At her confirmation hearing in January, Pam Bondi presented herself as a lifelong public servant. “From the moment I began to work as an intern at the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office, I knew I wanted to spend my life as a prosecutor,” the 59-year-old told the assembled senators. She walked them through her time going after Tampa criminals, first as a prosecutor and then as the Florida attorney general, a job she left after two terms in 2018.

All that experience no doubt built up her skills as a lawyer. The six years of her life she left out of her timeline, though—2019 through 2024—built up her bank account. In her final year as Florida’s top legal official, Bondi declared a net worth of over $1.5 million, almost all of which was her Tampa home, plus one third of a small condo she splits with her siblings and “household goods and personal effects.” She had just $4,025 in her checking account. Today, Forbes estimates that she’s worth at least $5 million, and likely more.

How’d she do it? First, she started working as a lobbyist for Florida-based Ballard Partners. According to a database maintained by the political transparency group OpenSecrets, big names like General Motors, Carnival and Major League Baseball—plus 13 other clients, like GEO Group, which invests in private prisons—hired her in 2019, presumably hoping to leverage her close relations to Donald Trump’s first administration. The nation of Qatar also hired her that year. In 2020, her client list included prominent companies like Amazon, Fidelity and Uber. Between 2023 and 2024, according to her most recent federal disclosure, she made over $1 million from Ballard work. Separately, Bondi also worked for pharma giant Pfizer via the Fort Lauderdale law firm Panza, Maurer, & Maynard, a gig that earned her over $200,000 during the same years.

Plenty of her work in that six year window was more overtly political, including representing Trump at his first impeachment in 2019 (he was acquitted by the GOP-controlled Senate). After he left office, she joined the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA think tank that was headed up by Linda McMahon, now Trump’s education secretary, and Brooke Rollins, now Trump’s agriculture secretary, as its litigation chair. Her work there, which included filing lawsuits and amicus briefs supporting conservative causes—Trump in his various legal battles, combatting vaccine mandates, and actions against Big Tech—earned her $520,000 across 2023 and 2024.

Additionally, Bondi consulted in connection with Trump Media and Technology Group’s SPAC merger, which, per SEC documents and a questionnaire she submitted to the Senate, appears to have earned her at least 75,000 shares of Truth Social-parent DJT and 31,250 warrants when the merger was completed in March 2024. (Her disclosure lists $2.9 million in compensation, but the value of those shares and warrants is closer to $1.9 million as of Monday’s market close.) She also made paid appearances on the further-right-than-Fox cable network Newsmax, earning her $27,600 in fees.

A final boost to her fortune came from marrying John Wakefield, a former corporate banker and wealth manager who co-owns a real estate private equity company called Varner Wakefield. On Bondi’s disclosure, in addition to a share in a management company that he says is worth between $1 million and $5 million, Wakefield discloses personal interests in three commercial real estate properties: a shopping plaza in Naples, Florida and two apartment communities in North Charleston, South Carolina. They were purchased, in 2023 and 2024, for $6.6 million, $6.8 million and $27.9 million, respectively, but Wakefield only values his stakes in them at $100,000 to $250,000 (for the first two) or $500,000 to $1 million (for the final one). He does not disclose a percentage share, so it’s unclear why. Neither Wakefield nor the Department of Justice responded to requests for comment.

Bondi, a fourth-generation Floridian, was born in 1965 to two public servants, one of whom also found a way to get wealthy. Her mother was an elementary school teacher, but her father, an educational consultant and University of South Florida professor who served as a city councilman and mayor of Tampa suburb Temple Terrace in the 1970s, authored more than 25 textbooks. According to a Tampa Bay Times obituary, his work was instrumental in establishing middle schools as the norm in American education. Just before Bondi’s father died in 2013, a one-bedroom condo in Longboat Key, Florida—a vacation home, per a local paper’s account—passed to her and her two siblings, and Forbes estimates her share is worth around $167,000 today.

