How Nancy Pelosi's Net Worth Vastly Increased While House Speaker

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will leave her role in the Democratic leadership when the new Congress meets on January 3—and she will depart considerably wealthier than when she began.

Pelosi became speaker for the first time in 2007 and served until 2011. She the resumed the speakership in 2019 and will hold that position until the end of the present Congress.

Her estimated net worth has increased significantly since 2008 thanks in large part to the success of her husband, Paul Pelosi, who is a venture capitalist and property investor. It's not possible to know the precise net worth of members of Congress as they are only required to provide a range of values in their financial disclosures and not specific dollar amounts.

That also makes it difficult to pin down exactly how much Pelosi's net worth has grown since she first became speaker in 2007, but she has been reported to be one of the wealthier members of Congress.

Pelosi's net worth in 2021 was estimated to be as much as $171.4 million in an October report by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet that arrived at that figure "by taking into account the ranges of all the individual assets and liabilities" in Pelosi's financial disclosure statement.

The Washington Free Beacon also estimated then that Pelosi's net worth had risen by $140 million since 2008.

D.C.-based nonprofit OpenSecrets.org estimated Pelosi's net worth at $115 million in 2020, a rise of $41 million since 2004 - the first year OpenSecrets began tracking members' personal finances.

Paul Pelosi's company, Financial Leasing Services, has been highly successful in its investments in recent years and those investments have included shares in major firms such as Disney, Amazon and Google.

The New York Post estimated that the Pelosis had made between $5.6 million and $30.4 million between 2007 and 2020 through capital gains and dividends from investments in five tech companies - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft - based on public disclosures.

Drew Hammill, Pelosi's deputy chief of staff, said in a statement in July this year that the speaker "does not own any stocks."

"As you can see from the required disclosures, with which the Speaker fully cooperates, these transactions are marked 'SP' for Spouse. The Speaker has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions," Hamill said.

Newsweek has asked Pelosi's office for comment.

The speaker has been criticized by some in her own party for not moving fast enough on a ban that would prevent members of Congress from trading in stocks while in office.

Pelosi previously opposed such a ban, but later came out publicly in support of it. No ban has yet been put in place.

In September, Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger slammed Pelosi for her apparent inaction on legislation that would require lawmakers' investment assets to be placed in a blind trust.

"After first signaling her opposition to these reforms, the Speaker purportedly reversed her position. However, our bipartisan reform coalition was then subjected to repeated delay tactics, hand-waving gestures, and blatant instances of Lucy pulling the football," Spanberger said in a statement.

"It's yet another example of why I believe that the Democratic Party needs new leaders in the halls of Capitol Hill," she said.

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