What Is Dr. Ben Carson's Net Worth?
Dr. Ben Carson is an American neurosurgeon who has a net worth of $30 million. In addition to being a world-renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson has earned notoriety as a 2016 candidate for President of the United States on the Republican ticket. In March 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Dr. Carson as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. According to a 2014 financial disclosure, at that time Dr. Carson's net worth was $26 million. An updated financial disclosure released in 2016 lowered his net worth estimate to $16 million. His 2016 disclosure showed Carson owning tens of millions of dollars worth of publicly traded equities in companies, notably Kellogg and Costco, on which he served as a member of the Board of Directors.
Speaking Fees and Royalties
Outside of his income as a physician, Carson has made a small fortune giving inspirational speeches. In 2014 alone, he made more than $2 million giving speeches, with his per-speech fee ranging from $12,000 to $50,000 on average. In a 2015 financial disclosure, Ben revealed that in a 16-month period between 2014 and 2015, Carson and his wife, Candy, earned between $9 and $27 million in speaking engagement fees, book royalties, and salary for serving as a Board member on various companies. Between January 2014 and May 2014, Carson earned $4 million giving 141 speeches.
In a 16-month period between 2014 and 2015, Carson earned between $2 million and $10 million for his work as a member of the Board of Kellogg and Costco.
In the same period, he earned between $1 million and $6 million from book royalties and advances and between $200,000 and $2 million working as a contributor to Fox News and the "Washington Times."
Early Life
Ben Carson was born Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr. on September 18, 1951, in Detroit, Michigan. Carson's mother, Sonya, was just 13 when she married his father, 28-year-old Robert Solomon Carson. After his father finished his military service, the family moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1959, Carson's parents separated, and he lived with his mother and brother in Boston. Two years later, they moved back to Detroit, where Ben attended Southwestern High School and graduated third in his class.
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Education and Career as a Surgeon
Carson graduated from Yale University on a full-ride scholarship and then went on to earn his medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School. After struggling academically at first, he was encouraged to either drop out or take a reduced class load and take longer to graduate. He continued with a regular full class load, and his grades slowly improved. He graduated in 1977 and was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. Carson was subsequently accepted into the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine neurosurgery program, where he served for one year as a surgical intern and then five years as a neurosurgery resident. He completed his final year as chief resident in 1983. Ben spent 1983 and 1984 as a Senior Registrar in Neurosurgery at a hospital in Perth, Western Australia.
In 1984, Carson was appointed the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a Professor of Neurosurgery, Oncology, Plastic Surgery, and Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, and he also operated on approximately 300 children a year. (Down from his original 500 per year.) As a surgeon, he specialized in traumatic brain injuries, brain and spinal cord tumors, epilepsy, and other neurological and congenital disorders. Carson was part of the revival of the hemispherectomy, a surgical procedure in which part or all of one hemisphere of the brain is removed to control severe epilepsy in children. He refined the procedure and performed it many times.
Ben is most widely recognized as the man who led the surgery for the first pair of successfully separated conjoined twins in 1987. He led a team of 70 surgeons to separate Patrick and Benjamin Binder, who had been joined at the back of the head. The team rehearsed the surgery for weeks, practicing on two dolls secured together by Velcro. Sadly, although Carson was able to separate the boys, both twins were left in a vegetative state, with neither twin able to talk or care for himself, and became institutionalized wards of the state. According to his uncle in 2015, Patrick Binder had died sometime in the last decade. The Binder surgery served as a blueprint for the separation of conjoined twins and was refined in subsequent decades and used successfully in at least one other outcome. The surgery launched him into the public spotlight, which resulted in multiple publishing deals and a side career as a motivational speaker.
Carson's work on pediatric neurosurgery, in particular, has been hailed as groundbreaking, and in 2008, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Carson has had his findings and research printed in well over a hundred publications. In July 2013, Ben retired from the field of surgery.
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Political Career
Carson made headlines after he gave what many people felt was a pointedly conservative speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast. The event is normally apolitical in nature, and Carson made jabs at President Barack Obama's policies and philosophies as he was sitting just ten feet away.
In 2016, Ben was a candidate for President of the United States in the Republican primaries. Early on, he led in the polls but then saw a decline in his numbers after he released controversial ads and did not perform well at the presidential debates. Carson suspended his run on March 4, 2016, following the Super Tuesday elections. He announced he would be the new national chairman of My Faith Votes, a group that encourages Christians to vote. Carson's campaign spent $58 million, with most of the money going to political consultants and fundraising. A week after he suspended his campaign, he endorsed Donald Trump.
In March 2017, he was appointed the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development by President Donald Trump. Carson has identified as a Democrat (before 1981), a Republican (1981 to 1999 and again starting in 2014), and an independent (1999 to 2014).
Author
Carson has written several articles in peer-reviewed journals. He published the bestselling books "Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story" in 1992, "Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence" in 1996, "The Big Picture: Getting Perspective on What's Really Important in Life" in 2000, "Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk" in 2009, "America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great" in 2013, "One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America's Future" in 2014, "One Vote: Make Your Voice Heard" in 2014, "You Have a Brain: A Teen's Guide to T.H.I.N.K. B.I.G." in 2015, "My Life: Based on the Book Gifted Hands" in 2015, and "A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties" in 2015.
Personal Life
Dr. Ben Carson and his wife, Candy, have been married since 1975. The couple has three children, Rhoeyce, Benjamin Jr, and Murray. Their eldest son Murray was born in Perth while Carson was doing his residency there. Ben was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2002 and underwent a successful two-hour operation at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Real Estate
In 2001, Ben and Candy purchased a 48-acre property in Upperco, Maryland.
In 2013, they moved to West Palm Beach, Florida. In February 2017, after his confirmation as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Carson purchased a $1.22 million home in Vienna, Virginia, and sold his West Palm Beach home for over $900,000.
