Wes Moore

Westley Watende Omari Moore (born October 15, 1978) is an American politician, investment banker, author, nonprofit executive, and former television producer.

Since 2023, he has been the 63rd governor of Maryland.

Moore was born in Maryland and raised largely 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.

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 their grandparents.

His 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.

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.

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.

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.

He was initiated into the Sigma Sigma Chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity at Johns Hopkins in 2000.

He then attended Johns Hopkins University, where he studied international relations and economics and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa in 2001.

At Hopkins, Moore played wide receiver for the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays football team for two seasons.

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 was activated in the Army following the September 11 attacks, and deployed to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006, attaining the rank of captain while serving in the 82nd Airborne Division.

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.

Between 2010 and 2015, Moore published five books, including a young-adult novel.

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.

He left the Army in 2014.

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.

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.

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 longtime member of the Democratic Party.

He won the 2022 Maryland gubernatorial election against Republican nominee Dan Cox, to become Maryland's first African-American governor, the third African-American person elected as governor of any U.S. state, and as of 2024, the only African-American incumbent governor of any U.S. state.

Moore is the fifth African-American U.S. state governor overall following P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana, Douglas Wilder of Virginia, Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and David Paterson of New York.

Moore was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, to William Westley Moore Jr., an African American and a broadcast news journalist, and Joy Thomas Moore, a daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Jamaica, and a media professional.

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.

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.