How a man with lots of money spends his money is his own business, or so Republicans have been claiming for a recent long time, perhaps reaching back to Lincoln, if not later when Teddy Roosevelt invented the term "malefactors of great wealth." While not a billionaire, to the best of Crabgrass knowledge, J.D.Vance is well fixed.
A site calling itself "Fast Company" posted: https://www.fastcompany.com/91157500/companies-jd-vance-invested-in-as-a-vc
The headline is not needed, since the link, if read, says what has to be said.
Rather than quoting, readers should follow the link, with that item linking over to: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/person/143425-72P where the link tells no story to where it should be noted Pitchbook appears to look at individual investors and public knowledge of their money-related activity and holdings; this item being about "J.D. Vance JD Overview" which can be taken as a "title" Without calling Vance an elegyic hillbilly, nor anything else beyond noting he holds a Juris Doctor degree.
Upshot of both links - the man owns more interests in companies than a dog has fleas, companies almost nobody has heard of and some of them already failed. That is how Venture Capitalists operate, and we got one here talking up hillbilly roots, rather than fairly vast current wealth, and we can only guess why that might be.
Being an active Venture Capitalist means investing in handfuls of new hopefuls, where if one scores big the whole bundle is well worth the gambles spread out to where numbers of held items is hedging.
And he's not gotten there alone. The text preamble of the first linked item to the gist of the list, (excuse that please I couldn't resist), to the extensive listing - that preamble tells names of prominent Silicon Valley movers/shakers who "hillbilly Vance JD" enlisted into mentoring relationships - he did not do it alone as the book he wrote might imply. Now, Trump is mentoring him, and a fictional hit was about Dr. Frankenstein creating a monster, should that unrelated thought have relevance.
Vance could prove otherwise, but objectively we see a Yale educated millionaire investor with foreseeable conservative politics. Yeah. Big deal. As if never before seen. The key now, seen and heard, since he took up politicking.
Vance presently stands (and talks) conjoined in yet another Venture, a campaign with a grave older man who's engineered casino bankruptcies and traded on his brand name, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Towers, where you decide what the name is worth, as a talisman of high class elitism, and he decides its worth in pricing it for sale.
_________UPDATE__________
To access actual disclosure data for Senators, readers can navigate from:
https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/
Crabgrass has not gone there, relying on other online info sources. For instance, this link notes in ending:
Vance reported having investments, real estate, and bank accounts totaling somewhere between $4.3 million and $11 million in 2022, according to a cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer analysis of his most recent financial disclosure form, filed last year.
That figure doesn’t include Vance’s home in Cincinnati or his wife Usha’s full salary from her law firm, [no longer applicable since she resigned] nor does it reflect what his investments are worth today.
Senate financial disclosure forms only require filers, in most cases, to list financial holdings within certain ranges, not specific amounts. However, Vance did report receiving $945,000 in profits and a $110,146 salary from Narya [his VC operation] in 2022, as well as $121,376 he made in royalties that year from his bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
While the Vances’ financial holdings put them among the top 2% of Americans, Vance – who grew up in poverty in Middletown, Ohio – is hardly among the richest members of the U.S. Senate.[...]
Vance worked as a venture capitalist for six years until he was elected to the Senate in 2022. He listed more than 140 investments in his financial disclosure for that year. Most of them were somewhere in the range of $1,000 to $15,000 each.
Vance had somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 invested in Hallow, a Catholic meditation and prayer app. [https://hallow.com/] He invested up to $300,000 in Rumble, a conservative-leaning video-sharing platform. He had a smaller stake – somewhere between $1,000 and $15,000 – in Shearshare, an app that helps people rent salon or barbershop space.
Vance also invested somewhere between $116,000 and $315,000 in AppHarvest, a Kentucky-based startup that aimed to grow food via giant greenhouses. He also served on AppHarvest’s board until 2021, when he resigned after tweeting against corporate resistance to GOP-proposed voting restrictions. Appharvest filed for bankruptcy last year.
One died, many more may score. It is VC in a nutshell. While there may be danger in judging a man by his holdings, if Vance rails MAGA style against elites, it is helpful to know how very elite he is. As is Trump himself, atop the ticket telling people what he thinks they want to hear. Indeed, you don't get into the Senate without being elite going in, it is entirely an elitist body, and regular people have to understand that in studying how politics works and how it might work better for them. Or, just don a red MAGA cap, and believe in it as a religion.