How has a long career in finance influenced Jim Cramer's net worth? The "Mad Money" host is many things: Harvard Law grad, hedge fund founder, co-founder of TheStreet, and host of two longstanding CNBC stock market television programs. His reputation as a loud and energetic voice on Wall Street is longstanding.
His “Mad Money Manifesto” states that the purpose of his nightly show is to help even the financial playing field. He does this by teaching everyday investors how to think like the white-collar fund managers — the people who control most of the money that moves through the market.
To the younger generation of Reddit-user retail investors who helped launch Gamestop’s legendary 2021 short squeeze, however, he’s morphed into a meme. It’s a standing joke that any time he endorses a stock, it plummets. In fact, an inverse ETF with the sole purpose of betting against his advice was created in March 2023 in an attempt to monetize Cramer’s reputation for being “bad medicine” for the stocks he picks.
Related: Inverse Cramer Tracker ETF: The fund that bets against ‘Mad Money’ host Jim Cramer
His reputation for being wrong may be blown out of proportion though — predicting the performance of individual stocks in the short term has always been a loser’s game, and he has to do it every night on the fly in response to the questions of his callers. First and foremost, his show is entertainment, and his stated goal is to teach his viewers how to think about stocks, not to tell them which ones to buy and sell on a daily basis (although there’s nothing to stop his more voracious viewers from doing this).
At the end of the day, Cramer is an eccentric and entertaining performer whose enthusiasm for the market is self-evident. But just how much money has he made from his dual careers in finance and media? And what is Jim Cramer's net worth now as the host of two popular CNBC television shows?
What is Jim Cramer’s net worth?
CelebrityNetWorth.com has listed Jim Cramer’s net worth as $150 million since mid-2022. Multiple outlets, including Investopedia and Yahoo Finance, have cited this figure in the time since. An October 2023 post on CAclubindia.com, however, listed Cramer’s net worth a third higher at $200 million.
His wealth comes from several sources. One is profits minted from gains at his former hedge fund. There are his earnings from his two shows on CNBC, along with his investing club, his books on investing, and his fees for speeches and public appearances.
‘Squawk on the Street’ & ‘Mad Money'
Cramer spends three hours per day, five days a week (excluding market holidays and occasional absences) on television. This has made him one of the most recognizable financial analysts in modern media. “Squawk on the Street,” his morning program, begins at 9:30 a.m. Eastern and follows the first two hours of trading on the New York Stock Exchange live beginning with the opening bell.
“Mad Money,” Cramer’s 60-minute evening program airs at 6 p.m. Eastern, an hour and a half after the market’s closing bell. On this program, Cramer speculates fast and loud about how various factors might affect the market and individual stocks in the days and weeks to come.
He's famous for using a DJ-style soundboard to punctuate his assertions with sound effects. On "Mad Money", you'll hear the sounds of machine guns, cash registers ringing, heads being chopped off, and a host of other cartoonish onomatopoeias. He also fields calls from excited viewers and provides on-the-spot takes on their favorite stocks, funds, and market segments.
This instant analysis portion of his show could be a major part of why many of his predictions flop — he doesn’t have time to perform an in-depth analysis of each stock presented to him. That means many of his takes are more like casual, educated guesses than the well-researched recommendations you'd get from a personal portfolio manager.
Between his two shows, Cramer spends an astounding 21 hours per week on television. That doesn't include reruns or guest appearances on other shows.
How much does Jim Cramer make at CNBC?
Most sources peg Cramer’s CNBC salary at $5 million per year. That figure again seems to trace back to CelebrityNetWorth.com. Interestingly, CAclubindia.com again lists a higher figure — $12 million per year — in its October 2023 post.
Outside of CNBC, Cramer also earns money from the sales of his books on finance. “Get Rich Carefully,” “Getting Back to Even,” and “Stay Mad for Life” have all contributed to Jim Cramer's net worth.
Cramer also generates income from paid speaking appearances, which reportedly don’t come cheap. According to a 2022 article on Yahoo Finance, he earns $30,000 to $50,000 per speech. His profile on Speaking.com lists his fee even higher — $75,000 or more.
