Linda McMahon spent nearly three decades building WWE into a multibillion-dollar entertainment company before walking away entirely to build a second career in government, one that has now culminated in her running the same federal department responsible for investigating the kind of misconduct allegations she and her husband, Vince McMahon, are currently fighting in court.
She is the 13th United States Secretary of Education, sworn in on March 3, 2025.
Linda McMahon Biography
She was born Linda Marie Edwards on October 4, 1948, in New Bern, North Carolina, into a Welsh-American family, the only child of Henry and Evelyn Edwards, who worked on a military base near their home.
Linda McMahon grew up an athletic tomboy, playing basketball and baseball as a girl, and was raised in a Roman Catholic household.
She met Vince McMahon while both were teenagers, married him in 1966 shortly after graduating high school, and went on to earn her bachelor’s degree from East Carolina University in 1969, majoring in French, with early aspirations of becoming a schoolteacher.
Vince McMahon’s Wife
Linda and Vince McMahon are named as co-defendants in a lawsuit filed in Maryland by men who worked as underage ringside crew members, known within WWE as ring boys, during the 1980s and 1990s.
The suit alleges both McMahons knew a WWE ringside announcer had what court filings describe as a peculiar and unnatural interest in young boys, that Linda fired the announcer for a period before allegedly allowing him back on the condition he stay away from the boys involved, and that the two helped create a company environment in which sexual abuse could occur.
The case, which eventually named eight alleged victims, was known to exist before McMahon’s SBA nomination years earlier, but drew renewed national attention once she became a Cabinet nominee.
The McMahons have denied all allegations, and Linda’s attorney, Laura Brevetti, has called the lawsuit baseless, saying the FBI investigated similar claims at the time and found no grounds to pursue them.
A federal judge in Maryland ruled on December 11, 2025, that the case could proceed, denying most of the McMahons’ motions to dismiss in a 48-page ruling, and the lawsuit remains active, carrying particular weight given that McMahon’s Cabinet role includes oversight of investigations into sexual misconduct within federally funded education programs.
Vince McMahon stepped down as Chairman and CEO of WWE in 2022 amid separate misconduct allegations, including a reported multimillion-dollar settlement with a former employee.
In 2023, WWE merged with UFC’s parent company, Endeavor, to form TKO Group Holdings, restructuring the ownership of the company Linda and Vince spent decades building together. Vince has faced additional allegations of sexual abuse and harassment beyond the Ring Boys lawsuit.
Career
In 1980, Linda and Vince McMahon founded Titan Sports and later acquired Capitol Wrestling Corporation, the regional wrestling promotion owned by Vince’s father. Those ventures evolved into what became World Wrestling Entertainment.
Linda served as the company’s president from 1993 to 2000 and as its CEO from 1997 to 2009, overseeing WWE’s business operations as it grew from a small regional promotion into a publicly traded global enterprise.
She launched the company’s merchandising division and initiated its civic outreach programs, including Get R.E.A.L. and SmackDown! Your Vote.
Unlike her husband, who was a constant on-screen presence, Linda made only occasional appearances in WWE storylines, most notably in a feud with Vince that culminated at WrestleMania X-Seven. She stepped down as CEO in 2009.
Political Career
Linda McMahon’s political career began the same year she left WWE. In 2009, Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell appointed her to the state’s Board of Education.
Still, she resigned after roughly a year to launch the first of two unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaigns, winning the Republican primary both times but losing the 2010 general election to Richard Blumenthal and the 2012 general election to Chris Murphy.
She supported Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, serving as a Connecticut delegate to the Republican National Convention and a member of the RNC Rules Committee.
After Trump’s victory, he nominated her to lead the Small Business Administration, a post she held from February 2017 to April 2019.
At her SBA confirmation hearing, she described her WWE career directly, saying that over decades of hard work and strategic growth, she and her husband built it into a publicly traded global enterprise, and that she was proud of the success and understood exactly how much work it had taken to build.
After leaving the SBA, she chaired America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC, and later became chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank.
She co-chaired Trump’s presidential transition team alongside Howard Lutnick following the 2024 election, a role that led directly to her nomination as Secretary of Education on November 19, 2024.
Becoming Secretary of Education
During her February 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, McMahon laid out an agenda built around shrinking the department she was being asked to lead, telling senators she supported downsizing the Department of Education and returning education authority to individual states, while suggesting some of the department’s current responsibilities should be handled by other federal agencies entirely.
Her stated policy priorities include expanding parental rights in education, growing school choice options beyond traditional district boundaries, prioritizing career and technical education, and emphasizing what she calls evidence-based learning in core subjects like math and reading, while opposing what she describes as political indoctrination in classrooms and one-size-fits-all education models.
The Senate confirmed her on March 3, 2025, by a vote of 51 to 45, and she was sworn in as the 13th U.S. Secretary of Education that same day, succeeding Miguel Cardona.
Since taking office, according to reporting by The New Yorker published through NPR in April 2026, McMahon has moved well beyond stated policy goals into direct structural action, cutting roughly 50 percent of the department’s employees and transferring many of its core functions to other agencies, changes that have had significant downstream effects on federal education research, student loan management, and programs supporting students with disabilities.
Linda McMahon Net Worth
Linda and Vince McMahon have a combined net worth of $3.2 billion, according to Celebrity Net Worth, built almost entirely from their ownership stake in TKO Group Holdings, the company formed when WWE merged with UFC in September 2023.
At the time of that merger, the McMahons held 28.84 million TKO shares, roughly 16 percent of the company, worth an estimated $2.3 billion immediately following the IPO. That figure has shifted significantly since.
Vince has sold off large portions of his TKO holdings over the past two years, offloading more than $2 billion worth of shares by April 2025, including a $311.2 million sale to TKO and Endeavor in April 2024 and a $250 million sale to WME Group that same year.
By April 15, 2025, his remaining stake had fallen to roughly 8 million shares, about 9.8 percent economic ownership and 4.1 percent voting power in the company, a fraction of what the family held right after the merger.
He also resigned from TKO’s board of directors in January 2024, following a separate civil lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault and sex trafficking filed by a former WWE employee, allegations he has denied.
Linda’s own financial position is better documented than most Cabinet officials’, thanks to the federal disclosure she filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics ahead of her confirmation.
That filing showed roughly $12 million spread across ten U.S. bank accounts, between $25- $50 million held in a Morgan Stanley money market account, and more than $2 million in personal equity and bond fund holdings, on top of hundreds of millions more in assets held jointly with Vince and their children.
The couple’s real estate holdings include an $8 million estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, with access to a private polo field, a $3 million penthouse at Trump Parc in Stamford, a TriBeCa loft and additional properties in New York City, Las Vegas and Boca Raton.
As Secretary of Education, Linda draws an annual government salary of $250,600, a figure that is publicly disclosed and fixed by statute for Cabinet-level positions, regardless of her personal wealth.
The family’s fortune traces back to genuinely modest origins. Linda has spoken publicly about relying on food stamps early in her marriage to Vince, before WWE’s success.
She has described selling meatball sandwiches at small early wrestling events to help make ends meet, a detail that makes the scale of the family’s current wealth a real rags-to-riches story.
Beyond Linda and Vince, their children have built substantial wealth of their own within the same business: daughter Stephanie McMahon and her husband, Paul “Triple H” Levesque, have a combined net worth estimated at $250 million, and son Shane McMahon’s net worth is estimated at $200 million.
