SCOTT BESSENT, born on this date, is an American investor and hedge fund manager. He was a partner at Soros Fund Management and the founder of Key Square Group, a global macro investment firm.
Bessent was a major donor, fundraiser, and an economic advisor for the Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign. In November 2024, Trump named Bessent as his nominee for United States secretary of the treasury. If confirmed by the Senate, Bessent would be the first out gay secretary of the Treasury.
In article in fall 2022 commemorating former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Bessent wrote “President Trump’s most enduring achievement may have been to wake the United States and the world to the growing dangers of an ever-more-antagonistic China. In response, Abe’s greatest foreign policy achievement was taking this awakening and developing a multilateral solution for containment.”
Bessent sits on the university council at Yale University. Bessent and his sister donated the Bessent Library to Yale University. Bessent has endowed three scholarships at Yale: one for students who are first-generation college matriculants, one for students from South Carolina, and one for students from the Bronx.
Bessent chairs the investment committee and is a member of the executive committee on the board of trustees of Rockefeller University. Bessent formerly served on the board of God’s Love We Deliver, an organization founded to deliver meals for homebound people with AIDS. He is a trustee of Classical American Homes Preservation Trust (renamed the Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation), and a former board member of the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina. Bessent is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[
Bessent has praised Trump’s proposal to implement broad tariffs. In a Fox News op-ed in November 2024, Bessent wrote that the “U.S. opened its markets to the world, but China’s resulting economic growth has only cemented the hold of a despotic regime” and argued tariffs “are a means to finally stand up for Americans”. Regarding Trump’s pledge to impose blanket 20% tariffs on all imports, Bessent argued that these “were maximalist positions that would probably be watered down in talks with trading partners”.
Bessent resides in Charleston, South Carolina, and belongs to the Huguenot Church, which his ancestors helped to build in 1680. Bessent and his husband, former New York City prosecutor John Freeman, have two children.
In 2016, Bessent purchased the historic John Ravenel House, owned by John Ravenel and inherited by his son St. Julien Ravenel and his wife Harriott Horry Ravenel. The building restoration project was awarded the Preservation Society of Charleston’s Carolopolis Award in 2021. The mansion, known as the “Pink Palace”, is located on Battery Street in Charleston.