What's Kash Patel's net worth?

FBI Director Kash Patel is mostly known as a fiery, combative figure in the MAGA universe. His calling card is unflagging loyalty to President Trump, but prior to the rise of the 47th president, he had a routine legal career that took him from a job as a Miami public defender to a prosecutor in the Department of Justice.

His turn towards conspiracy theorizing and far-right politics appears to coincide with his time as the lead counsel on the House Intelligence Committee after President Trump's first election in 2017. Since then, he has made millions as a pro-Trump commentator, consultant and author, mostly when he no longer had a position in government during the Biden administration.

From public defender to MAGA stalwart

Patel grew up on Long Island and attended the University of Richmond for his BA in criminal justice and history before obtaining his law degree from Pace University in 2005. His first job out of law school was as a local public defender in Miami, Florida. Colleagues in Miami remember him as "good at face-to-face interactions and building rapport with judges, but uninterested in the paperwork and legal arguments that came with the job," said CNN. He later became a federal public defender in the Southern District of Florida, where he "developed a deep animosity toward the Justice Department prosecutors he found himself up against," said The New York Times. "Pay for public defenders" in 2010 was "a median of $47,500 for entry-level public defenders and increasing to about $76,000 for those with 11 to 15 years of experience," said the National Association For Law Placement.

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In 2014, Patel joined the Department of Justice as an attorney whose job was "helping prosecute terror suspects at home and abroad," said Vanity Fair. At the Department of Justice, Patel carved out "a satisfactory, if unremarkable, legal career," before becoming "a useful Republican Hill staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, where he dug into the origins of the FBI's Russia investigation of the Trump campaign," said CNN. Patel's income as a lawyer with the Department of Justice likely did not make him rich. The cost of living in the Washington, D.C., area, after all, is "42% higher than the national average," said Redfin.

In 2017, Patel took a job as the lead counsel for the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee, where he "emerged as a leading critic of the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into the Trump campaign's alleged links to Russia," said The Washington Post. From there, he moved to the National Security Council, where he was the senior director for counter-terrorism. In 2020, he became the senior advisor to Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell before becoming chief of staff for Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller in November 2020.

Cashing in on his proximity to Donald Trump

In the past, officials from the party ousted from the White House have parked themselves in think tanks, which often "serve as governments-in-waiting for the party out of power, providing professional perches for former officials" as they prepare for their party's next election victory, said National Affairs. Patel, while he accepted a position as a Senior Fellow at the Center For American Security at the America First Policy Institute in October 2024, fashioned a multi-faceted post-government career for himself during the Biden administration, which was largely outside of the think tank world and seems to be the source of his small fortune.

His list of income sources, according to the financial disclosure form he filed when he was nominated to lead the FBI, is extensive and complicated. He founded a company, Trishul LLC, which is a "national security, defense and intelligence consulting business," whose clients included the "Embassy of Qatar and the Trump-founded leadership PAC, Save America," as well as Trump Media & Technology group, said Investopedia. His financial disclosure states that his income from Trishul was $2.1 million in 2024.

Beginning in 2022, he wrote a trilogy of Trump-themed children's books, including "The Plot Against the King 3: The Return of the King." Those books were "written for an audience of one: King Donald Trump," said The Guardian. They earned him as much as $50,000 each in 2024 according to his financial disclosure, as well as up to $1 million in royalties from his book "Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy." He also earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2024 alone as a contributor to right-wing media outlets like The Epoch Times and Real America's Voice News.

Patel also "served as a board member of Trump Media and Technology Group," where he was paid "$120,000 annually from the company as a consultant," in addition to earning "$544,000 for his work for Trump's campaign," said Forbes. He holds stock in a company called Elite Depot, which "owns the controversial Chinese fast-fashion retailer Shein" that are "worth between $1 million and $5 million." He also reported countless other smaller sources of income, including "doing more than $5,000 worth of consulting work for CSGM, a branch of the Czech-owned foreign arms conglomerate The Czechoslovak Group." Patel's net worth also includes his investment portfolio, including "up to $250,000 in chip-designer NVIDIA, up to $250,000 in Bitcoin mining company Core Scientific and up to $115,000 in a Bitcoin ETF," said ABC News.

Patel's net worth is "more than $5.9 million," said Business Insider, in an analysis based on his financial disclosure. Other analyses have come to different conclusions. Patel "parlayed proximity to Trump and a zeal for self-promotion into consulting contracts, corporate board seats and a role as a sought-after MAGA commentator" that ultimately "helped swell his net worth to as much as $15 million," said the Associated Press.