Scott Bessent’s had a busy start to his new job. As trade wars and political uncertainty have sent stocks and bonds swinging, the Treasury secretary has been hitting the television circuit to try and calm things down. “When he speaks,” Donald Trump said in May, “the markets really listen.”

There are hundreds of millions of reasons why. After years of working for George Soros, Bessent split out on his own, then used his Wall Street bona fides to pitch himself to the president—and the world on Trump. Bessent has long enjoyed displaying his wealth, buying and selling at least 20 homes over the years while assembling a collection of art and antiques. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint his exact net worth, Forbes figures it’s somewhere in the ballpark of $600 million.

Life wasn’t always so luxurious. Born in 1962 in Little River, South Carolina, Alexander Hamilton’s 78th successor started working at age nine when his father, a real estate developer, ran into financial trouble. He dreamed of making it to the Naval Academy, but Annapolis didn’t have spots for gay men at the time. His high school peers knew he was going somewhere nonetheless, voting him “most likely to succeed.”

Sure enough, Bessent headed off to Yale University in 1980, trying his hand at journalism before settling on a more lucrative industry, finance. A Yale alum, Jim Rogers, needed an intern for his money-management firm in New York City. “He even offered—which was key for me—a place to stay on the office sofa,” Bessent later told an alumni magazine.

Rogers, who hit gold cofounding George Soros’ marquee fund, retired young, but Bessent continued on with Soros, working from 1991 to 2000 in Soros Fund Management’s London office. In 1992, Bessent helped his boss tank the British pound by betting against its artificially high exchange rate with the German deutschemark, helping Soros become the first person to make $1 billion in one month.

In 2000, Bessent tried to start his own hedge fund with $200 million in backing from Soros. After failing to take off, it shuttered by 2005. He returned to Yale to teach economic history and worked at another hedge fund, Protege Partners. In 2011, Bessent married his now-husband, John Freeman, a former New York prosecutor, and they now have two kids. He eventually returned to Soros’ shop as chief investment officer; his trading reportedly made his old boss another $10 billion in profits.

In 2015, Bessent tried to forge his own way once again, starting a firm named Key Square. Soros again helped out, reportedly handing him $2 billion. Key Square had a decent year in 2016, Reuters reports, when it bet that the United Kingdom would vote to leave the European Union, thus sinking the pound. But performance stagnated after that, according to annual reports of the New York Police Department’s pension fund, which invested in Key Square. They were flat or negative through 2021, even as the S&P 500 more than doubled. Then the money dried up. Soros took most of his back in 2018, also according to Reuters, thanks to a prearranged agreement.

In 2022, Key Square bet on high inflation and returned 29%, according to the Financial Times, while the S&P tumbled by 19% that year. But the firm never regained its stature. Analysis by AUM13F.com, an online database of asset managers, shows the firm’s assets under management peaking at over $5 billion in 2018 before dropping below $1 billion by 2023.

By then, Bessent had enough money to live well regardless of his performance. In late 2022, he bought a $4.25 million home in Cashiers, North Carolina, one of 20 properties he’s reportedly owned over the past three decades. Today, thanks to his new job in D.C., he lives in a Georgetown estate with a garden and pool that he purchased for $12.5 million in January.

As he was packing to move to the nation’s capital, Bessent prepared to lay out his holdings for the public in government disclosure documents. The form showed an investor still locked in on currency trades, with massive bets on the euro, Japanese yen and Chinese yuan alongside a massive position in U.S. Treasuries. “My life has been the ‘only in America’ story,” he told Congress two weeks before he closed on the D.C. home, “that I am determined to preserve for future generations.”

With additional reporting by John Hyatt and Hank Tucker.