Kalama Harris made history as 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.
The eldest child of her immigrant parents, Harris’ 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.
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While in college, Harris worked at McDonald’s to earn spending money, she told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle. 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.”
Harris said the experience working with McDonald’s allowed her to really connect to the financial struggles of ordinary working Americans as she seeks the highest office in the country.
“It was not a small job,” Harris told Ruhle of her McDonald’s job in her 20s. “I did the fries.” She continued, “Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family — I worked there as a student, I was a kid — who worked there trying to raise families and pay rent on that.”
“And I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs.”
Trump has claimed that Harris’ story about having worked at the fast-food chain is “fake”. But, according to an October 2023 press release by McDonald’s, working at the company is common, stating that 1 in 8 Americans have worked under the Golden Arches.
Before becoming U.S. vice president, Harris 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 earns around $235,100 per year, a lot more than she made as Senator for California which was around $174,000.
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.