For her part, Bondi attended the University of South Florida in Tampa for three years of college, then transferred to the University of Florida for her final year, graduating with a criminal justice degree in 1987. She returned to Tampa Bay to attend Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport—a suburb of St. Petersburg—and earned a J.D. in 1990 while clerking for a local firm. She also married her first husband, Garret Barnes, that year, but the couple divorced just two years later.

Bondi passed the bar in 1991, kicking off 18 years at the state prosecutor’s office. In 1996, she bought a home in Historic Hyde Park, Tampa’s oldest neighborhood. It’s unclear how much she paid for it—information on the property is blocked from the county assessor—but public records do show that she initially took out a $155,000 mortgage, then repeatedly refinanced and tapped the property for cash as it rose in value with the Florida real estate boom. She married her second husband, Scott Fitzgerald, in 1997, but they split in late 2002 or early 2003, per court records.

In 2010, Bondi rode the Tea Party wave to becoming Florida’s attorney general, winning on a platform of challenging President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. That didn’t work out—the Supreme Court largely ruled against her in 2012 in a shock 5-4 decision—but Bondi, who won a second term in 2014, joined a second suit (also ultimately tossed by the Supreme Court) in 2018. For the most part, though, her office’s major initiatives included cracking down on the illegal drug trade and prosecuting fraud. She also secured more than $3 billion in settlement money for Florida following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and $8 billion from a national mortgage settlement.

Despite the money she brought to the state coffers, Bondi’s compensation while attorney general didn’t budge once while she was in office, staying at a flat $128,972 all eight years. Her net worth still climbed with the value of her home—between 2014 and 2018, her Florida financial disclosures show its value soaring from $810,000 to almost $1.2 million. But she didn’t appear to save any money during that time; her checking account stayed flat at about $4,000 while her personal effects, which the disclosure says could include things like jewelry, art, cars, furniture and clothing, climbed from $518,000 to $590,000.

It’s no wonder that, less than a month after she left office, she signed on with Ballard Partners, where she cashed in after years in the public sector. Bolstered by additional wealth, Bondi and Wakefield got to work spending some of it. Starting in 2021, they tore down and rebuilt Bondi’s Tampa home, which one listing says was originally built in 1922. There are two notices in local records that notify the city of the construction of a new single family home. Additionally, Bondi and Wakefield took out a $1.6 million loan on the property in 2021, an amount greater than her original house was ever worth on her disclosures, and video footage of the home taken in March shows what appears to be relatively new construction—though a wall of hedges hides much of the first floor. Forbes estimates that the new house is likely worth between $2 million and $2.5 million, before debt.

Stepping into the attorney general role will mean an end, for now, to such lucrative years for Bondi: Her annual salary as a Cabinet secretary will be $235,100, and she won’t be able to take on consulting or lobbying clients for the next few years. She’ll have plenty of savings to fall back on, though, including the proceeds from divesting her Trump Media stock—on which, thanks to a perk for incoming federal appointees, she will be able to defer paying capital gains taxes. She and Wakefield have well over $1 million in cash and retirement accounts, and she has another $1 million owed to her for consulting services by CGI Investment Management Group, a Miami-based private equity firm tied to the company that bailed Trump out of his money-losing D.C. hotel. Plus, starting in 2027, those years of comparatively low pay as a prosecutor will start paying off again—that’s when her pension will start paying her $75,000 annually, for life.

Not that Bondi spent those years as a prosecutor—or accepted Trump’s appointment as attorney general—for the money. Since the beginning, she’s been focused on bringing her vision of justice to the fore. One of her first press conferences as U.S. attorney general, for example, was to announce a lawsuit against New York over a state law that she claimed interfered with immigration enforcement. “This is a new DOJ, and we are taking steps to protect Americans—American citizens,” she said. “New York has chosen to prioritize illegal aliens over American citizens. It stops. It stops today.”