Jordan Belfort’s Salary & Earning (Net Worth)

Born in Queens, on July 9, 1962, Jordan Ross Belfort (aka ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’), showed natural talent as a salesman from an early age. He has estimated net worth of $100 million US Dollars.

During the 80′s, he operated his own meat and seafood business, which soon went bust. In 1987, Belfort started to learn the art of stock broking, and in 1989, he opened another business. This time, in the stock market. The business he opened was an investment firm called Stratton Oakmont.

Stratton Oakmont was not a standard investment firm, unbeknown to his investors. Instead, it was set up as a ‘pump and dump’ firm, and defrauded their investors of hundreds of millions. In a pump and dump, the company would purchase shares in a company at a low rate, they would then buy lots of shares for their clients, which would increase the value of these shares, and would then sell their own shares, which would drop the price drastically. Effectively, they transferred the wealth of their clients, into their own bank accounts illegally.

At one point, Stratton Oakmont was so big it employed over 1000 brokers, and handled nearly $1 billion in investors assets. The company managed to get away with this for a few years. During this period, Belfort lived the high life. He purchased a mansion, a few sports cars, a helicopter, and even a yacht previously owned by Coco Chanel. However, along with the money, came addictions. Jordan became addicted to drugs, which caused him to be involved in several accidents while under the influence. These accidents included crashing his helicopter into his own yard, and sinking his yacht in a storm. The drugs also contributed to the break up of his second marriage.

In 1992, the SEC decided they wanted to shut Stratton Oakmont down. It took them two years before they reached an agreement with Belfort, which included a life long ban, plus a fine for the company.

However, things didn’t end there. 1996 saw the company liquidated, in order to pay the fines etc. Then, in 1999, Jordan pleaded guilty to securities fraud, and money laundering. In 2003, he was sentenced to 4 years in prison, and personally fined $110 million. It was when he was in prison that he developed an interest in writing.

In 2008, after he was out of prison, he published his first book ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’. Which followed his rise and fall in Wall Street. And in 2009, he published his second book ‘Catching The Wolf Of Wall Street’. He got lots of money with that.

In more recent times (2013), The Wolf Of Wall Street came to the big screen, with a movie produced by Martin Scorsese, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It has been claimed that Belfort has only repaid $14 million of the $110 million fine, meaning that he still owes investors close to $100 million. He is now making money from motivational talks, as well as owning another company that provides sales training, and sells ‘Straight Line’ training programs which help clients to build wealth. We are expected that he will have total net worth of $150 million USD in next few years.

Unless his current business endeavors do extremely well, it is unlikely that Belfort will ever clear his debt from his stock broking days.