Cash in and live it up with the rich — yes, we can
Barack and Michelle Obama don’t regard themselves as money-obsessed, but multimillion-dollar TV and publishing deals have propelled them into a rarefied world
When it emerged that Barack Obama was pocketing six-figure sums as a trophy speaker after stepping down as US president, the host of the comedy news program The Daily Show put forward a novel defence of his ballooning wealth.
“So the first black president must also be the first one not to take the money afterwards?” the satirist Trevor Noah quipped. “No, no, my friend. He can’t be the first of everything. Make that money, Obama.
There is no doubt that Obama and his wife, Michelle, have prospered since leaving the White House. Few begrudge the former first family their success, although Donald Trump has a chip on his shoulder about it. There is talk that the defeated President — or election “winner”, as Trump sees it — might get a mega-advance for his Maga book and go on to found his own media empire once he is prised out of the White House, but, irritatingly, the Obamas have got there before him.
The Obamas received a world-beating $US65m $89m) combined advance for their memoirs from Penguin Random House and a further $US50m at least — the exact sum has not been disclosed — to produce films and documentaries for Netflix, the streaming giant.
Michelle justified that early vote of confidence by selling 14 million copies of her autobiography, Becoming, while a documentary of her 34-city, arena-filling book tour was her first project for Netflix.
“This girl is on fire,” her friend Alicia Keys sang on the soundtrack.
The first volume of Obama’s presidential memoir, A Promised Land — released last week — is on its way to surpassing Michelle’s record: it sold 887,000 copies on its first day of publication. Although there are as many dark and fantastical conspiracies about the source of the Obamas’ wealth as there are about the 2020 US election results, their global celebrity and penmanship have taken them a long way from their childhoods.
“I am from the south side of Chicago,” Michelle said defiantly on film about her tough upbringing. “That tells you as much about me as you need to know.”
Barack, meanwhile, long before he was famous, wrote Dreams from My Father, about growing up with his grandparents in Hawaii after his teenage mother was deserted by his Kenyan father. The couple felt skint in the early years of their marriage, even as their careers were taking off.
“Money was perpetually tight,” Barack recalls in A Promised Land. “Our credit card balances grew, we had little in the way of savings.”
They were still repaying loans on their Ivy League educations when he became senator for Illinois in 2004.
Today their fortune is estimated at $US135m and, with their daughters Malia, 22, and Sasha, 19, they are enjoying the ritzy lifestyle that goes with it. When a friend asked Michelle whether she could ever be persuaded to run for president, she replied: “Absolutely not. I love the life I’m having now.”
It came as a shock to fans when the cerebral Barack was pictured in 2017 whooping it up in the waves with Richard Branson on Necker Island, but that was just one of many celebrity holidays he has shared with Michelle — whether relaxing on producer and music mogul David Geffen’s yacht with Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Springsteen or holidaying with George and Amal Clooney at their Lake Como villa.
The Obamas also hang out in Hawaii with Martin Nesbitt, a close family friend from Chicago, whose fortune is even greater than theirs.
Not, of course, that they regard themselves as in the least bit star-struck or interested in money. In an interview in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine, Barack says: “Michelle and I were talking (recently) about the fact that although we grew up in very different places, we were both very much working-class, lower middle-class, in terms of income, and we weren’t subject day-to-day to the sense that if you don’t have this stuff then you are somehow not worthy.
“America has always had a caste system — rich and poor, not just racially but economically — but it wasn’t in your face most of the time when I was growing up. Then you start seeing Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the sense that you’ve either got it or you’re a loser. And Donald Trump epitomises that cultural movement that is deeply ingrained now in American culture.”
The Obamas don’t share Trump’s taste for bling, but they have definitely joined the rich and famous club. They own an $US8m mansion in Kalorama, one of Washington’s most desirable neighbourhoods, complete with a castle-like turret, and an even swankier $US15m waterfront compound in Martha’s Vineyard, the summer retreat for politicos.
