Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) has emerged as a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination while denouncing the ultra-rich who “hoard wealth and engage in financial speculation.” But the progressive, Silicon Valley congressman and his family live a life of staggering luxury, fueled by dynastic wealth they did not earn and protected by the same thicket of trusts, anonymous corporations, and foundations that Khanna condemns.
Khanna lives in a $6 million, 8,000-square-foot luxury home with a four-story elevator and so much premium marble that even the two laundry rooms have marble counters. The Northwest Washington, D.C., home is now for sale, as the Khanna family prepares to move to an even larger, more expensive house a few miles away in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Khanna’s two children, who are minors, have large ownership shares in three private golf clubs, a significant stake in a $65 billion wealth management firm, and investments in hedge funds that focus on distressed debt, of which Khanna has been critical. Khanna’s wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover she was so displeased with that she sued the dealer.
A Washington Free Beacon investigation into Khanna’s finances finds that the progressive truthteller’s lifestyle is funded by his wife, Ritu Ahuja Khanna, an heiress to her father’s Cleveland auto parts fortune. An analysis of Khanna’s financial disclosures reveals his gilded life is enriched by the same sort of investment vehicles that Khanna has said he has a “moral” duty to oppose and that Khanna’s family is a beneficiary of the “New Gilded Age” he condemns.
Khanna’s family wealth comes from his father in law, Monte Ahuja, an Indian-born, Cleveland auto parts magnate turned investor and philanthropist. Like many of the global ultra-rich with generational wealth, Ahuja has set up various trusts and other financial models to benefit his children and grandchildren. These complex financial structures are deliberately opaque, but Khanna, as a member of Congress, is legally required to disclose his family’s financial affairs to the public. This visibility, however, has been somewhat obscured by Khanna’s decision to file his financial disclosures in the old analog format, effectively rendering it immune to a thorough examination without the use of sophisticated data analysis tools.
In 2024, Khanna’s financial disclosures clocked in at 333 pages of non-text-searchable tables, listing over 3,000 individual assets owned by him, his wife, and his children, with each asset having ticked one of 13 available boxes corresponding to an asset valuation range. Put together, those assets are worth anywhere from $103 million to more than $340 million, according to a Free Beacon review. It’s possible that the net worth of Khanna’s nuclear family could far exceed $340 million. He reported a total of 10 assets held by his wife and two children—including the stakes they hold in three golf clubs—as simply being worth more than $1 million with no disclosed ceiling.
For his two young children, Khanna reported in 2024 they own between $26 million and more than $73 million in irrevocable trusts, a wealth transfer vehicle that could shield them from future inheritance taxes.
Khanna’s wife purchased the couple’s current Washington, D.C., home through one of her trusts in 2020 for $3.15 million, real estate records show. The house, which is located in an enclave of newly constructed luxury homes in Northwest D.C., is less than a mile from a private school for young children, which counted Khanna’s wife as a member of its parents association through 2023.
The Khannas put this D.C. home up for sale in June for more than $6 million, as they prepare to decamp for the wealthy D.C. suburb of McLean, Va., where the children are enrolled in an elite private school. Ahuja Khanna is identified as the chair of the school’s annual spring event, and her family’s private foundation donated $20,000 to the school in 2024.
Ahuja Khanna also has a seat on the large board of directors of Georgetown University, her alma mater, suggesting that the university hopes to bring in significant donations from her family.
Ahuja Khanna appears to have recently purchased a brand new custom-built home in McLean. A Virginia LLC managed by a partner at an elite Cleveland law firm—which has connections to the Ahuja family in Cleveland philanthropic circles—closed on the McLean house for about $10 million just two days before the Khannas put their D.C. home on the market. The selling agent for the Khannas’ D.C. home also happens to be the same buying agent for the McLean home, which is currently unoccupied.
Khanna and his wife won’t be lacking in comfort as they manage their move. In October 2024, Ahuja Khanna, who does not appear to have a conventional job, purchased a luxury Range Rover SUV for $190,000, which exceeds Khanna’s annual congressional salary of $174,000. Within a year of purchasing the vehicle, however, Ahuja Khanna alleged in a lawsuit filed in federal court that the car was an irreparable lemon, and sued for damages under the District of Columbia’s Lemon Law. She settled with Jaguar Land Rover of North America for an undisclosed sum in October, according to court records.
