Presidents Day trivia: Who were the 10 richest US presidents?

Mitt Romney earned nearly $22 million in 2010. If elected, he would be in the Top 3 most wealthiest presidents. You may be surprised by who ranks among the Top 10 wealthiest US presidents.

3. John F. Kennedy (approximately $125 million)

AP/File
John F. Kennedy delivers his inaugural address after taking the oath of office at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. in this1961 file photo.

One of the hardest presidents to quantify in financial terms, Kennedy was undoubtedly one of the richest residents of the White House. Forbes has ranked him fourth. The 24/7 Wall St. website has at various times ranked him No. 3 or No. 10. His father, Joseph Kennedy, made a fortune in banking, shipbuilding, the film industry, the stock market, and other activities. Various reports have credited the Kennedy family fortune at close to $1 billion. Yet John Kennedy never received his portion of the inheritance. During his lifetime, he donated his presidential salary to charity and received annual trust-fund payments. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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