Wes Moore
Westley Watende Omari Moore is an American politician, businessman, author, and former U.S. Army officer, serving as the 63rd governor of Maryland since 2023.
Moore was born in Maryland and raised primarily in New York. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received a master's degree from Wolfson College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. After several years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserve, he became an investment banker in New York. Between 2010 and 2015, Moore published five books, including a young-adult novel. He served as CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation from 2017 to 2021. Moore authored The Other Wes Moore and The Work. He also hosted Beyond Belief on the Oprah Winfrey Network, and was executive producer and a writer for Coming Back with Wes Moore on PBS.
Moore is a member of the Democratic Party. He won the 2022 Maryland gubernatorial election, becoming Maryland's first African-American governor and the third African-American person elected governor of any U.S. state.
Early life and education
Moore was born in Takoma Park, Maryland in 1978, to William Westley Moore Jr., a broadcast news journalist, and Joy Thomas Moore, a daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Jamaica, and a news media professional. His maternal grandfather, James Thomas, a Jamaican immigrant, was the first black minister in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church. His grandmother, Winell Thomas, a Cuban who moved to Jamaica before immigrating to the U.S., was a retired schoolteacher. His grandmother's stepfather was Chinese.On April 16, 1982, when Moore was three years old, his father died of acute epiglottitis. In the summer of 1984, Moore's mother took him and his two sisters to live in the Bronx, New York, with her parents. His occasional babysitter was Kamala Harris' stepmother, Carol Kirlew. Moore attended Riverdale Country School. When his grades declined and he became involved in petty crime, his mother enrolled him in Valley Forge Military Academy and College. Moore's family moved back to Maryland after his mother's employer, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, relocated to Baltimore.
In 1998, Moore graduated Phi Theta Kappa from Valley Forge with an associate degree, completed the requirements for the United States Army's early commissioning program, and was appointed a second lieutenant of Military Intelligence in the Army Reserve. He then attended Johns Hopkins University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in international relations and economics in 2001. At Johns Hopkins, he also played wide receiver for the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays football team for two seasons, served as the chair of the university's Men of the NAACP branch, and was initiated into the Omicron Delta Kappa honor society, and Sigma Sigma chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha. In 1998 and 1999, Moore interned for Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke. He later became involved with the March of Dimes before serving in the Army. He also interned at the United States Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Tom Ridge.
After graduating, he attended Wolfson College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a master's degree in international relations in 2004 and submitted a thesis titled Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere. He then served in the 82nd Airborne Division and was deployed to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006, attaining the rank of captain. He left the Army in 2014.
Career
In February 2006, Moore was named a White House Fellow to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He later worked as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank in Manhattan and at Citibank from 2007 to 2012 while living in Jersey City, New Jersey. In 2009, Moore was included on Crain’s New York Business's "40 Under 40" list.In 2010, Moore founded a television production company, Omari Productions, to create content for networks such as the Oprah Winfrey Network, PBS, HBO, and NBC. In May 2014, he produced a three-part PBS series, Coming Back with Wes Moore, which followed the lives and experiences of returning veterans.
In 2014, Moore founded BridgeEdU, a company that provided services to support students in their transition to college. Students participating in BridgeEdU paid $500 into the program with varying fees. BridgeEdU was not able to achieve financial stability and was acquired by student financial services company Edquity in 2019, mostly for its database of clients. A Baltimore Banner interview with former BridgeEdU students found that the short-lived company had mixed results. Moore was the commencement speaker at Utah Valley University's class of 2014 graduation ceremony.
In September 2016, Moore produced All the Difference, a PBS documentary that followed the lives of two young African-American men from the South Side of Chicago from high school through college and beyond. Later that month, he launched Future City, an interview-based talk show with Baltimore's WYPR station.
From June 2017 until May 2021, Moore was CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization that attempts to alleviate problems caused by poverty in New York City. It works mainly through funding schools, food pantries and shelters. It also administers a disaster relief fund. During his tenure as CEO, the organization also raised more than $650 million, including $230 million in 2020 to provide increased need for assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moore also sought to expand his advocacy to include America's poor and transform the organization into a national force in the poverty fight.
Prior to his election as governor, Moore was a member of the boards of directors for Under Armour and Green Thumb Industries. In October 2022, Moore announced that he would use a blind trust to hold his assets and resign from every board position if elected governor. In May 2023, Moore finalized his trust, making him the first governor to have one since Bob Ehrlich. In May 2025, after similar conflict of interest concerns were raised about former governor Larry Hogan during his 2024 U.S. Senate campaign, Moore signed into law a bill requiring future governors to put their assets into a blind trust or sign an agreement not to participate in decisions affecting their businesses.
