Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Wednesday, February 12th. Today on Forbes, here's how much Pete

Hegeseth is worth, and it's less than you might think. In Pete Hegseth's 2024 book, The War on Warriors,

he takes on what he calls, quote, the left's anti-warrier radicalism and pitches the military as a force for

egalitarianism in a democracy. He writes, quote, the military, properly understood,

forges future leaders with fidelity to the constitution, from the small town poor kid to the

big city rich kid. The freshly confirmed Secretary of Defense himself went from a small town to a big city,

but Hegsteth's winding career, quite different from that of previous Pentagon heads,

doesn't seem to have made him particularly rich.

Forbes estimates that Hegeseth, who is 44 years old and his wife, Jennifer,

are worth about $3 million,

including cash, investments, and $700,000 in home equity. That's plenty more than the median

American his age, but there's a catch. Only about a third of that fortune looks to be Pets.

The other two-thirds are his wife's assets. A longtime Fox News producer,

Jennifer Hegeseth appears to have socked away savings over the years in two IRAs and a deferred

compensation plan, and now has between $900,000 and $2.3 million in those accounts. According to the

financial disclosure, her husband had to file as a

cabinet nominee, which only requires politicians to value assets and ranges. Hexeth makes plenty of

money. His annual salary as a weekend show host at Fox was over $2 million, and during 2023 and

24, he raked in between $700,000 and $2.5 million from book advances

and royalties and another $900,000 from speeches. Yet he only declared liquid assets

of his own in a range of about $460,000 to $1.1 million, including Bitcoin, valued between $15,000 and $50,000.

Without his wife's holdings, it's possible he, individually, may not even be a millionaire,

...