Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is Apparently an Excellent Blackjack Player

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker apparently knows his way around the blackjack table. He has claimed on his taxes that he won $1.4M in Vegas playing the popular card game last year. Although $1.4M is a lot of money for regular folks like you and me, it’s only a drop in the buck for him. That’s because Pritzker was born into the Pritzker family, one of America’s wealthiest dynasties, with a collective net worth of approximately $37 billion.

He says, “I was incredibly lucky” and that he plans to donate the entire windfall to charity. “You have to be, to end up ahead, frankly, going to a casino anywhere,” the Democrat said. “It was in Las Vegas, and I like to play cards.”

On top of the $1.4M, Pritzker and his wife made a total of $10.7 in total income in 2024.

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More About the Pritzker Family

The family’s fortune originated in the hotel industry: In 1957, Pritzker’s uncle Jay Pritzker and father Donald Pritzker acquired the Hyatt House hotel near Los Angeles International Airport for $2.3 million, transforming it into the global Hyatt Hotels Corporation. They expanded rapidly by building properties near airports and business hubs, capitalizing on the rise of corporate travel in the 1960s. Hyatt went public in 1962, was taken private, and relisted in 2009; the family retains a controlling stake in the publicly traded company, which now operates over 1,350 properties worldwide.

The Pritzkers diversified into other sectors, including stakes in Royal Caribbean Cruises (co-founded in 1969), the Marmon Group (a manufacturing conglomerate sold to Berkshire Hathaway in 2013 for $4.5 billion), TransUnion credit bureau, Braniff Airlines, and Ticketmaster (sold in 1993). Pritzker inherited roughly $1.3 billion from this empire, primarily tied to Hyatt shares and other family holdings. He is considered the fifth-wealthiest member of the family.