In Pete Hegseth’s 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” he takes on what he calls “the Left’s antiwarrior radicalism” and pitches the military as a force for egalitarianism in a democracy. “The military, properly understood, forges future leaders with fidelity to the Constitution—from the small-town poor kid to the big-city rich kid,” he writes.

The freshly confirmed secretary of defense himself went from a small town to a big city, but Hegseth’s winding career—quite different from that of previous Pentagon heads—doesn’t seem to have made him particularly rich.

Forbes estimates that Hegseth, 44, 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 Pete’s. The other two-thirds are his wife’s assets. A longtime Fox News producer, Jennifer Hegseth 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 in ranges.

Hegseth makes plenty of money. His annual salary as a weekend show host at Fox was over $2 million, and during 2023 and 2024, 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, despite his high earnings.

So where did his money go? For starters, Hegseth and his wife spend plenty on housing. Outside of cash accounts and investments, their main asset is a 77-acre Goodlettsville, Tennessee estate 25 minutes outside of Nashville that’s worth about as much as the couple is before debt. Public records and a real estate listing indicate that the property sports 6,900 square feet of living space (plus an unfinished basement), pasture and woodland, a 5-car garage, a pool, a theater room and a 960-square-foot, two-bedroom guest unit. He and Jennifer bought the home for just over $3.4 million in 2022; Forbes estimates that it’s worth about $3.2 million today—and that the roughly $2.5 million left on the mortgage costs the Hegseths over $19,000 per month.

On top of that, Hegseth had to pay for his two divorces, at least in part due to his own infidelity. While details from his first divorce are sparse, the second, finalized in 2018, was costly. Per divorce records, Hegseth was ordered to pay his second wife, Samantha, spousal maintenance of $20,000 per month for a year, then $17,000 per month for four more years through June 2023. The decree also ordered him to pay child support of $2,700 per month through June 2023—when the payment would increase to $4,000 per month—and pay for each of their three kids’ $10,000 annual private school tuition. That adds up to at least $1.3 million out the door.

All that helps explain why Hegseth didn’t build up much of a nest egg despite years of high salaries and book sales. But a look back at his life also turns up episodes of impulsive decision making and possible financial mismanagement. (Hegseth denies most of the allegations against him, including those of financial mismanagement, sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse, but did tell Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine at his Senate confirmation hearing that “I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully, I’m redeemed by my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” The White House and the Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment, and a Fox spokesperson did not respond to questions about Hegseth’s or his wife’s compensation.) If those habits carried over into his personal finances, they may have contributed to Hegseth’s lower-than-expected net worth today—and raise questions about his qualifications as he takes over the Pentagon’s nearly $900 billion budget.

Hegseth was born in Minnesota in 1980 to middle-class parents—his father was a school district activities director and his mother worked as a leadership coach, according to her LinkedIn. In 1999, he headed off to Princeton University, where he signed up for ROTC and quickly established himself as a conservative voice on the Ivy League campus. Hegseth became the publisher of the Princeton Tory, a conservative outlet where he and his fellow editors railed against diversity initiatives, same-sex marriage and left-leaning student activism. Recent profiles in the Daily Princetonian student newspaper and the alumni magazine recount his devotion to Christian faith groups, confrontations with liberal or anti-Iraq War protests and a paintball duel with the head of the College Democrats.

The budding culture warrior majored in politics and, after graduating in 2003, headed off to his first job as an equity capital market analyst on Wall Street. Not long after, Hegseth was deployed to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba from June 2004 to April 2005, then returned to finance—and hated it. “I’d rather count every rifle, every radio, and every ‘sensitive item’ in the company one hundred times before I sat my ass on the thirty-eighth floor of Bear Stearns in New York City and crunched numbers on an Excel spreadsheet for boring meetings with really rich bankers,” he wrote in his most recent book. He left the well-compensated office job for a deployment to Iraq from September 2005 to July 2006, where he led a platoon and worked in civil affairs.

Back stateside, he got involved with a non-profit organization founded in 2006 called Vets for Freedom that supported the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its 2006 tax filing lists Hegseth as an unpaid director. In 2007, he drew a salary of $42,500; that more than doubled in 2008 to $100,000.

But as his salary climbed, the group’s finances dwindled, and its liabilities exceeded its assets by the end of 2008. Donors intervened, per reporting in the New Yorker, following rumors of expensive parties and sexual misconduct in the workplace. According to the New Yorker article, Hegseth admitted in early 2009 that the group had upwards of $500,000 of unpaid bills but less than $1,000 on hand. At that point, according to its tax filings, Hegseth’s role and salary shrunk, as did VFF as a whole. Revenues of $8.8 million in 2008 became $260,000 in 2010, $22,000 in 2011 and just $81 in 2012, the last year it filed. Hegseth’s salary dropped from $45,000 in 2010 for 30 hours of work per week to $8,000 for just a half-hour a week by 2012.

