Others in the Trump inner circle who made their fortunes via privately held ventures include treasury secretary
#Steven T. #Mnuchin, who got a great deal during the financial crisis on IndyMac, a mortgage lending bank,
thanks to our government’s penchant for the socialization of risk and privatization of profit when entities considered “too big to fail” go into a state of distress.

Mnuchin and his fellow investors, a group that included liberal donor and hedge-fund honcho George Soros, changed the company name to #OneWest and began to aggressively foreclose on homeowners.
The bank earned Mnuchin and his partners a profit of $1.6 billion in its first year of operation,
even as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was preparing to take a hit of nearly $11 billion “on bad loans that the Pasadena institution made before it was sold last March and renamed OneWest Bank,” according to E. Scott Reckard of the Los Angeles Times.

Then there’s commerce secretary #Wilbur #Ross, worth $2.5 billion according to Forbes, who started a second career in 2000 with the creation of his eponymous investment company,
which he later sold to Invesco for a reported $375 million.

#Reed #Cordish, special assistant to the president for intragovernmental and technology initiatives, is a scion of the family that owns privately held Cordish Companies,
involved in gaming and entertainment.
He’s said to be tight with Jared Kushner.

#Sonny #Perdue, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, founded the private company Perdue Inc., a trucking outfit,
with his wife, Mary, who was reported in 2005 to be the company’s sole shareholder.
(An official at Perdue Inc. declined to confirm to The Baffler whether this is still the case.)

And, while not a rich guy himself, CIA director #Mike #Pompeo founded a private company called #Thayer #Aerospace in the late 1990s with help from Koch Venture Capital, an arm of Koch Industries.
A Pompeo aide told the Washington Post that the Koch investment amounted to only 2 percent,
but there’s no way to really know, since the transaction took place between two privately held companies.
He later became president of #Sentry #International, another private company, before his 2010 run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he won, again with an assist from the Koch brothers.
He’s also a climate-change denier—an appealing trait in a public official if you’re a fossil fuels magnate looking to buy one