Maybe $2 million or so feels like chump change to a Kennedy, especially one who hopes to join the Billionaire Bros club of the Trump administration, but even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has to know that hundreds of thousands in yearly compensation is nothing like what he called an “unpaid” position as founder, chairman and general counsel of the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense.
New reporting from The Daily Beast reveals that Kennedy owned up to the truth in financial disclosure forms – eventually.
In personal financial disclosure forms required for all presidential candidates, Kennedy initially reported that he had earned $731,470.53 in 2022 and 2023. (In the summer of 2023, he reported making $515,960 the previous year from CHD; in the summer of 2024, he reported making $215,510.53.)
But documents obtained by the Daily Beast show that Kennedy—after being nominated by Trump for his Cabinet—then quietly amended those forms to disclose that he had actually earned far more from his anti-vaccine nonprofit: a total of $1.2 million.
Kennedy called the original underreporting an “inadvertent error.”
Yeah, an “inadvertent error” he has been making for years.
More from The Daily Beast:
In 2017, he told MAGA journalist Tucker Carlson, “I’m getting unpaid for this. This has been probably the worse career move that I’ve ever made.” He told InfoWars in 2021 that his anti-vaccine advocacy work had “the opposite of a profit motive” and had “damaged relationships even with people in my family.”
In fact, Kennedy earned $2.2 million between 2017 and 2023 from the nonprofit he founded, according to federal tax returns filed by his group.
When he was a candidate for president during the 2024 election—first as a Democrat, then as an independent—Kennedy significantly underreported how much he made in the last two years he led the group: an omission of $431,156.72.
The Daily Beast further reported that Kennedy claimed the “inadvertent error” was made because he conflated “net pay” with “gross wages.” That’s “an odd mistake for a multimillionaire who can afford professional accountants,” the article dryly noted.
I’m sure President-Unelect Elon Musk and tax cheat Donald Trump can totally relate to “forgetting” about a couple hundred thou here and there.
