Background and career
Scott Kenneth Homer Bessent ( BESS-ənt; born August 21, 1962) is an American businessman and government official serving as the 79th United States secretary of the treasury since 2025. Bessent was a partner at Soros Fund Management (SFM) and founded Key Square Group, a global macro trading firm. He is the first openly gay person to lead the U.S. Treasury, becoming the highest-ranking LGBTQ government official in American history. Bessent graduated from Yale University in 1984. After holding a series of financial positions, he was hired by Soros Fund Management (SFM) in 1991, eventually becoming the head of its London office. While serving in the role in September 1992, he was a leading member of the SFM group, which profited by $1 billion on Black Wednesday, the British pound sterling crisis. In 2013, he made SFM another $1.2 billion by betting against the Japanese yen. After leaving the Soros Fund in 2015, Bessent established Key Square Group, another hedge fund. Bessent served as an economic advisor, fundraiser, and major donor for the Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign. On November 22, 2024, President-elect Trump announced his nomination of Bessent for U.S. Treasury Secretary in the second Trump administration. Bessent was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 27, 2025, by a 68–29 vote, and sworn in as the 79th U.S. Treasury Secretary on January 28, 2025.
Scott Kenneth Homer Bessent was born on August 21, 1962, in Conway, South Carolina, to Barbara (née McLeod) and Homer Gaston Bessent Jr. The Bessent family is of French and Scottish descent, and had a Baptist affiliation at times in its history. Scott's father founded and owned one of the Grand Strand's early real estate companies. His mother, a local businesswoman, assumed responsibility for that business when Homer was ill for a period in the 1960s. Scott's mother married five times, twice to Bessent’s father. John Jenrette, a disgraced member of the United States House of Representatives, was Scott Bessent's uncle. Bessent had a summer job as a busboy at age 9. In 1980, he graduated from North Myrtle Beach High School in Little River, South Carolina. He considered attending the United States Naval Academy but decided not to as he was unwilling to lie about his sexual orientation. Bessent graduated from Yale College in 1984 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in political science. He was on the board of the Yale Daily News, acted as president of the Wolf's Head Society, and was the class treasurer. He also chaired the 1984 Yale Alumni Fund and was an assistant to the director of athletics. As an undergraduate, Bessent interned with Jim Rogers, a co-founder of the Quantum Fund, after meeting him at a Yale career center event.
After college, Bessent worked at Brown Brothers Harriman, at the Riyadh-based company Olayan Group, and then at the hedge fund Kynikos Associates, under Jim Chanos. In Business Insider, Julia La Roche connected Bessent's work with Chanos to his eventual opportunity at Soros Fund Management (SFM), noting that George Soros was a major Chanos client. In the Yale Daily News, Asher Boiskin suggested Soros himself recruited Bessent. In 1992, Bessent was a leading member of the SFM team whose bet on the Black Wednesday collapse of the British Pound sterling earned the firm over $1 billion. Some sources, such as Forbes, call Bessent a "protégé" of Soros. After resigning from SFM in 2000, Bessent founded a $1 billion hedge fund, Bessent Capital. The fund closed in 2005. Bessent has said he learned that he should not change his style or the firm's approach because of investor preferences. He was also a senior investment adviser to fund-of-funds Protégé Partners. Bessent returned to SFM as chief investment officer from 2011 to 2015. His bet against the Japanese yen in 2013 yielded more than $1.2 billion in profit in three months. From 2006 to 2011, Bessent was an adjunct professor of economic history at Yale, teaching three courses.
Bessent left SFM in 2015 to launch Key Square Group, a hedge fund named after a spot on the chessboard, with Michael Germino, who had been the global head of capital markets at SFM. It received a $2 billion anchor investment from George Soros. Key Square uses geopolitics and economics to make macro investments. Its main fund returned 13% in 2016 but declined or broke even every year from 2017 to 2021 before making major gains in 2021, 2022 and 2023. The inconsistent track record scared away clients. Assets under management shrank from $5.1 billion in 2017 to $577 million in 2023 and the number of institutional investors declined from 180 to 20 over the same period. It earned a "double digits" percentage profit in 2024 betting that U.S. stocks would rise after Trump won the election. In 2018, as part of a prearranged deal, the firm returned Soros's investment as it took in other assets. Its investors include Australia's sovereign wealth fund, Future Fund. Bessent announced that he would sever ties with the group after assuming the role of treasury secretary.
Bessent and his husband, John Freeman, have bought and sold at least 20 properties reportedly valued in total at over $127 million as of December 2024. They also oversaw the renovation of many of these. In The Wall Street Journal, E. B. Solomont mentioned the following examples. Bessent bought a house in Bedford Hills, New York, for $11.3 million in 2007, selling it in 2011 for $7.1 million. Bessent bought a 9,700-square-foot house in Miami Beach for $9.5 million in 2010 and sold it in 2014 for $14.5 million. Also in 2010, he bought a 10,700-square-foot home in Southampton, New York, for $9.95 million; he sold it for $19 million in 2019. He purchased his unit at 720 Park Avenue for $19.25 million in 2017 and sold it for $15 million in 2021. Quartz reported that Bessent purchased a unit at One Sutton Place South in Manhattan (formerly owned by John F. Kennedy's sister) for $12 million in 2007 and sold it for $9.5 million in 2009. In the reports, the 9,400-square-foot John Ravenel House, purchased by Bessent for $6.5 million in 2016, had not yet sold. That renovation received an award from the Preservation Society of Charleston in 2021. In March 2025, the property sold for $18.25 million, plus an additional $3 million for the furnishings and fixtures, the highest price ever paid for a house in Charleston. The Journal and other outlets emphasize Bessent's and Freeman's losses, but the Journal says the work might not have been purely profit-driven, and the properties its article lists as having already sold reflects a net profit, with the further sale of the John Ravenel House also without loss.
According to reporting by Bloomberg that multiple other outlets picked up, in September 2007 Bessent designated through an attorney a Bedford Hills property and a property in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as his principal residences simultaneously on mortgage documents submitted to the Bank of America, despite rider documents referencing the properties as secondary residences (his primary residence being in Manhattan at the time), a matter that received attention because of the Trump administration's use of such disclosures as leverage against people in government it wishes to replace—reporting that Bessent's legal representative called "nonsensical".