The family also has a house in Chicago, where the enormous $US500m Obama Presidential Centre — the future home of the Obama Foundation, presidential library and museum — will be built (if planning snafus are resolved). They are not seen much in their old home town but, through the foundation, they sponsor emerging youth leaders and activists in Africa and other parts of the world.
The Obamas’ Washington place is close to the des res of Ivanka Trump — Donald’s daughter — and Jared Kushner. Sally Bedell Smith, who has written biographies of the Queen and the Kennedys, lives nearby. “The Kushners have this bizarre, exposed house on the corner with fortifications that make it look like a forward operating base in Iraq,” she said. “The Obamas don’t make a big spectacle of themselves.”
The former president’s road is sealed off by security, but Bedell Smith witnessed an “only-in-Washington” moment when the Kushners’ young children were allowed past the checkpoint to skateboard in privacy. As Malia and Sasha Obama have found, it is not easy to grow up in the public eye. In the past 12 years, the girls have gone from being kids who were shown how to slide down the White House banisters by George W Bush’s daughters during the 2008 transition (how different to today’s epic stand-off) to accomplished young women with lives that remain eagerly scrutinised.
Sasha, a student at Michigan University, used to share the limelight unselfconsciously with her parents — Obama writes proudly of her visit, aged eight, to Moscow, where she “strolled through the Kremlin like a pint-sized secret agent in a trench coat”.
Today she appears fun, flirty and fashionable, but has tried to stay under the radar. A video of her on TikTok, lip-syncing with friends to Moneybagg Yo’s Said Sum remix, which includes the n-word, was hastily taken down after she was recognised.
Malia is in her final year at Harvard and spent last Christmas in Islington, north London, at the home of her well-connected British boyfriend Rory Farquharson. It is not clear if the former head boy at Rugby, who graduated from Harvard last northern summer, has followed his parents into investment banking. Barack, a fanatical golfer, will have approved of the fact Rory played golf at school.
The couple have been photographed during their three years together kissing, attending college football games and concerts — and smoking, not unlike Barack, who confesses in his book that he secretly smoked as many as 10 a day at the White House. Ironically, he switched to chewing nicotine gum after Malia “frowned (on) smelling a cigarette on my breath”.
On her gap year, aged 18, Malia spent three months interning for the producer Harvey Weinstein, who has since been imprisoned for sexual assault and rape (some say her horrified parents should already have known about his reputation). Bedell Smith met her in the green room at the Sundance film festival.
“She was very sweet, very natural and down-to-earth,” she remembered.
At the same time, Malia was being escorted around by the head of the film festival, not the usual treatment for a teenager.
Both Malia and Sasha have had a tough time as students during the pandemic and are back home, studying remotely.
“I’m just glad they’re staying put, even if they are sick of me,” Michelle told the singer Jennifer Lopez on Instagram Live.
They had fun over the summer in Martha’s Vineyard, she told another interviewer, but are now “back in Zoomland (and) no longer thrilled to be with us”.
Despite this, the Obamas are an admirably close-knit family. A Promised Land is dedicated to Michelle, “my love and life’s partner”, and to Malia and Sasha, “whose dazzling light makes everything brighter”. One Los Angeles couple with a young son who may be looking on enviously are the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, with whom they share friends such as Oprah and Gayle King, the CBS news presenter.
Meghan and Harry have already got their own Obama-style, multimillion-dollar Netflix deal, which is said to include a documentary about leaving the royal family. But a mischievous rumour has surfaced in Washington that Meghan may have taken soundings about going into politics — in particular, about inheriting the Californian senate seat of Kamala Harris, now the vice-president elect. (Her friends deny it.)
Two years after becoming a senator, Obama launched his successful run for president. Four years after leaving the White House, he has built a potential billion-dollar brand. It wouldn’t be surprising if the former Ms Markle were tempted to follow his example in more ways than one.
The Sunday Times
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