ATLANTA — The upcoming election stands to be the most expensive in Georgia's history. A man who will be spending some of that money is married to Kelly Loeffler – the soon-to-be U.S. Senator appointed to replace Johnny Isakson.
This is the story of an Atlanta power couple. One will be Senator next month. The other is reportedly worth half-a-billion dollars and is expected to spend a bit of that to help his wife face voters in 2020.
Jeffrey Sprecher's company owns the New York Stock Exchange – which has made him a visible player in the financial industry.
"I’m a serial entrepreneur," he told Bloomberg News in April 2018.
In a video now on YouTube, Sprecher cheerfully tells the story of how he amassed what’s reported to be a half-billion-dollar fortune.
"I saw a little failing company here in Atlanta, and I acquired it," Sprecher told Bloomberg.
He built it into a Fortune 500 company called the Intercontinental Exchange or ICE.
"We were nine people. We didn’t think we’d make a Fortune 500 company, for crying out loud," he told a site called TechRides.
Sprecher was one of a hundred people in an overcrowded room at the Georgia Capitol, Wednesday. He was next to his wife Kelly Loeffler. She will become a Senate appointee in January – and a Republican Senate candidate facing voters next fall. The couple will finance much of the campaign themselves.
Records show Sprecher and Loeffler have been generous with federal campaign contributions for years.
The vast majority of their donations have been to Republican causes. Like Loeffler, Sprecher has also given thousands of dollars to Democrats – including Georgia Congressman David Scott; and former congressmen Jim Marshall and John Barrow.
There was also a $2,000 donation from Sprecher to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign – from 2007, when she was running in the Democratic primaries against Barack Obama. In 2013, Sprecher told Atlanta Magazine his wife is more politically conservative than he is.
Sprecher is an easygoing presence on the web – showing off his rare sports car here, talking up his Midwestern roots here.
He rarely appears with his wife. But that has already started to change.
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