Lester Holt attends The Hollywood Reporter’s 5th Annual 35 Most Powerful People in New York Media. (Getty)
NBC’s Lester Holt is the moderator of the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. What is the NBC Nightly News anchor’s net worth?
According to Celebrity Net Worth, Lester Holt’s net worth is approximately $12 million. For comparison, the former anchor of Nightly News, Brian Williams, is estimated to have a net worth of $40 million.
As of 2015, Holt was receiving a salary of at least $4 million a year with NBC News, according to IndieWire. This is lower than his predecessor, Brian Williams, who was being paid $10 million per year by the network.
In fact, it was reported last year that this caused some behind the scenes drama at NBC, as Holt wanted his salary to be bumped up to $10 million to put him on the same level as Brian Williams.
“Lester’s team feels that if he gets half of what Williams was making, the message to him and the newsroom is he’s half the anchor Brian was,” a source told The New York Post at the time. Any final agreement Holt and the network may have come to was not reported on.
Lester Holt has been a journalist since 1981, with his first major job being with a CBS News affiliate in New York City. He dropped out of college in order to accept this job; he was in his junior year at California State University, Sacramento at the time. Holt began working full-time at NBC in 2003.
An opportunity opened for Lester Holt in 2015, when it was revealed that Nightly News host Brian Williams had lied about a story involving his helicopter being hit by gunfire while in Iraq. Holt, who had previously filled in for Williams, was hired as a temporary anchor after Williams departed, and he was eventually made the permanent new host.
Holt lives in Manhattan, New York with his wife and two children.