George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, the first of six children of George H.W. Bush, who would become the 41st President of the United States, and Barbara Bush (née Pierce). He grew up mainly in Midland and Houston, Texas, part of a family already prominent in business and politics through his grandfather, Prescott Bush, a longtime U.S. senator from Connecticut. Bush attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 1968 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1975, making him the first U.S. president to hold a graduate business degree.

After Harvard, Bush returned to Midland and entered the West Texas oil business, founding Arbusto Energy in 1977 with startup capital from family and outside investors; the company was later renamed Bush Exploration. Drilling results through the early 1980s were weak, and in 1984 the company was absorbed into Spectrum 7 Energy Corp, with Bush installed as chairman and chief executive at an annual salary of $75,000. When Spectrum 7 was in turn acquired by Harken Energy in 1986, Bush received Harken stock reported at $500,000 to $600,000 in value, a board seat, and a consulting arrangement paying up to $120,000 a year. A June 1990 sale of roughly two-thirds of his Harken shares, for $848,560, drew a Securities and Exchange Commission review of possible insider trading; the SEC closed the matter in 1993 without filing charges.

Bush’s highest-profile pre-political venture came in 1989, when he helped assemble the investor group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball franchise for $86 million. He contributed an initial $500,000 for a 1.8% ownership stake and served as the team’s managing general partner, a public-facing role that raised his profile in Texas well beyond his oil-business record and helped position him for his run for governor.

Bush was elected Governor of Texas in 1994 and re-elected in 1998, serving from January 1995 to December 2000. In 2000 he was elected the 43rd President of the United States and was re-elected in 2004, serving two terms from January 2001 to January 2009 at the fixed presidential salary set by Congress.

Since leaving office, Bush’s public career has centered on the George W. Bush Presidential Center, a presidential library, museum, and policy institute that opened on the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas in April 2013. He has also built an unexpected second act as a painter: Bush took up oil painting around 2012 after reading Winston Churchill’s essay “Painting as a Pastime,” and his work — portraits of world leaders, his dogs, and later wounded post-9/11 veterans — has been exhibited publicly and compiled into books, discussed further in the Contracts section below.

During his two terms in the White House, Bush was paid the fixed presidential salary set by Congress — $400,000 a year, a rate first applied to his presidency in 2001 and still unchanged today. Since leaving office in January 2009 he has received an annual former-president’s pension, set by statute to the pay of a cabinet-level Executive Level I official; that benchmark stood at $253,100 a year under the 2026 federal Executive Schedule pay table, alongside a separate congressional allowance for a post-presidential office, staff, and travel that is not personal income.

Beyond the pension, Bush’s other disclosed income has come chiefly from paid speaking engagements. Political reporting from the years following his presidency put his typical fee in the $100,000-$175,000 range per appearance, with well over 100 paid speeches delivered in the years after he left office. Because he does not publish a running total of engagements or fees, no reliable annual speaking-income figure exists in public reporting; the $100,000-$175,000 figure describes a typical single fee, not a yearly sum.

Bush’s largest disclosed publishing transaction is the deal he signed with Crown Publishing Group, a Penguin Random House imprint, for his presidential memoir, tentatively titled Decision Points. The advance was reported at around $7 million — less than half of what Bill Clinton received for his memoir “My Life” and less than the $8 million reported for Hillary Clinton’s memoir, according to contemporaneous trade coverage. Published in November 2010, Decision Points sold 775,000 copies in its first week and went on to pass 2 million copies sold, a strong commercial performance for a presidential memoir.

Bush’s paid speeches, discussed above, are typically booked through a speakers’ bureau rather than under one standing contract, and his usual $100,000-$175,000 fee has occasionally been renegotiated for charitable events. In one widely reported 2012 appearance for the veterans’ nonprofit Helping a Hero, his fee was reduced from a stated $250,000 to $100,000.

As with other recent former presidents profiled on this site, Bush has not pursued conventional paid product endorsements or brand ambassadorships since leaving office. His commercial activity runs instead through book royalties, the speaking circuit, and, since 2017, the publication of his paintings, covered in the sections above and below. No reliable public reporting documents a traditional endorsement deal for Bush, and none is claimed here.

Bush’s most profitable pre-presidency investment was his Texas Rangers stake. After helping assemble the 1989 purchase for $86 million with a personal investment that grew to $606,302, his ownership share rose to about 11.8% by the time the team was sold to Thomas O. Hicks in 1998 for $250 million; Bush’s payout from the sale was reported at $14.9 million, roughly a 25-fold return on his original stake.

Since leaving the presidency, Bush’s most notable non-real-estate venture has been his painting practice, though it functions as a public and charitable project rather than a commercial business. Net proceeds from his 2017 book “Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors,” which paired 66 of his portraits of post-9/11 veterans with their stories, were donated to the George W. Bush Presidential Center’s veteran and military-family programs rather than retained as personal income, according to the Bush Center itself. As with most former presidents, Bush’s broader personal investment portfolio — any current holdings in stocks, funds, or private ventures — has not been made public since he left the financial disclosure requirements of federal office, so no specific investment holdings beyond the documented items above can be verified here.

Bush’s best-known property is Prairie Chapel Ranch, a roughly 1,583-acre working ranch about seven miles northwest of Crawford, Texas, and 25 miles from Waco, which he bought in 1999 for an estimated $1.3 million. It served as the “Western White House” during his presidency and, based on the most recent public reporting, remains associated with the family. In October 2008, ahead of leaving office, Bush and his wife Laura purchased an 8,501-square-foot home on just over an acre in the Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas for approximately $3 million, which has served as their primary residence since early 2009.