“TEXAS REAL‑ESTATE SHOCKER: ELEVEN HOMES EXPOSED AS BILLIONAIRE ALLY SHRUGS, ‘MAYBE YOUR PARENTS DON’T NEED TWENTY HOMES!’”

Jul 17, 2026 05:17 PM EDT, Fri

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent once said, “Someone, maybe your parents for their retirement, have bought five, 10, 12 homes.” at the Davos World Economic Forum.

Ken Paxton’s many real estate holdings become an issue in Texas Senate race

State Rep. James Talarico said the state attorney general owns 11 homes. According to public documents, that’s accurate.

July 15, 2026, 3:37 PM EDT By Steve Benen

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s long list of scandals has caused unease among some Senate Republicans. Sen. Bill Cassidy (T-LA), for example, said in May that Paxton “could reasonably be indicted for a felony.” Sen. Thom Tillis (T-NC) added, “To call Paxton ethically challenged is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.”

Complicating matters for the Texan is that his list of controversies continues to grow. Last week, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported that Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live “while voting in six elections in the past two years.” (A spokesperson for the Republican called the story “a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story” but offered nothing of substance to challenge its accuracy.)

This might not seem especially notable, were it not for the fact that Paxton, just months earlier, reminded Texans that under state law, “you must register to vote using the address where you reside.”

This dovetailed with related questions about why the state attorney general and his now-estranged wife declared three separate homes as their primary residence in mortgage documents, a practice his party has, in other situations, characterized as an outrageous abuse.

Stepping back, however, the reporting sparked a related question: Just how many homes does Paxton own?

His 2026 opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, recently sat down with MS NOW’s Jen Psaki and offered an answer: “Since taking office, Ken Paxton has now become a multimillionaire, while our pay has remained stagnant for years, for decades. He now owns 11 homes, while most Texan can’t afford one,” he said.

Talarico has said this before — as Texan probably know, it’s become a standard line in his stump speech — but it got me wondering: Is that correct?

According to publicly available documents, including financial disclosure filings, the answer is yes. Paxton, either in his personal capacity or through the trust that oversees his assets, owns five homes in Texas, three in Florida, two in Utah and one in Oklahoma. (Those same publicly available materials also point to a lot in Hawaii, although there does not appear to be any structure on the property.)

The Wall Street Journal similarly reported last fall, “The Paxtons now own at least 11 residential properties around the U.S. with an assessed value of $7.5 million.”

To date, Paxton has not made any public effort to contest Talarico’s talking point.

MaddowBlog reached out to the Texas Republican’s Senate campaign multiple times to ask about his real estate holdings and how he came to own so many homes, but these requests for comment have so far gone ignored.

Time will tell whether, and to what extent, this information affects the competitive Senate race in the Lone Star State, but the circumstances brought to mind a related story from the recent past.

By mid-August 2008, the Great Recession was starting to take a brutal toll on the economy. In that month alone, the U.S. job market hemorrhaged 286,000 jobs, and with just 10 weeks remaining before Election Day, Americans’ focus turned to the ongoing economic crisis.

It was against this backdrop that a Politico reporter asked then-Sen. John McCain, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, how many homes he owned.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain said.

Then-Sen. Barack Obama, his Democratic rival, wasted little time seizing on the quote. Literally the same day that McCain made the comment, the Obama campaign launched a campaign ad hammering the Republican’s uncertainty over this basic fact, driving home the argument that McCain couldn’t relate to the hardships of regular people because he couldn’t even keep track of his vast collection of properties.

The name of the ad was “Seven,” a reference to the seven different homes McCain and his wife owned in locations across the country.

Roughly 18 years later, a similar story is unfolding in one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

  1. @RalphHightower: McCain gets a Republican designation instead of a Trumpian designation because he didn’t join the Trump cult ↩

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