His personal life also spiraled in 2008 when his first wife, Meredith, who he’d met in high school and married in 2004, filed for divorce. She cited infidelity, according to reporting from American Public Media; the pair had no children. Hegseth married Samantha Deering, who he reportedly started dating while both were working at VFF, in March 2010, and by June, they had their first of three sons.

Next, Hegseth deployed to Afghanistan from May 2011 to January 2012, where he taught counterinsurgency tactics in Kabul. When he got back, he ran for a U.S. Senate seat in his home state of Minnesota, but failed to win the Republican nomination. Hegseth earned a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University in 2013. (A decade later, he scrawled “RETURN TO SENDER” across his degree with a black marker live on Fox and mailed it back to Cambridge, telling his cohosts that “as conservatives and patriots, if we love this country, we can’t keep sending our kids to universities that are poisoning their minds.”)

Around the time he was at Harvard, he also joined up with Concerned Veterans for America, another conservative veterans group. A tax filing from 2012 lists him as an unpaid CEO, but subsequent filings show him making $67,500 in 2013, $145,000 in 2014 and $182,500 in 2015. He first became a contributor on Fox News in 2014, and left the nonprofit in 2016. Hegseth said at the time that his departure was to pursue broader advocacy work and focus on publishing his first book, “In the Arena,” which has only sold about 1,400 copies, according to print sales data from Circana Bookscan, an industry data service. But CBS News reported in December that there were other reasons he left, including ideological differences with leadership and allegations of financial mismanagement, intoxication and sexual misconduct.

Fox promoted him to weekend co-host of the morning show Fox & Friends in early 2017, but the rest of the year was tumultuous. In September, Samantha filed for divorce, and while infidelity wasn’t explicitly cited, Hegseth’s divorce judgment notes that he had one “non-joint child born during the pendency of this proceeding.” Reportedly, Hegseth and his current wife, Jennifer, had an affair that resulted in a daughter in 2017. The pair married in 2019 at Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club.

Additionally, in October 2017 at a Republican women’s conference, Hegseth allegedly sexually assaulted another attendee, who he later paid $50,000 as part of a settlement. Hegseth has maintained that the encounter was consensual, and local law enforcement did not press charges.

As he solidified his career as a fixture on Fox, Hegseth also wrote four additional books: “American Crusade” (2020, 68,000 copies sold), “Modern Warriors” (2020, 164,000 copies sold, according to a Fox spokesperson), “Battle for the American Mind” (2022, 191,000 copies sold) and “The War on Warriors” (2024, 194,000 copies).

It was through his cable news stardom that he caught the attention of another politician with an unorthodox background: Donald Trump, who reportedly considered Hegseth to head the VA during his first administration. That didn’t work out—Trump ultimately selected Pentagon official Robert Wilkie. After Trump lost the 2020 election, Hegseth, at that point a member of the D.C. National Guard, volunteered to guard Biden’s inauguration following the attacks on January 6, but according to his most recent book was flagged as a potential extremist and told to stay home. Enraged and dejected, he submitted his resignation from the military at the rank of Major soon after. An Army spokesperson could not confirm by press time whether Hegseth retired with enough service credit to receive military retirement benefits, so Forbes did not estimate their present value in calculating his net worth.

Evidently, Hegseth remained on Trump’s mind—or television screen, as an energetic supporter—even after the president left office. After his reelection, Trump nominated Hegseth for secretary of defense. He faced immediate scrutiny over his lack of experience managing an organization the size of the U.S. military, his stated opposition to diversity initiatives and women in combat roles, and his alleged history of drunkenness, infidelity and sexual misconduct. But Hegseth framed himself as fighting to restore a “warrior ethos” at the DoD, defended himself at a contentious confirmation hearing and, while he lost the support of three Republicans in the Senate, ultimately prevailed on Jan. 24 thanks to the tiebreaking vote of Vice President JD Vance.

Hegseth’s finances may be further squeezed in the coming years. He resigned from Fox in November after he was nominated, and as a Cabinet secretary, his salary is $235,100, a roughly 90% pay cut from what he made at Fox. Ethics rules also bar Hegseth from making extra money from speeches or signing new book deals, though he can continue to receive royalties from his previous writings. And presumably, he’ll have a new expense, buying or renting a place in the pricey D.C. area—his new boss has ordered all federal employees back to the office, after all.

The former soldier doesn’t seem worried, though. “The President has given me a clear vision, and I will execute,” Hegseth told the Senate committee vetting his nomination. “I’ve sworn an oath to the Constitution before, and—if confirmed—will proudly do it again. This time, for the most important deployment of my life.”