Books
On April 27, 2010, Spiegel & Grau published his first book, The Other Wes Moore. The 200-page book explores the lives of two young Baltimore boys who shared the same name and race, but largely different familial histories that leads them both down very different paths. In December 2012, Moore announced that The Other Wes Moore would be developed into a feature film, with Oprah Winfrey attached as an executive producer. In September 2013, Ember published his second book, Discovering Wes Moore. The book maintains the message and story set out in The Other Wes Moore, but is more accessible to young adults. In April 2021, Unanimous Media announced it would adapt The Other Wes Moore into a feature film. As of June 2022, a film has yet to be produced.In January 2015, Moore wrote his third book, The Work. In November 2016, he wrote This Way Home, a young adult novel about Elijah, a high school basketball player, who emerges from a standoff with a local gang after they attempt to recruit him to their basketball team, and he refuses. In March 2020, Moore and former Baltimore Sun education reporter Erica L. Green wrote Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City, which explores the 2015 Baltimore protests from the perspectives of eight Baltimoreans who experienced it on the front lines.
Political activities
Moore first expressed interest in politics in June 1996, telling a New York Times reporter that he planned to attend law school and enter politics after two years at Valley Forge. Moore first expressed interest in running for governor of Maryland during an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 2006, later telling The Baltimore Sun in October 2022 that he felt the idea of holding elected office only started to feel like a real possibility in 2020, when he was about to leave his job running Robin Hood.Moore gave a speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, supporting Barack Obama for president. In 2013, he said that he had "no interest" in running for public office, instead focusing on his business and volunteer work. Later that year, Attorney General Doug Gansler said that he considered choosing Moore as his running mate in the 2014 Maryland gubernatorial election, in which he ran with state delegate Jolene Ivey.
In April 2015, following the 2015 Baltimore protests, Moore said that the demonstrations in Baltimore were a "long time coming" and that Baltimore "must seize this moment to redress systemic problems and grow." Moore attended the funeral for Freddie Gray but left early to catch a plane to Boston for a speech he was giving on urban poverty. He later said he "felt guilty being away, but it wasn't just that. An audience in Boston would listen to me talk about poverty, but at a historic moment in my own city's history, I was." On the eighth anniversary of Gray's death in April 2023, Moore made a tweet calling his death a turning point for not just those who knew Gray personally, but the entire city.
In February 2017, Governor Larry Hogan nominated Moore to serve on the University System of Maryland Board of Regents. In October 2020, Moore was named to serve on the transition team of Baltimore mayor-elect Brandon Scott. In January 2021, Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates Adrienne A. Jones consulted with Moore to craft her "black agenda" to tackle racial inequalities in housing, health, banking, government, and private corporations.
Disputed biographical claims
In April 2022, CNN accused Moore of embellishing his childhood and where he actually grew up. Shortly after the article was published, Moore created a website that attempted to rebut the allegations.On November 19, 2024, Moore was cited with a Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service in Afghanistan. Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel pinned the decoration on Moore on December 14. Fenzel recommended Moore for the Bronze Star in 2006 and encouraged Moore to list the award in his application for a White House fellowship. Fenzel assumed the medal would have been awarded by the time the fellows were named. In his view, Moore's medal was awarded 20 years late. Moore failed to correct journalists who referred to him as a Bronze Star recipient, and he apologized for the mistake.
In December 2025, the Washington Free Beacon accused Moore of exaggerating various details of his academic and military achievements on his 2006 White House fellowship application, in which he claimed to have graduated Oxford a year and a half earlier than he had, did not submit his doctoral thesis, was working toward a doctorate at Oxford, and was a "foremost expert" on Islamic extremism who authored four articles and featured in two books on the threat of radical Islam in Latin America. A spokesperson for Moore disputed the claims made by the Free Beacon, saying that Moore had submitted his thesis and that the website would be spreading a conspiracy theory by suggesting otherwise, though his office was unable to locate the four articles Moore claimed to have contributed to. Julia Paolitto, the deputy head of university communications at Oxford University, clarified to WBFF that submitting a thesis to the Bodleian Library was not a requirement to complete the university's MLitt program, but it was a requirement to confer degrees at a ceremony, which Moore did not have. When asked about the Free Beacon report by Armstrong Williams of The Baltimore Sun, Moore described the story as a distraction and declined to release his doctoral thesis, saying that he was "not going to spend a second of my time trying to dig up a paper that I wrote 20 some odd years ago because a right-wing blog post is asking me to."