Where did Barack Obama make his money?

Answer 1

While Barack Obama's net worth is now about five million dollars, he spent much of his life as a member of the lower-middle class (and later, thanks to his grandparents, as a member of the middle class). It is really only in the past decade that his income soared. He got rich through wise investments, as well as through the royalties from two best-selling books and from a successful career as a political figure and a public speaker.

Answer 2

President Obama earned a salary as U.S. senator and as a law professor. These days, he earns a salary as president (currently $400,000 a year), and he also earns royalties from his two best-selling books.

Answer 3

He worked as a lawyer , a law professor, a member of the Ilinois State Senate and the head of a charitable organization. He probably earned his largest salary as a US Senator. He also got some royalties from his books.

Answer 4

In addition to his salary of $157,102 from the Senate and Mrs Obama's $103,633 from the University of Chicago Medical Center, he had a profit of $3.9 million from the sale of his two best-selling books. If you mean, where did he get all the money for his campaign, the following information was compiled about one month before the November general election: Approximately half of the funds came from individual donations of $200 or less. These amounted to $223 million dollars, mostly contributed over the internet - purchase a t-shirt and charge a donation to the same credit card. These small donations do not need to be reported unless an individual contributes over $4600, so one person could make 23 separate donations without being identified. A few were caught using false names in an attempt to contribute far more and probably would have been successful if they had used multiple names. $33.8 million of these small donations came from overseas without verification of the donors' citizenship. Three residents of a refugee camp in Gaza attempted to donate $33,500 apiece. The other half came from large corporations or bundled donations. At the top of the list is the University of California with $1.2 million. Several other universities raised $500,000 or more. Financial institutions raised a significant amount with nearly one million from Goldman Sachs. Citi Group, J P Morgan-Chase, United Bank Shares, and Morgan Stanley, all now recipients of TARP funds, raised half a million or more each. At the top of the list of individual contributors by profession is 'retired'. This group is also McCain's #1 source of donations. Next is attorney or lawyer, followed by 'unknown' and then 'unemployed'. Lawyers and unknown gave over 3 times as much to the Obama campaign as they did to McCain. The unemployed contributions to McCain barely show up on the graph but they gave $12 million to Obama. In smaller, but still significant amounts, homemakers gave nearly equal amounts to both campaigns, but physicians and consultants favored Obama by about 3 to 1. Professors, teachers, and students gave over 90% of their contributions to Obama.

Answer 5

The vast majority of the money raised by the Obama campaign has been through small individual donations. The Obama campaign has extensively used the internet as both an outreach and as a way to receive these small payments, allowing a large number of small contributions to be efficiently collected for use in the political process.

In theory, this makes the campaign much more beholden to the population than it is to singular large contributors such as political action comities and lobbyists if it results in electing the candidate. One would expect that current misgivings about the state of the country as illustrated by recent polls makes this effort much easier for the Obama campaign. There have been repeated correlations between moves by the McCain campaign and spikes in Obama's fund raising that suggest that offering an easy way to make small contributions can channel spontaneous political outrage into increased resources for the campaign.

One would expect future campaigns to attempt to repeat this strategy.

Answer 6

Mr. Obama has been working for many years. Before he became the president, he was a community organizer and an advocate for the poor; a lawyer and a law professor; a state senator and then a U.S. senator. He was also the author of two best-selling non-fiction books. He finally reached millionaire status around 2005, due in large part to royalties from his books and speaking engagements.

Answer 7

Initially from a Harvard Law degree and practicing as an attorney. Later, from his sale of books he authored and being a US Senator. His wife was also a prominent attorney.

Answer 8

Autobigraphy book sales

He didn't build that!