After several failed runs for Congress, Dan Bongino has made serious money in conservative media.
Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Politicon
Dan Bongino isn’t worried about money. On a Monday livestream—the first since President Donald Trump announced his decision to nominate Bongino, a controversial conservative political commentator and former Secret Service agent, to be deputy director of the FBI—he declared that his focus was now on combating criminals, not expanding his bank account. “Money and all that other crap, who gives a damn about any of that stuff?” he asked. “We’ll figure that out later.”
That’s probably because he’s already set for life. In addition to earnings from his podcast and radio program, “The Dan Bongino Show,” which draws millions of viewers and listeners monthly, Bongino has a valuable stake in Rumble, the conservative-leaning video platform that pitches itself as a free speech alternative to YouTube. At Monday’s close price, his more than 16 million shares—representing a 5.7% stake in the company and a 1.1% voting share, according to SEC filings—were worth nearly $160 million.
Rumble’s stock was down nearly 7% Monday on the news of its most popular creator’s imminent departure. In a statement posted to Rumble’s website, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski congratulated Bongino and wrote that Bongino’s show “has been instrumental to the rapid growth of the platform,” but also claimed that “the revenue Rumble derived from the content is not material to the company” thanks to their third-party advertising arrangement.
Bongino was one of Rumble’s earliest backers, and since then he and Rumble have taken turns supporting one another. He began uploading his podcast episodes to the platform in September 2020 after chafing against YouTube’s content moderation practices, helping drive the nascent platform’s user base growth from 1 million in Q2 to 21 million in Q4. A year later, Rumble bet on him, investing in Parallel Economy, a payment processing platform he cofounded in 2021. At some point, as Rumble prepared to go public via a SPAC deal, Bongino got in on the ground floor; a January 2022 filing showed him owning 15,982,404 shares.
That same month, Bongino’s subscriber base on Rumble hit 2 million, far surpassing what he had then, 864,000, on YouTube. Shortly after, he was kicked off YouTube for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policy—in a video afterwards, he said they were “emulating the tactics of socialist fascist totalitarian regimes throughout human history, because that’s what these Big Tech losers do”—but by then, his following on Rumble had already taken off.
On Election Night 2024, he led Rumble’s streaming charts, accounting for 515,000 of their 1.8 million viewers. His daily video-podcast episodes, which recently have sported titles like “Trump Keeps Delivering And The Libs Are Seething,” “Biden Is Destroying The Country On His Way Out” and “Truth Returns To The White House Press Room,” routinely attract over a million views on Rumble. Just four days before his second inauguration, Trump called into Bongino’s radio show; the pair discussed the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal, during which Bongino claimed that the Biden administration was “basically negotiating for Hamas,” as well as conspiracy theories about the January 6 Capitol riot. Today, he has 3.5 million followers on Rumble.
Bongino’s success has come even as Rumble has faltered—following its SPAC merger in late 2022, Rumble’s users have flatlined and the platform hemorrhaged cash. It was bailed out by cryptocurrency platform Tether in December, and the resulting surge in the stock price temporarily made Rumble founder Chris Pavlovski a billionaire. At that time, Bongino’s stake was worth over $260 million.
Bongino started out as a cadet at the New York Police Department in 1995. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology from the City University of New York soon after, then joined the force full time in 1997. Two years later, he headed to the Secret Service, where he served on both George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s security details—and also squeezed in getting an MBA from Penn State. He resigned in 2011 to run for a Maryland Senate seat, losing by 30 points in the deep-blue state.
Bongino with a Maryland voter during his long-shot Senate bid in 2012.
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Undeterred, he wrote a book about his experience in the Secret Service and running for office, then ran for a Maryland congressional seat in 2014, losing to the incumbent Democrat by 1.5 percentage points. (By then, he was evidently financially comfortable enough to promise to donate half of his congressional salary to charity, per local media reports.) In 2016, after a second book about his time in the Secret Service, he ran for a Florida congressional seat but got third in the GOP primary. He’s been in media ever since, including hosting shows with Fox News and NRA TV.
On his podcast Monday, Bongino acknowledged that taking a government job like deputy FBI director—a role typically held by career FBI agents, not media pundits or Secret Service agents—could hurt his bottom line, but indicated that he was focused on the job ahead. “There’s a chance, when the mission’s over, that you guys all disappear and go somewhere else,” he told hundreds of thousands of live listeners. “Not gonna lie, that’s been on my mind for a long time. I hope not, I love you guys, but this is a mission I can’t say no to.”
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