What Is Julian Assange's Net Worth?
Julian Assange is an Australian publisher, journalist, computer programmer, and Internet activist who has a net worth of $300 thousand. Julian Assange is probably most famous for being the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that releases information that often exposes classified and private information about governments and politicians. He is well-known for his public appearances in many parts of the world for speaking out about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.
Assange has won many awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award and Readers' Choice for "TIME" magazine's 2010 Person of the Year. In his youth, he was referred to as "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker" by the Personal Democracy Forum.
In 2010, WikiLeaks shook the world with a series of explosive revelations that laid bare the inner workings of US military operations and diplomacy. The organization's most controversial releases began with the "Collateral Murder" video, which exposed a shocking 2007 airstrike in Baghdad that claimed civilian lives. This was followed by the Afghan War Diary and Iraq War Logs, vast troves of classified military reports that offered unprecedented insight into the conflicts. The climax came with "Cablegate," the release of hundreds of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables. These leaks ignited fierce debates about national security, government transparency, and the ethics of whistleblowing. Critics argued that the disclosures endangered lives and compromised operations, while supporters hailed them as a triumph for public accountability. The fallout was immense, straining international relations and triggering legal actions that continue to reverberate today.
In 2012, Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange on sexual assault allegations, which he denied. He lost appeals against the warrant. Fearing the United States would use Sweden's arrest warrant to ultimately extradite him to face charges in America for publishing classified US documents, Assange sought and was granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 citing political persecution. Assange was arrested by British authorities in 2019. He was imprisoned in London from 2019 until June 2024 when Julian finally reached a plea deal with US prosecutors.
Early Life
Julian Assange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. He is the son of Christie Ann Hawkins and John Shipton, who separated before he was born. When Julian was a year old, his mother married actor Brett Assange, whom Julian regards as his father, thus choosing Assange as his surname.
In 1987, at the age of 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax. He formed a hacking group called "The International Subversives." Julian married a girl named Teresa while he was still a teenager, and they had a son, Daniel, in 1989. The couple divorced and disputed custody of Daniel until 1999. Over the course of the dispute, Assange's brown hair turned white. In 1991, Julian was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line and raided his home. Assange was charged with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes in 1994. He pled guilty to 24 charges in December 1996, and he was ordered to pay reparations and was released on a good behavior bond. Assange studied programming at the University of Melbourne from 2003 to 2006 but did not finish a degree.
WikiLeaks
Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999 but did not do anything with it at the time. He publicized a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999 for voice-data harvesting technology. Julian and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. He became a member of the organization's advisory board and editor-in-chief. His idea was to make WikiLeaks into an "open-source, democratic intelligence agency." The open-editing aspect was soon abandoned, but the site remained open for anonymous submissions
From 2007 to 2010, Julian traveled worldwide on WikiLeaks business. WikiLeaks published, along with leaks, internet censorship lists and classified media from anonymous sources, including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and more. WikiLeaks's international profile increased when a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, failed to block the site's publication of bank records. In 2008, during the U.S. presidential election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo! Mail account belonging to Sarah Palin was posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into.
Some topics that have been published on his WikiLeaks site include extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Cote d'Ivoire, and procedures at Guantanamo Bay. WikiLeaks has five international print media partners, which include "Der Spiegel," "Le Monde," "The Guardian," "El Pais," and "The New York Times." In November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing detailed correspondence between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world (also known as Cablegate).
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Criminal Investigations
In early 2010, Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army soldier, disclosed to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents. After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, U.S. authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed chat logs between Manning and an interlocutor they claimed to be Assange. Manning was charged with 22 severe offenses and imprisoned from 2010 to 2017 when she had her sentence commuted.
In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual assault of two women. Julian breached his bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012, where he was granted asylum by Ecuador on the grounds of political persecution, with the presumption that if he was extradited to Sweden, he would soon be extradited to the United States. In 2013, U.S. officials said that it was unlikely that the Justice Department would indict Assange for publishing classified documents because it would also have to prosecute the news organizations and writers who published classified material. In 2014, he was being actively investigated. Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because they were unable to find any evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist; however, after Trump took power, Mike Pompeo and Jeff Sessions stepped up in pursuit of Julian.
Assange's asylum was withdrawn on April 11, 2019, following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. British police were invited into the embassy, and Julian was arrested on the spot. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. He was then further charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 when the U.S. government unsealed older indictments against him. Since his arrest, Julian has been incarcerated at the HM Prison Belmarsh in London. The U.S. requested that Assange be extradited to the United States, but on January 4, 2021, Judge Braister ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States, citing concerns about his mental health and the risk of suicide in a U.S. prison. Two days later, Julian was denied bail by the United States on the grounds that he was a flight risk.
On June 25, 2024, Julian was released from British custody after reaching a plea deal with American authorities. Under the plea deal, Julian agreed to plead guilty to a change under the US Espionage Act. The plea allowed for Julian's immediate release.