The incongruities between Khanna’s political platform and his lifestyle are among the most striking contradictions of any sitting member of Congress. He’s a vocal supporter of the California ballot initiative to impose a wealth tax on billionaires, saying the ultra-wealthy have a duty to give back some of their “unprecedented wealth” in the spirit of “shared prosperity” for the middle class. He has repeatedly boasted about standing up to the Silicon Valley billionaires in his congressional district, by many measures the wealthiest in the country, and recently made a show of standing up to Elon Musk, who had threatened to sue him after Khanna said Musk’s DOGE cuts had led to child deaths.
An analysis of Khanna’s public statements about wealth inequality and the sins of the rich shows that Khanna is careful to single out “billionaires” for criticism, rather than centimillionaires like his father in law Monte Ahuja. But while Ahuja is not a billionaire (there are fewer than 1,000 billionaires in the United States, and no billionaires in Congress), Khanna’s enormous family wealth is structured and managed in the very fashion he criticizes. Irrevocable trusts, such as the ones owned by Khanna’s children, shield beneficiaries from paying inheritance taxes, experts say.
Khanna is also one of the loudest advocates in support of banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks, saying the practice presents a specter of insider trading that has caused a “crisis of confidence right now in our democracy.” At the same time, however, Khanna holds the crown as the most prolific stock trader in Congress by a wide margin, with his disclosures showing that the trusts owned by his wife and children made over 4,100 individual trades totaling an estimated $53 million in 2025 alone. Khanna maintains he has never traded stocks and never will, telling the Political Wallet Substack page in May that he has “zero say” and “zero knowledge” of the trades being made by his wife’s trust, which was set up by his father in law prior to their marriage in 2015.
Khanna has also positioned himself as an opponent of hedge funds, saying in 2021 there was “visceral anger” over their role in propelling economic inequality in the United States. But Khanna, in his 2024 financial disclosure, reported that his wife and children, through their trusts, own positions in hedge funds including Silver Point Distressed Opportunity Fund, a Connecticut-based hedge fund that specializes in buying debt from struggling companies, typically at a steep discount. The fund manages $4.6 billion in assets and, as of June 2026, is closed to new investors.
The California Democrat’s wife and children also own minority stakes in MAI Capital Management, a behemoth wealth management firm based in Cleveland that services ultra-high net worth individuals and has more than $65 billion in assets under management. Two trusts—one for Khanna’s wife and another for his children—report owning more than $1 million worth of MAI Capital Management with no disclosed ceiling.
Monte Ahuja, the source of the Khanna family’s wealth, remains active in the philanthropic scene in Cleveland and in Naples, Fla.—a playground of the Midwest’s wealthiest snowbirds—where he and his wife have owned a sprawling, Gulf-facing penthouse condominium for more than 20 years that may now be worth as much as $30 million. Ahuja, an Indian immigrant, says he arrived in the United States in 1969 with just $12 in his pocket. In 1975, Ahuja founded Transtar, an automotive transmission distribution company. He sold the bulk of his stake in the company in 2005 to a pair of venture capital firms and used the proceeds to form MURA Holdings, a direct investment firm through which he bought companies with annual revenues of up to $100 million.
MURA Holdings now manages large portions of the assets held in the trusts for Khanna’s wife and children, including their stakes in MAI Capital Management and the Silver Point fund (MURA Holdings reportedly owns between 10 percent and 25 percent of MAI Capital Management).
ARECO LP, another fund managed by Khanna’s father in law, manages some other assets in the trusts for Khanna’s children, including a commercial property in Walton Hills, Ohio, worth $5.3 million where Transtar operates a retail establishment.
Within the Khanna children’s various trusts is their ownership interest in three Cleveland-area private golf clubs. Khanna reported his children own “over $1,000,000” in Barrington Golf Club in Aurora, Ohio, which charges new members an initiation fee of up to $30,000, according to records obtained by the Free Beacon. The children earned between $100,000 and $1 million in unearned income from their investment in Barrington in 2024, Khanna said in his financial disclosure that year.
The California Democrat’s children own another stake worth “over $1,000,000” in ARECO Golf, which owns Sand Ridge Golf Club near Chardon, Ohio, and Mayfield Country Club in South Euclid, Ohio—membership initiation fees at those two clubs run upward of $45,000. Khanna’s children earned another $100,000 to $1 million in unearned income from ARECO in 2024.
The golf club investments are just one of several ways that Monte Ahuja has ensured his grandchildren—and perhaps their children and grandchildren—will never need to worry about money. That is, unless wealth tax proposals such as the one his son in law is promoting actually go into effect. Regardless, Khanna’s father in law has said that golf investments are little more than a passion pursuit in his retirement. After he purchased the Sand Ridge and Mayfield golf clubs in 2018, Monte Ahuja told the press he acquired the clubs not to make money, but because he “loves the game of golf.”
Khanna’s office declined to comment.
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