All right, here we go. Today we have Anthony Scaramucci, a Long Island finance and founder of SkyBridge Capital, who's reportedly worth over $200 million. He served as a White House communications director for 11 days in July of 2017 before becoming one of Donald Trump's most consistent public critics. Anthony, welcome to Vlad TV.
Vlad, thank you. Thank you for doxing my net worth. You're the best. Okay. And I appreciate being on, but you have a great following and I was very flattered to be invited. So, thank you.
Well, it's an honor to have you on, man. I appreciate you being here.
You know, the one thing you haven't done in my introduction, though, which I think is a little unfair, you should be offering me condolences because some woman just blew past my record at the White House. Okay. Five minutes into the White House, she gets herself fired. She knocked me out of the Guinness World Book of Records flat. I was hoping you would at least say, 'Hey, I give you my sympathy and my condolences for this.'
Oh, yeah. Your 11 days doesn't seem like a big deal anymore.
Well, it's your first time here. I want to start in the very beginning. So, you grew up in Long Island, New York.
Yep. Yep. I was in poor Washington. Where are you from? Where did you grow up?
Well, I was born in Kiev, Ukraine. And I grew up in the Bay Area.
Yeah. And your parents were immigrants?
So, no, my parents were actually born in the United States. My grandparents were the immigrants. They came in the 1920s. My father's family, my dad was like the youngest of seven. So, my father's parents, unfortunately, my grandparents on his side, I never met. They passed away before I was born. So, I was really living in the town of my mother and my mother's mother and dad, my grandparents and her siblings. But my father moved from northeastern Pennsylvania, which was a coal mining town in Wilkes-Barre, out to Long Island to take a construction job outside, and he met my mother there. They were married 67 years before he passed. But the joke in the family was, Vlad, they put 500 years of fighting into a 67-year marriage. It was a totally dysfunctional Italian-American show. But anyway, that's how life is, you know. What can I tell you?
Okay. And your dad was a crane operator?
He was the good most of his career. You know, my brother corrected me. You know, when dad turned 55, they made him a dispatcher. They let him weigh the trucks in the crushed aggregate side of the business, because he was still in the union. I guess as you get a little older, it's harder to operate the crane, but he worked in the same company, same union, 41 years.
Okay. So, you grew up in a very working-class household.
Very much so. Yep. No. Neither of the parents went to college. It was a great, by the way, it was a great upbringing. I would never dishonor my mom or dad by telling you I grew up poor. I did not grow up poor. We had macaroni. We had air conditioning. We had enough school supplies, you know, we had a tight budget. My parents were pretty frugal because they had to be, but it was a great upbringing. And I went to a very good public school system. So, if you know the schools out on Long Island, the public schools out on Long Island, particularly in the town I grew up in, was a very good school.
Okay. And were you the first person in your family that went to college?
My brother. So, my brother and I are about two years apart. He went to Tufts University. I followed him at Tufts University. And then I'm the first person to go to Harvard Law. I'm the first person to go to a professional school. I went to the Harvard Law School.
Okay. Because Tufts is a good school, but Harvard is a whole different level. So, you got into Harvard Law and you graduated and you passed the bar. How big of a deal was it at that point to have a JD from Harvard Law?
I think it's different today. But let me tell you something. When I got to Harvard, they were celebrating their 350th anniversary. It was 1986. Of course, the school was founded in 1636. And so, this was a very huge deal. And my parents were not knowledgeable. You know, my mother originally thought I was going to Hartford Law School. Like, they didn't really know the difference between Harvard and Hartford. But for me it was a big deal. I always say this and I got to give this guy a shout out. My guidance counselor was an Italian-American by the name of John Zenetti. He just turned 90 years old last week. God bless him. He went to see my folks in 1982 and he convinced my mom and dad to put me at the private school, Tufts University, even though it was very expensive for my parents and they really didn't have the money to put me there. I had gotten into Binghamton, the SUNY school, which was a state school that was $6,000 a year. Tufts was 24,000, and Zenetti talked to my parents in Italian and convinced them to put me there. That was the game changer because, Vlad, if I didn't get to Tufts, I probably wouldn't have gotten into Harvard. Tufts was down the block from Harvard. It was only two miles away. And my faculty adviser was very close to a lot of the people in the Harvard Law School administration. And I think that familiarity really helped me. Listen, I had the grades. I was Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate from Tufts, you know, I had a top SAT score, but that was really the differential for me getting into Harvard.
Yeah, I mean, these days people like to downgrade college and say that it's not a big deal. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. I went to UC Berkeley myself. I got a computer science degree and I'm going to tell you I do not regret a single minute that I spent during that time. When you go to a top university and have a good degree, it really changes the rest of your life.
Well, listen, you have to understand, and I'm sure you appreciate this given your upbringing and how you were raised. You know, that was a game-changing, intellectually opening moment for me. You know, I think it set a fire of intellectual curiosity. It also put me in a professional class. Remember, my dad wore a greenie, you know, which was a green uniform to go operate a crane. You know, I got to work inside an office building. You know, one of my dad's best lines in his life was when I got the job at Goldman Sachs, he said, 'Hey, I never want you to complain about your job.' And I said, 'Why is that?' He said, 'Well, you're indoors. You're out of direct sunlight and there's no heavy lifting.' He said, 'I never forget that about your job. I don't want any complaints.' So, you know, during the financial crisis, stock market crashes, I used to mumble to myself, 'Okay, no complaining. No complaining,' you know.
Well, yeah. You know, you just mentioned this. After you graduated from Harvard, you joined Goldman Sachs.
And you worked investment banking, equities, and private wealth management until 1996. So, for what, seven years?
Okay. So, during that time, did you make your first million?
I did. I did. Yeah. I became a millionaire just after my 30th birthday. So in 1994, I had a couple of good things happen to me. I had crossed over the million dollars worth of net worth and I had also paid off my school debt, which was very important to me.
Okay. So at that time, how did you get a million dollars net worth? Was it certain stocks that you bought or what?
Well, you know, I was getting paid a lot of money at Goldman back in that day. You know, I was making over a million dollars a year in the mid-'90s. And so, you know, that was a lot of money back then. And so, you know, the taxes being what they were, you got to keep about $550,000 of it. I didn't need that much money. I was living out on Long Island. I was married in 1988. I had my first child in '92. So, I had a small house out on Long Island. I think that house cost me $400,000. So, I was putting away $200,000, $300,000 a year. And you know, you do that for two or three years and plus you're investing in stocks and if you remember the '90s, we were in quite a healthy bull market. So my assets grew to north of a million dollars.
Well, me and you had a conversation before this interview and you mentioned how you got married in 1988. So you're actually going to Harvard Law School when you got married.
