Is Hunter Biden really worth "$230 million"? (2024)

An unverified claim about Hunter Biden's supposed net worth has been widely shared on social media, amplified by a number of conservative figures including Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A number of posts, some including a graphic with "annual income," "net worth" and other figures purportedly describing the personal finances of President Joe Biden's son, have been viewed more than a million times on Twitter and Reddit, despite no specific sources being cited.

The viral claim emerged as the Biden family finances face intense public scrutiny. House Oversight Committee Republicans released a 36-page memo on Wednesday about the Bidens' financial dealings.

As Newsweek reported, the documents released on Wednesday provide no evidence that Joe Biden was ever directly involved in the alleged schemes—or if the payments in question resulted in a tangible impact on U.S. policy.

And while some of the financial transactions mentioned in the memo do involve Hunter Biden, it provides no estimate of the president's son's total earnings or his net worth.

Hunter Biden has previously denied allegations of impropriety.

An attorney for Hunter Biden accused Republicans on Wednesday of "chasing conspiracies." "Today's so-called 'revelations' are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens," Abbe Lowell, his lawyer, told the Associated Press.

Nevertheless, the debate fueled speculative and misleading claims about his wealth on social media, including by the president's opponents.

"Impressive. Normally I'd ask how a crack and sex addict, who has dozens of LLCs that never have produced a product to sell or proof of services for profit, made all that money. But serving on the Oversight Committee, I now know.. All roads lead to Joe," Greene tweeted on May 9, 2023 (archive here).

The Georgia lawmaker's tweet included a graphic that appears to list a number of data points relating to Hunter Biden's finances.

"Hunter Biden is estimated to have a net worth of $230 million and makes more than $20 million yearly," the top line says.

The graphic also features supposed listings of Biden's annual income, IRS taxes paid, assets, and investments.

The image does not include a source or any indication of where the figures have been taken from. Greene, likewise, does not offer any explanation in the tweet about where the graphic was taken from, or what the underlying source for the financial data is.

Newsweek Misinformation Watch investigated the claim and found earlier iterations of it in other Twitter posts, which saw far less engagement than the congresswoman's tweet.

"JUST IN: Hunter's Biden expensive lawyers argue that he is "too poor" to pay child support. He has a net worth of $230 million but he can't pay child support? What a disgrace," one user said in a May 2, 2023 tweet, viewed more than 90,000 times.

"Dead beat daddy Hunter Biden, the 'smartest guy Joe Biden knows', tells the court he's too broke to pay child support. Right. Per ABC Action News—Mar 2023, it is estimated that the First Son has a net worth of $230 million and makes more than $18 million yearly," wrote another user on the same day.

While it is not clear where Greene found the graphic used in the tweet, both the top line and the table beneath appear to match that used in the ABC Action News page.

The article on the website is dated May 4, but the fact that it has been referenced before that date suggests that it has been backdated. Archived copies of the page go back as far as March 15, according to Internet Archive.

The article, which covers the president's son's biography and supposed "lavish" spending examples, offers few verifiable sources for the figures and data it publishes.

Under the section "Multiple Income Sources," the authors appear to have compiled disparate pieces of reported and unverified earnings through the years, including "$6 million in earnings between 2014 and 2016"; an approximate $5.8 million from his contract with Chinese interests between 2013-2018 (citing NBC news); $4.8 million CEFC China energy "sent to many bank accounts linked to Hunter Biden"; another "$11 million" from the same NBC report; and "$2 million was the advance that Simon & Schuster paid Hunter in 2020 for his book Beautiful Things."

The authors do not make clear whether any of the figures cited overlap, nor make a distinction of earnings by Biden himself or companies associated with him. The total, amounting to around $30 million (by Newsweek estimates), appears to be a fraction of the sum mentioned in the underlying claim.

ABC Action News is an ABC TV affiliate for the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Sarasota market in Florida. But crucially, the article on its website, carries at the top a disclaimer that it is "Sponsor Generated Content."

"Disclaimer: This is sponsored content. All opinions and views are of the advertiser and do not reflect the same of WFTS," the disclaimer notes. Newsweek reached out to ABC Action News to seek clarification about what organization sponsored the content, and where the data mentioned was sourced from.

The same figure ($230 million) along with a number of matching claims regarding properties and assets also appears in another "celebrity net worth" assessment website found by Newsweek, in an article dated March 10, 2023.

The website, CAknowledge.com, describes itself as "a community of Finance bloggers who are popularly known as 'Investors'! These are bloggers who are living an internet lifestyle or are currently moving in that direction."

It, too, provides no verifiable sourcing for the assessment and, as Newsweek and others have reported previously, has shared false, unfounded or misleading assessments about politicians' and celebrities' net worth, including that of Congresswomen Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York.

These and other claims, such as that Tucker Carlson's net worth is over $400 million, are also presented without evidence. Newsweek was unable to find any evidence from credible outlets to corroborate them either.

While Hunter Biden's net worth has been the subject of much speculation and inquiry for years, no definitive number has emerged as of yet. A Newsweek assessment in 2019 could not establish a specific figure, though a total of the various reported sources of income came to substantially less than the figure cited by Greene.

Other net worth monitoring websites, such as Finty or Wealth Gorilla, put the figure anywhere between $1 million and $20 million, though these outlets tend to be notoriously speculative and unreliable, rarely providing comprehensive sourcing for the claims.

Nevertheless, many such pages tend to be elevated to Google and other search engines' top search results lists, despite offering little to no evidence for their estimates.

However, Newsweek found no reliable sources that would corroborate the $230 million figure mentioned by Greene and others.

Greene did not elaborate on the source of her data when contacted by Newsweek.

"I trust that the intrepid 'journalists' of Newsweek can figure that out," the congresswoman's representative responded after Newsweek reached out for comment via email.

Newsweek reached out to Hunter Biden's legal representatives, CAKnowledge and ABC Action News for comment via email.