Kalama Harris is the first woman and first Black person to be elected Vice President of the United States of America after running with Joe Biden in 2020. Before becoming U.S. vice president, she served as a Senator for California from January 2017 to January 2021.
She first ran for office in 2003 and was elected to become the district attorney of San Francisco. In 2010, she ran for the attorney general post in the state of California, which she won, making her the first Black woman to hold the position.
As vice president of America, Harris is expected to earn $235,100 per year, a lot more than she made as Senator for California which was around $174,000.
In her memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, Harris noted that “We weren’t rich in financial terms. But the values we internalized provided a different kind of wealth.”
Now, as the vice president of America, and having served in various capacities, Harris is surely rich. In 2021, Forbes estimated her net worth, which she shares with her husband, Douglas Emhoff, at $7 million. The Business magazine noted in 2019 that their assets include an estimated $5.8 million homes in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco as well as retirement accounts worth at least $1.4 million.
After almost four years in office, Forbes now estimates that her net worth, along with her husband, has increased from $7 million to about $8 million, which is roughly 20 times the median net worth of Americans in their age bracket. Besides owning a multimillion-dollar home in Los Angeles, Forbes wrote that the rest of their assets mostly comprise cash, index funds, bonds and pensions.
In 2020, Fortune reported that Harris and Emhoff’s net worth is $6.3 million, basing it on the assets listed in her Senate financial disclosure, filed in May of that year. “More recently, Harris disclosed that she personally made $277,763 in income in 2019 in her latest Senate financial disclosure, all from book publishing advances,” Fortune wrote.
Harris is the eldest child of her immigrant parents. Her mother comes from India and her dad comes from Jamaica. They first met as undergraduates while participating in a civil rights movement at the University of California Berkeley.
However, her parents separated not long after her younger sister, Maya, was born. The sisters moved into a Berkeley apartment with their mother before moving to Montreal, when her mother landed a new job there. After High School, Harris attended Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of Law to become a prosecutor.
