Photo by: Nathan Congleton/MSNBC Mika Brzezinski on the set of Morning Joe.
Mika Brzezinski is the co-host of MSNBC‘s Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough, and was the latest target of President Donald Trump‘s Twitter tirades. She’s paid $2 million a year, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
In a pair of tweets, he called the TV host “Low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and said she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when they visited Mar-A-Lago on New Year’s Eve. Brzezinski responded by tweeting a picture of a box of Cheerios that reads, “Made for little hands.”
Trump, Scarborough and Brzezinski once had a friendly relationship, so much so that they were often criticized by media observers for being too friendly with him. That all changed recently when Brzezinski and Scarborough began criticizing Trump after he took office.
The New York Times reports that president has been fuming over their increasingly critical coverage of Trump and his administration. A source told the Times that Trump has even referred to Scarborough as a “psycho” and considers their critiques a personal betrayal.
“It’s a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty personal attacks instead of doing his job,” an MSNBC spokesperson said in a statement.
Here’s a look at Brzezinski’s net worth and salary.
1. Brzezinski Has an Estimated Net Worth of $12 Million
GettyMika Brzezinski in 2015.
Brzezinski has an estimated net worth of $12 million, Celebrity Net Worth estimates.
The 50-year-old Brzezinski has been in journalism since 1990 and has been at MSNBC since 2007. That same year, she joined Morning Joe and she’s been co-hosting ever since. In May 2017, the two announced that they are engaged.
Brzezinski has two daughters with her ex-husband, Jim Hoffer. They were married from 1993 to 2016.
She’s the daughter of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbignew Brzezinski, who died last month. Her mother is sculptor Emilie Brzezinski. She also has two brothers, Mark and Ian, who have both worked in government.
2. Brzezinski Earns $2 Million a Year from MSNBC
Her MSNBC contract pays Brezezinski $2 million, Celebrity Net Worth reports. The same site notes that Scarborough makes $6 million a year.
In 2011, the pay gap between the two hosts earned media attention, when Brzezinski wrote about her past struggles to earn pay equal to her male colleagues in the book Knowing Your Value. She told the Huffington Post at the time that she almost left MSNBC because of it in 2008. At the time, Scarborough was earning 14 times as much as Scarborough.
Then one day, she saw that Scarborough put in one of the bonuses he got for their good ratings in her bank account. She didn’t see it as an act of kindness, but an attempt to convince her to stay at the show.
Scarborough and Brzezinski later revealed on Morning Joe that he helped her get a salary increase. However, she still makes less than Scarborough.
3. She Blamed Herself for Getting Her Low-Paying Contract, Saying She Took the Low Offer
In a 2011 Time Magazine interview, she blamed herself for taking a lowball offer to join MSNBC.
“I let it happen. That’s how it happened. I signed a contract. They made an offer, a very low offer,” she told the magazine. “It’s like buying a house. Nobody loses by trying to lowball [the seller]. And I do not blame my employer for trying to get the best value out of everybody who works for them.”
She told Time that, after talks to get a pay increase, the two sides ended up in a “much better place.”
In Knowing Your Value, Brzezinski theorized that women take low offers because they feel lucky just to have a job. Then, they don’t make the right demands.
“Then we get our sea legs, and we develop our talent and our skills and our ability to communicate on the air, and then we step out to have babies,” Brzezinski told the magazine. “Maybe we’re gone for six months, maybe a year. No matter what, coming back to work after having a baby feels like walking on the moon. And I believe we get that whole grateful-to-be-there feeling all over again. I think it’s very hard to break that pattern. We end up being obsequious and needy and overly chatty and overly dramatic, when we need to be clear about what it is we bring to the table.”
As for the length of the contract, Scarborough told Vanity Fair last year that they are signed to an “extended” deal. “We’re exactly where we want to be,” he said.
4. ‘Morning Joe’ Has Earned More Viewers Than CNN for 9 Straight Quarters
As TVNewser points out, the ratings for MSNBC have only been going up since Trump took office. Morning Joe specifically has beat CNN’s New Day for nine consecutive quarters.
On June 27, MSNBC announced that Joe averaged 997,000 total viewers during the second quarter of 2017, which was a record for the 6 a.m.-9 p.m. time slot. The number of total viewers has consistently grown for the show and it had the best-ever rating in the 25-54 demographic for the network.
Of course, Morning Joe still can’t beat Fox & Friends, which averaged 1,612,000 total viewers in the second quarter of 2017.
5. Brzezinski Listed Her Bronxville Home for $2.1 Million in February
In February, just a couple of months before confirming her engagement to Scarborough, Variety reported that Brzezinski listed the Bronxville, New York home she shared with Hoffer for $2,095,000.
The home is a three-story Tudor-style mansion and was built in 1915. The property covers .3 acres and has seven bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms. Brzezinski and Hoffer bought the home in 2012 for $1.9 million.
Variety reports that property records also show that the couple shared a rural home west of Philadelphia that they bought for $295,000 in 2008, and an apartment house in New York City, which they bought in 2015 for $870,000.