How did Jim Cramer get his start in the stock market? How did his hedge fund perform?
According to a 2005 Dan Rather interview on CBS's “60 Minutes” Cramer has been obsessing over stocks to some degree since he was in the fourth grade. He learned more as he got older and kept it up through his tenures at Harvard College and Harvard Law.
He highlighted the origins of his always-practical approach to stocks, describing attending baseball games as a kid and observing the behavior of other attendees instead of the game and its players. He noticed how many people were drinking Budweiser compared to eating Ballpark Franks. This got him thinking about the implications these sorts of consumer behaviors could have on the companies’ stock prices.
After graduating from law school, Cramer got an investment banking job in sales and trading with Goldman Sachs, but he only stayed on for about three years. He left to start his own hedge fund, Cramer & Co., and begin investing on his terms. He was able to use hundreds of millions of dollars entrusted to him by his early investors, which included Harvard classmate Marty Peretz — who he would go on to cofound TheStreet with in 1996.
According to Cramer’s reports, his hedge fund performed extremely well, returning an average of 24% annually over the 15 years he managed it before retiring in 2001. He also claims to have sold all of his stocks just prior to the infamous Black Monday crash of 1987.
What are some of Jim Cramer’s worst predictions?
While Cramer’s reputation for making bad calls may be overblown, he certainly has had some heavy hitters over the years. In 2000, he was a big advocate for buying technology stocks despite the sector’s sky-high P/E ratios shortly before the dot-com bubble deflated after the turn of the millennium.
Before the market’s next great crash, he advocated for over-leveraged banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers shortly before they collapsed. With the mortgage-backed security market in the aughts, these banks triggered the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the subsequent Great Recession.
In early 2023, before the year’s infamous banking crisis, Cramer recommended buying Silicon Valley Bank. Shortly after this, the bank experienced a liquidity crisis and folded as a result. Next, he tweeted that First Republic was a “very good bank,” and it subsequently collapsed before being seized and sold by the FDIC.
In some strange way, it seems like any time a market or sector is about to implode, Cramer is there — just a couple of weeks or months before — touting its strength. His hedge fund may have made waves in the 80s and 90s, but once 2000 hit, many of his broad-based predictions have been about as wrong as can be.
Does Jim Cramer own stocks? Which ones?
Cramer reportedly no longer owns individual stocks due to potential conflicts of interest, which have gotten him in hot water in the past. When writing for “SmartMoney,” he drew criticism after he reeled in sizeable gains from stocks he had recommended to readers. This was ostensibly due to a wave of buying that occurred as a result of his recommendations. He did, however, disclose his position in the stocks when recommending them.
In any case, Cramer is now required by CNBC to avoid individual stocks since he discusses so many of them on his shows. Instead, he keeps 50% of his portfolio in cash, 40% in broad-market index funds, and the remaining 10% in gold and cryptocurrencies.
What is Jim Cramer’s charitable trust portfolio? What stocks does it include?
Cramer’s Charitable Trust Portfolio is one that he manages but whose gains are donated entirely to charity. Created in 2005 (the same year both of his shows launched), this portfolio allows him to invest his own money based on his own opinions about the market without risking a conflict of interest.
As of mid-November 2023, the top five holdings in this portfolio were all members of the so-called “magnificent 7:” Alphabet (GOOG) -), Amazon (AMZN) -), Apple (APPL) -), Meta (META) -), and Tesla (TSLA) -).
Little-known facts about Jim Cramer
- Cramer got his start in media working as editor-in-chief of his alma mater’s student newspaper, “The Harvard Crimson.”
- In 1999, Cramer told “Vanity Fair” that he was the first reporter on the scene after Ted Bundy’s infamous Chi Omega sorority murders; he lived nearby and was working for the “Tallahassee Democrat” at the time.
- In the same interview with “Vanity Fair,” Cramer said that early in his journalistic career, while he was working for the “Los Angeles Herald Examiner,” his apartment was robbed by a stalker, and he lived out of his car for several months after the event.
- Punk band Chiodos has a song titled “Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered,” an investment adage Cramer frequently cites as his number one rule.
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