Background and career
Bruce Vincent Rauner (; born February 18, 1956) is an American businessman, venture capitalist, and politician who served as the 42nd governor of Illinois from 2015 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he had a decades-long career in investment management before entering politics, serving as the co-founder and chairman of Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR. As of 2026, Rauner and his lieutenant governor Evelyn Sanguinetti are the most recent Republicans to have won or held statewide office in Illinois. Following his retirement as chairman of GTCR in 2012, Rauner shifted his focus from business to civic and political involvement, leading Chicago's tourism bureau and the Chicago Public Education Fund. He announced his candidacy for governor of Illinois in 2013, winning a crowded Republican primary. In the 2014 election, Rauner narrowly defeated incumbent Democratic governor Pat Quinn, winning every county in the state besides Cook County. Governing as a moderate conservative, Rauner sought to pass right-to-work laws, institute term limits, protect abortion rights, and lower income taxes. However, his agenda was largely stalled by the Democratic supermajorities controlling the Illinois General Assembly. Notably, disagreements between Rauner and Democratic leaders culminated in to a two-year budget crisis. Running for reelection in 2018, he narrowly fended off a primary challenge from conservative State Representative Jeanne Ives. Rauner went on to lose by a large margin to Democratic nominee JB Pritzker.
Rauner was born in Chicago and grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb 10 miles north of Chicago city limits. His mother, Ann (née Erickson) Rauner, was a nurse, and his father, Vincent Rauner, was a lawyer and senior vice president for Motorola. He has three siblings, Christopher, Mark, and Paula, and is of half Swedish and half German descent. His parents divorced and his father remarried to the former Carol Kopay in 1981. Through his father's second marriage, he has a stepsister, Larisa Olson. His first job was as a paperboy. Rauner graduated summa cum laude with a degree in economics from Dartmouth College, where he was a brother of Theta Delta Chi. He later received an MBA from Harvard University.
Rauner was the chairman of private equity firm GTCR, where he had worked for more than 30 years, starting in 1981 after his graduation from Harvard through his retirement in October 2012. A number of state pension funds, including those of Illinois, have invested in GTCR. In 2013, Rauner opened an office for a self-financed venture firm, R8 Capital Partners. The firm planned to invest up to $15 million in smaller Illinois companies. Rauner served as Chairman of Choose Chicago, the not-for-profit that is the city's convention and tourism bureau, resigning in May 2013, and as Chairman of the Chicago Public Education Fund. Rauner has also served as the Chairman of the Education Committee of the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago. In 2015, Rauner reported earning over $180 million. Prior to his 2014 run for Illinois governor, Rauner served as an advisor to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Rauner was awarded the 2008 Distinguished Philanthropist award by the Chicago Association of Fundraising Professionals. In 2003, Rauner received the Daley Medal from the Illinois Venture Capital Association for extraordinary support to the Illinois economy and was given the Association for Corporate Growth's Lifetime Achievement Award. Rauner and his wife were nominated for the Golden Apple Foundation's 2011 Community Service Award. Rauner has been a financial supporter of projects including Chicago's Red Cross regional headquarters, the YMCA in the Little Village neighborhood, six new charter high schools, an AUSL turnaround campus, scholarship programs for disadvantaged Illinois public school students, and achievement-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in Chicago Public Schools. He provided major funding for the construction of the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, endowed full professor chairs at Dartmouth College, Morehouse College, University of Chicago, and Harvard Business School, and was the lead donor for the Stanley C. Golder Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance at the University of Illinois. As of 2013, Rauner served on the board of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Rauner is also a frequent donor to his fraternity at Dartmouth, Theta Delta Chi.
In March 2013, Rauner formed an exploratory committee to look at a run for Governor of Illinois as a Republican. Rauner said that his top priorities included streamlining government, improving education, and improving the state's business climate. He supported term limits and said he would serve no more than eight years (two terms) as governor. On June 5, 2013, Rauner officially announced his candidacy for governor, telling Chicago magazine's Carol Felsenthal that his platform would include overhauling tax policy and freezing property taxes. In October 2013, Rauner announced that his running mate would be Wheaton City Councilwoman Evelyn Sanguinetti. Rauner won the March 18, 2014, Republican primary with 328,934 votes (40.13 percent), defeating State Senator Kirk Dillard, who received 305,120 votes (37.22 percent), State Senator Bill Brady (123,708 votes, 15.09 percent) and Illinois Treasurer Dan Rutherford (61,848 votes, 7.55 percrent). For the general election, Rauner was endorsed by the majority of Illinois newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Herald, and the Chicago Sun-Times. During the general election, television ads aired regarding Rauner's role in a chain of long-term care homes owned by his companies that faced lawsuits stemming from the death and alleged mistreatment of residents. Among the problems outlined in court cases, state records, and media reports were the deaths of developmentally disabled residents in bathtubs, "deplorable" living conditions, sexual assaults, and a failure by employees to stop residents from harming themselves. Also during the election, the media reported on a controversy regarding Rauner's daughter being admitted to Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago in 2008 through the "principal picks" process. The family maintained several residences, including one in downtown Chicago that enabled her to apply to the Chicago-based school. Although she had top grades, she had missed several days of school and therefore did not qualify through the regular admissions process. It was later revealed that Rauner had sought information on this process from his personal friend Arne Duncan, then CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Rauner has said he had no recollection of speaking with Duncan directly. According to another source, she was not a "principal pick", but was let in following the phone call between Bruce Rauner and Arne Duncan. The Rauners donated $250,000 to the school during the subsequent school year; Rauner has a long history of contributing to Chicago Public Schools. On October 22, 2014, Dave McKinney, a Chicago Sun-Times political reporter and bureau chief, resigned from the paper, citing pressure brought to bear on him by Sun-Times management with regard to his coverage of Rauner. McKinney had completed an investigative news story about a lawsuit filed by Christine Kirk, the CEO of LeapSource, a firm at which Rauner served as director. The piece, written by three reporters and approved by the newspaper's editors, described Rauner using "hardball tactics" to threaten Kirk and her family. According to McKinney's attorney, the Rauner campaign requested the story include that McKinney had a conflict of interest due to his marriage to Ann Liston, a Democratic media consultant; the campaign eventually published details about the Liston's LLC sharing office space with a legally separate, long-term Democratic strategist firm, of which Liston was part-owner. The LLC was employed by a pro-Quinn PAC. McKinney says any notion of conflict of interest was untrue, a position backed up publicly by Sun-Times management. Rauner is a former investor of the Sun-Times and received the newspaper's backing, marking the first time the media organization endorsed any candidate after imposing a moratorium on political endorsements three years earlier. On November 4, 2014, Rauner was elected Governor of Illinois; Pat Quinn conceded defeat the next day. Rauner received 50.27 percent of the vote, while Quinn won 46.35 percent. Rauner carried every county in the state except for Cook, home to Chicago. Rauner spent a then-record $26 million of his own money on his election.
Rauner was sworn in as the 42nd governor of Illinois on January 12, 2015. He governed Illinois as a Rockefeller Republican, with liberal stances on several issues including abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration. Rauner had a 52% job approval rating after assuming the governorship in 2015, which gradually declined during his term. It stood at 33% in December 2016, ranking 45th of the 50 U.S. governors. In January 2019, as Rauner was leaving office, his approval rating was about 25%.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
