Hunter Biden has said plenty of eyebrow-raising things over the years. But telling a court, under oath, that he doesn’t own a car or a cellphone might be the one that makes people stop scrolling and read it twice. That’s exactly what he did during a February 9 deposition, and the transcript just went public. His words were blunt: he has no assets, no vehicle, no phone, and according to him, no rich family standing behind him either.
The line that’s getting the most attention is short and to the point. “My family doesn’t have any money, and it’s not their debt anyway,” Biden said. For a guy whose last name has been near the center of American politics for decades, that’s a hard sell for a lot of people. Let’s walk through what he actually claimed, why he’s saying it, and the parts that don’t quite add up.
The $17 million bill behind all of this
None of this happens without a lawsuit. The law firm Winston Taylor, which used to be called Winston & Strawn, sued Biden in June 2025. The firm says he stiffed them out of roughly $17 million in legal fees. That money piled up while they defended him through two federal criminal cases, congressional investigations, and a stack of defamation lawsuits Biden himself filed against people he considered enemies.
Biden doesn’t really dispute the number. He agrees the firm is owed millions. His argument is different: he says the firm knew from the start that he couldn’t pay the full amount, and that both sides agreed to “work something out.” In other words, he’s basically saying, you knew I was broke when you signed me up, so don’t act surprised now. That’s the whole fight in a sentence.
“I don’t own a car. I don’t own a phone.”
When lawyers pressed him about what he actually owns that could cover the debt, Biden didn’t leave much room for follow-up questions. “I don’t have any assets. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a phone,” he said. He went further, insisting he has no stocks, no bonds, no savings accounts, nothing.
The one thing he admitted having any claim to is his own artwork. “I don’t own anything of any value other than my paintings which I painted myself,” he told the court, adding that he doesn’t even know what they’re worth anymore. It’s a striking picture from a man who was, until recently, one of the most talked-about figures in Washington. His current lawyers released the transcript themselves while fighting the firm’s demand to hand over his emails and encrypted text messages. So this wasn’t leaked. His own team put it out there on purpose.
The podcast tour tells a different story
Here’s where the “I have nothing” story runs into a wall. Biden’s lawyers described him in court as “impecunious,” which is just a fancy word for broke, and said he’s living abroad. But he’s been popping up in podcast studios all over the United States for months. He sat down with Barstool Sports for its Macrodosing show, which taped at the company’s Chicago studios.
You don’t have to be a detective to notice that Chicago is not abroad. A man who claims he can’t afford a phone somehow keeps showing up in American recording booths to talk for a couple hours at a time. Maybe the appearances don’t pay much, or anything at all. But the image of a guy touring the country’s podcast circuit while telling a judge he’s penniless is the kind of contrast that’s hard to spin. It’s the reason a lot of people read the deposition and rolled their eyes.
The paintings that used to sell for a fortune
Remember when Hunter Biden’s paintings were a whole national conversation? While his father was in the White House, his art sold for eye-popping prices. According to his own testimony, over roughly two or three years he sold 27 works at an average of nearly $55,000 each. Do that math and you land somewhere near a million and a half dollars just from paintings.
Then the market dried up. Biden said he’s sold exactly one painting for $36,000 since December 2023. That’s a steep drop from $55,000 a pop to one lonely sale in more than two years. Critics always said the prices had less to do with the art and more to do with the last name attached to it. Whether that’s fair or not, the numbers back up the idea that buyers lost interest fast once his dad left office. The paintings are now the only thing Biden admits owning, and even he says he doesn’t know what they’d fetch.
What about all those book advances?
This is the part that makes people squint. Biden said his family doesn’t have any money. But his father, former President Joe Biden, reportedly pocketed a $10 million book advance. Jill Biden got her own advance for a memoir. That’s real money, and it’s fair to ask where it went.
The reporting offers a few clues. One outlet described the family’s income “gravy train” as having dried up. Joe Biden has reportedly struggled to land the giant speaking fees that other former presidents cash in on. The grandkids have racked up big private school and University of Pennsylvania tuition bills. And a book advance sounds huge until you subtract taxes and agent fees, then get it paid out in chunks over time instead of one lump check. There’s also a separate report that Joe Biden left office carrying around $800,000 in personal debt. So the family may not be broke the way a regular family is broke, but the well isn’t gushing the way it once did.
The law firm says it went looking for donors
The firm has its own version of events, and it’s revealing. Winston Taylor says it didn’t just sit around waiting for a check. It claims it actively tried to connect Biden with donors inside what one lawyer called the “Democratic ecosystem” to help cover his bills.
Attorney Abbe Lowell, the well-known Washington litigator who took Biden on after the 2022 midterms, was also deposed. His testimony pulled back the curtain on the money hunt. Lowell said he reached out to third-party donors and even talked with Bob Bauer, a former Obama White House counsel and Joe Biden’s personal attorney, about setting up a legal defense fund and a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. That kind of group can accept unlimited donations without naming who gave the money. None of it raised enough to satisfy the firm. So the picture that emerges is a small army of well-connected people trying and failing to scrape together the cash.
He blamed his own lawyers for some of the bill
Biden didn’t just plead poverty. He pointed fingers at the legal strategy that ran up the tab in the first place. He blamed Lowell and the firm for pushing lawsuits against a list of his critics, including IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, Rudy Giuliani, and former Trump aide Garrett Ziegler.
Several of those cases got dropped as his money situation got worse. Back in March 2025, he asked a judge to toss his lawsuit against Garrett Ziegler, saying flatly, “I do not have the financial resources to continue litigating this case.” So the offensive lawsuits he once filed against his enemies became too expensive to keep going. That’s a big part of how the fees ballooned toward $17 million. Biden, who is himself a disbarred attorney in Connecticut, is now arguing the firm should have seen the whole mess coming.
He’s fighting a child support claim too
The law firm isn’t the only party chasing Biden for money. Lunden Roberts, the mother of his daughter Navy, is also taking legal action. She has called him a deadbeat dad and says he isn’t meeting his child support obligations. That claim lands very differently when it’s sitting next to a deposition where he swears he has no car, no phone, and no savings.
If you’re a court trying to figure out what someone can actually pay, these cases start talking to each other. A man arguing he’s flat broke to one court is the same man being told he owes support in another. Public reaction to all of it has ranged from open disbelief to mockery, mostly because the years of political access and overseas business deals sit so awkwardly next to the claim that there’s nothing left in the tank.
So is he really broke?
Here’s the honest read. Legal bills that size can wipe out even a well-off person, and Hunter Biden ran up two federal criminal defenses plus a pile of civil suits at the same time. The painting money vanished. The family’s big paydays got smaller and further apart. It’s completely possible the man is drowning in debt.
But “I don’t own a phone” from a guy taping podcasts in Chicago is the kind of line that invites skepticism, and he earned every bit of it. Whether a court buys his story is a different question than whether the public does. On that second one, the verdict already looks like it’s in.
