What is Julian Assange’s net worth
Julian Assange is an Australian publisher, journalist, computer programmer, and Internet activist who gained notoriety for being the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that releases classified and private information about governments and politicians.
Assange has a net worth of $300 thousand and is known for his public appearances around the world, where he speaks about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award and Readers’ Choice for TIME magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year.
During his youth, Assange was known as “Australia’s most famous, ethical, computer hacker” by the Personal Democracy Forum.
Early Life and Hacking
Julian Paul Hawkins was born on July 3, 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, Australia to Christie Ann Hawkins and John Shipton, but took his stepfather’s surname and became Julian Assange. At 16, he started hacking under the name Mendax and formed a group called “The International Subversives.” Assange married Teresa and had a son, Daniel, in 1989. They divorced and disputed custody until 1999. In 1991, he was caught hacking into Nortel’s Melbourne terminal and was charged with 31 counts of related crimes in 1994. He pled guilty to 24 charges in 1996 and was released on bond. Assange studied programming at the University of Melbourne from 2003-2006, but did not finish a degree.
Assange and WikiLeaks
Assange registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but it remained unused. He co-founded WikiLeaks in 2006, with the goal of creating an “open-source, democratic intelligence agency”. The site allowed anonymous submissions, and published leaked information about a variety of topics, including drone strikes in Yemen and procedures at Guantanamo Bay.
Assange and WikiLeaks gained international attention when they published bank records from Julius Baer, a Swiss bank. They also published hacked emails from Sarah Palin during the 2008 U.S. presidential election. WikiLeaks has five media partners, including The New York Times, and in 2010 they began publishing correspondence between the U.S State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world, known as Cablegate.
Julian Assange’s Legal Troubles
In 2010, Chelsea Manning leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks, leading to an investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, under the Espionage Act of 1917. Assange took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 after Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for him over allegations of sexual assault. In 2013, the U.S. officials said it was unlikely they would indict Assange for publishing classified documents. However, after Trump became president, the U.S. began pursuing Assange.
In April 2019, Assange’s asylum was withdrawn by Ecuador, and he was arrested by British police. He was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching the Bail Act and was later charged with violating the Espionage Act. In January 2021, a judge ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the U.S. due to concerns about his mental health and the risk of suicide in a U.S. prison. He was also denied bail by the U.S. on the grounds that he was a flight risk.
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