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US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. DESIGN BY FORBES.
About half of Becerra’s $7 million fortune comes from real estate.
The son of two working class immigrants from Mexico, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra often speaks of his formative years growing up in Sacramento. “We never had designer clothes. I never had Levi’s jeans or Converse sneakers or things like that,” Becerra told the Sacramento Bee in 2016. “But we always ate well.”
Today, Becerra can afford a little more luxury in his life. He and his wife Carolina Reyes, a doctor, share a fortune that is worth an estimated $7 million. About half of that comes from their real estate, worth roughly $3.5 million after debt. Becerra and Reyes also have retirement accounts and other investments worth at least $1.5 million, as well as two government pensions worth $1.1 million.
Becerra’s father was born in Sacramento but moved to Mexico as a boy and grew up there. His mother was born in Mexico. The pair got married and immigrated to California. His mother reportedly found clerical work, while his father found various jobs, picking vegetables, canning tomatoes for Campbell’s, repairing railroad cars and as a construction worker.
“He got treated like he wasn’t a citizen,” Becerra told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. “He couldn’t walk into restaurants because the sign said ‘No dogs or Mexicans allowed.’ He harvested the food that they were eating in those restaurants, but he could not go in there and eat.”
Becerra Vs. Azar
Xavier Becerra has spent nearly his entire career working in the public sector, while Alex Azar, his predecessor, spent a decade at pharma giant Eli Lilly, earning an annual salary of nearly $2 million.
Education provided a route to the upper class. Becerra got into Stanford University and became the first member of his family to earn a bachelor’s degree. He received his diploma in 1980, then got his law degree there too, graduating in 1984. After, he moved to Massachusetts while his wife worked on getting her medical degree at Harvard, and when Becerra came back to California he quickly got into politics.
First, in 1986 he worked for California state senator Art Torres. Then he got a job as a deputy attorney general in California’s civil division. In 1990 he won election to the California state assembly, but he didn’t stay long. After U.S. House member Edward Roybal announced his plans to retire, Becerra decided to make a bid for Congress. Then 34 years old, Becerra was heralded as a “rising star” in the Los Angeles Times when he won the Democratic party primary in June 1992, beating out nine other Democrats, before winning the general election.
When he arrived in Washington, Becerra started with a $133,600 salary, the standard for all members of Congress at the time. Over the next 24 years, he rose up to become the first Latino to sit on the House’s Ways and Means committee, and he also secured a federal pension that is worth more than $750,000 today.
Inside Becerra’s Wallet
About half of Becerra’s fortune is held in real estate. He owns three homes in Sacramento and two in Los Angeles, four of which he rents out, earning at least $60,000 per year.
In 2016, after Kamala Harris won her U.S. senate race, California Governor Jerry Brown needed to appoint someone to take her place as attorney general of the state. He picked Becerra. The new role put Becerra among the top highest-paid officials in California, earning an annual salary of about $170,000 in 2017. Back in California full time, Becerra and Reyes sold their house in Chevy Chase, Maryland for $1.6 million in 2017 and bought a new house in Sacramento for $955,000. The next year they sold a condo in Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill neighborhood for $290,000, and purchased two more properties in Sacramento—a townhouse for $460,000 and a three-bedroom for $527,000. They took out mortgages on the properties and started renting them out.
In addition to his government roles, Becerra is something of a small-time landlord. He’s also rented out two other homes in Los Angeles—one in the Monterey Park area, worth about $575,000, and another in Eagle Rock, worth an estimated $1.4 million. In total Becerra received at least $60,000 in rental income in 2020, according to his most recent financial disclosure report. Amid the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, he voluntarily took a $7,000 pay cut on his salary as attorney general, according to the financial disclosure. Now, back in Washington, Becerra is earning more than $200,000 for his role in Joe Biden’s cabinet.
While Becerra has built a career as a power player in Washington, his wife, Carolina Reyes, is established in her field of maternal-fetal medicine, a specialized area of obstetrics that focuses on high-risk pregnancies. Her earnings are varied. In 2020 she received some income from Valley Medical Group and the University of California Davis, more for serving on the boards of Providence St. Joseph Health and the California Health Care Foundation, and even more from a healthcare staffing firm named CompHealth.