Hegseth's $BTC Stash Can't Beat the Boss: Pentagon Chief Holds Up to $65K in Coinbase 💼

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth holds Bitcoin in a Coinbase wallet, according to his annual financial disclosure covering 2025 and released by the Office of Government Ethics. The $BTC appears under "other assets and income" as two separate entries inside a single Coinbase wallet, one valued at between $15,001 and $50,000 and the other at between $1,001 and $15,000. Because disclosure forms report ranges rather than exact figures, the combined holding sits somewhere between about $16,000 and $65,000, with the income type for both recorded as capital gains. Neither entry appears in the report's transactions section, which captures purchases and sales above $1,000 during the reporting period, so on the face of the filing Hegseth did not buy or sell $BTC above that threshold across the year.

The Bitcoin position is a small slice of a broader portfolio. The filing shows at least $3.1 million in cash, retirement investments and Bitcoin, with five retirement accounts held by Hegseth and his wife Jennifer containing index and Avantis funds. Three U.S. bank cash accounts are listed, one of them worth more than $1 million. That account represents the filing's sharpest change: an account under the same description held between $15,001 and $50,000 in his December 2024 nominee disclosure, CNBC noted, and because disclosures use ranges and the new filing provides no upper bound for that line, the two figures cannot be directly compared as totals.

The transactions section is dominated by a wholesale exit from individual stocks in the weeks after Hegseth took office in January 2025. On February 7 of that year he sold holdings in Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Honeywell, all defense contractors, along with KKR and Blackstone. The Lockheed and Northrop stakes were each in the $1,001 to $15,000 range, and his ethics agreement did not specifically require him to divest them. Six weeks later he sold a broader list including Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Visa, and across the rest of 2025 he bought index funds instead. On the liabilities side, the filing lists two mortgages on a personal residence, each in the $1,000,001 to $5,000,000 range, one taken out in 2022 and one in 2025 at an interest rate of 8.5%.

Hegseth signed the report in May. An agency ethics official certified it in August, and the Office of Government Ethics certified it on September 18. The sums are modest next to the administration's most prominent crypto holder. President Donald Trump's own disclosure, released earlier this year, reported more than $1.2 billion in earnings from crypto ventures and more than $50 million in Bitcoin holdings, with the president's filing totaling over 900 pages.