has been dubbed “Silicon Valley’s candidate,” Yang quit a prestigious job to launch a tech startup, sold a company for millions and now runs his own nonprofit. All that’s missing from his billionaire résumé is a billionaire bank account. After reviewing Yang’s finances, Forbes estimates his fortune to be about $1 million.

That’s a tidy sum for a 44-year-old second-generation American. But it’s less than the net worth of many of the career politicians Yang is running against. And it’s miles behind his entrepreneurial rivals Michael Bennet ($15 million), John Delaney ($200 million) and Tom Steyer ($1.6 billion).

Yang lives in a two-bedroom rental in midtown Manhattan, but his largest asset is a 2,700-square-foot home on a quiet block in New Paltz, New York (about 70 miles north of New York City), worth about $500,000. The rest of his fortune is largely tied up in an average joe’s investment portfolio—cash accounts and diversified mutual funds. Besides small holdings in Lending Club and Google stock, his financial disclosure form reveals just one Silicon Valley investment: a $15,000 to $50,000 stake in an entity called “Hustle Fund I, LP,” part of a small venture capital fund that invests in “hilariously early startups.”

He’s come a long way. Born in Schenectady, New York, to Taiwanese immigrants (his father, a UC Berkeley Ph.D., grew up on a peanut farm with dirt floors), Yang went from Phillips Exeter Academy to Brown University, where he studied economics, then got a law degree from Columbia. Just five months into a high-paying corporate law career, he quit to launch a startup called Stargiving.com. The site, which helped philanthropic celebrities raise funds for nonprofits, never took off. “My company failed spectacularly,” Yang wrote in his 2014 book Smart People Should Build Things, “but I recovered.”

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2019/11/19/andrew-yang-is-not-nearly-as-rich-as-youd-think