Here’s How Much Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo Is Worth

Before joining the Rhode Island state government, Raimondo worked in venture capital for more than a decade.

Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce, Penny Pritzker, was worth more than $2 billion when she served in office. Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, was worth an estimated $600 million. Joe Biden’s pick, former Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, is in a different league than her predecessors, worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million.

Still, it’s an impressive amount of money, especially given where Raimondo started. Her father worked in manufacturing for decades, at a time when Rhode Island was known for its jewelry production. Ultimately, his workplace, the Bulova watch factory, moved overseas, forcing the elder Raimondo into an early retirement in his 50s. “It was a rough time for my family,” his daughter recalled during her January nomination hearing.

Gina Raimondo took the bus to a Catholic school in Providence, La Salle Academy, where she graduated as valedictorian, foreshadowing later academic achievements. She went to Harvard, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Yale Law School. The year she got her law degree, she began clerking under Kimba Wood, a federal judge for the Southern District of New York. But Raimondo soon changed fields, electing to pursue finance.

She joined a Massachusetts-based firm called Village Ventures, which created a network of regional venture-capital funds. Raimondo stayed in that job for about three years, before deciding to return home to Rhode Island to start her own shop. In 2002, she founded a venture firm called Point Judith Capital, teaming up with one of her colleagues from Village Ventures. Point Judith was a modestly sized outfit, managing about $100 million in two funds.

Gina Raimondo vs. Wilbur Ross

The two commerce secretaries worked in similar industries—Raimondo in venture capital and Ross in private equity. But Ross is far richer, largely thanks to a blockbuster steel deal he made in the early 2000s.

Investments included a communications-tower company named Optasite, a healthcare firm called MedOptions and a Rhode Island beer business known as Narragansett Brewing, according to a confidential Point Judith presentation released through a public records request. Raimondo’s partners largely focused on telecom and internet opportunities, while she chased healthcare companies. Tudor Investment Corporation, led by hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones II, served as an investor and partner, according to the presentation. The two firms teamed up on certain deals, including one involving a medical-device company named Novare Surgical.

Around 2006, the State of Rhode Island invested $5 million into one of Raimondo’s funds. That commitment eventually caused a stir because, four years later, Raimondo won an election to become state treasurer, putting her in position to oversee Rhode Island’s investments. Rather than divest her venture-capital holdings, Raimondo elected to put them in a trust, which she handed off to someone else to manage. Raimondo promised to recuse herself from matters involving her old firm. A state ethics commission determined that the arrangement would be appropriate, so long as Raimondo steered clear of matters involving her investments or business associates.

In 2014, Raimondo won an election to become governor. The state remained invested in her former fund. It produced mediocre returns, averaging 5.4% annually, according to state records. The venture-capital holdings apparently provided a personal windfall for Raimondo, however. Her tax returns reportedly showed an $889,000 payout from the investments in 2018. In 2020, Raimondo picked one of her old business partners to serve as a trustee for the University of Rhode Island. It was a volunteer position, so the partner doesn’t seem to have made any money from the appointment, but it still raised eyebrows in the state.

While Raimondo was running Rhode Island, her husband Andy Moffit was working for McKinsey & Company, the global consultancy. Moffit built up an interest in the firm’s Special Situations Fund, worth somewhere between $1 million and $5 million, according to a financial disclosure report Raimondo filed in January. Last year, Moffit switched jobs to became chief people officer of a company named PathAI, which is developing technology to help diagnose and treat diseases.

Recently, Raimondo has been working to get rid of some of her holdings. She doesn’t seem to own her old venture-capital investments anymore. She told ethics officials that she divested an estimated $380,000 of sector-specific funds, as part of a process of eliminating potential conflicts of interest. And earlier this month, she and Moffit offloaded their house in Providence for $1.2 million. Their assets now largely consist of benign holdings like diversified stock funds, bond funds and cash.