Republican Governor of North Dakota Doug Burgum, one of the top VP contenders vying to join presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump on the Republican ticket, is reportedly worth $1.1 billion. After suspending his own longshot presidential campaign in December 2023, Burgum announced his endorsement of Trump and has been campaigning for the former president.
In that capacity, Burgum appeared this week on Fox News, where host Laura Ingraham asked the Governor what his message is to other “billionaires across the country who are adamantly supporting Biden still, especially the Wall Street types.”
Note: The U.S. has a record 813 billionaires — the most of any country. That includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and — further down the list — Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Burgum, among others.
Billionaires for Trump. Billionaire Doug Burgum urges other billionaires to support Donald Trump. (Video: Fox News) pic.twitter.com/OCv9uhkoRy
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) May 1, 2024
Burgum replied: “Well, I wish they had gotten the opportunity to know President Trump as the First Lady and I have.”
Burgum added, “[Trump’s] policies are all in the right direction. If you’re a billionaire and you care about your shareholders, you care about your family, you care about your grandkids, you should be voting for someone that’s gonna bring prosperity to America.”
With so many social issues to align with Trump on, Burgum instead makes his pitch to the Biden-aligned billionaires on the issue of future prosperity — a far tougher sell based on the data. One Oxfam study shows, as reported by CNN, that “billionaires have seen their wealth grow by $3.3 trillion, or 34%, since 2020, with their fortunes expanding three times faster than the rate of inflation.”
Or as American billionaire Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., told the Economic Club of New York last week, the economy is “booming.”
Data complied by Bloomberg backs up Dimon’s assessment: “Confidence in the US has never been higher, as reflected in the record 26% average premium investors are willing to pay for American stocks since 2021. That is more than twice the 12% premium they plunked down in 2017.”
Business Roundtable’s survey of top CEOs and Duke University‘s survey of CFOs also show rising confidence in the last year of Biden’s first term. According to Bloomberg, “The same surveys were in steady decline under his predecessor, Donald Trump, starting in early 2018 through 2019 (excluding the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020).”
[Note: Burgum sold his software company to Microsoft for more than $1 billion in 2001, and entered his first Republican primary in the 2016 North Dakota gubernatorial election without political experience.]
