Ron DeSantis

Ronald Dion DeSantis was born on September 14, 1978, in Jacksonville, Florida, to parents Karen DeSantis (née Rogers) and Ronald Daniel DeSantis. His middle name, Dion, honors the singer Dion DiMucci, and his family name has different pronunciations. His mother's family name, Rogers, was chosen by her grandfather (né Ruggiero) upon immigrating from Italy. All of DeSantis's great-grandparents immigrated from Southern Italy during the first Italian diaspora. His parents and all of his grandparents were born and grew up in Western Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio.

DeSantis's mother worked as a nurse and his father installed Nielsen TV-rating boxes. They met while attending Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, during the 1970s and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, during that decade. His family then moved to Orlando, Florida, before relocating when he was six years old to the city of Dunedin in Florida's Tampa Bay area. His only sibling, younger sister Christina, died in 2015 at age 30 from a pulmonary embolism. He was a member of the Dunedin National team that made it to the 1991 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. DeSantis attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School and Dunedin High School, graduating in 1997.

After high school, DeSantis studied history at Yale University. He was captain of Yale's varsity baseball team; he played outfield, and as a senior in 2001 he had the team's best batting average at.336. DeSantis is a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and of the St. Elmo Society, one of Yale's secret societies. While attending Yale, he worked a variety of jobs, including as an electrician's assistant and a coach at a baseball camp. DeSantis graduated from Yale in 2001 with a B.A., magna cum laude.

After Yale, DeSantis taught history and coached for a year at Darlington School in Georgia, then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2005 with a Juris Doctor, cum laude. At Harvard, he was business manager for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Post-naval career

With two law-school friends, DeSantis founded an LSAT test-prep company, LSAT Freedom, that one of the other co-founders billed as "the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates". DeSantis also worked as a litigator at the Miami-based law firm Holland & Knight before running for Congress in 2012.

DeSantis met his wife, Casey Black, at a golf course at the University of North Florida. She had been a television host for the Golf Channel, and then a television journalist and news anchor at WJXT. They married on September 26, 2009, in a chapel at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa. DeSantis is Catholic, as was his wedding ceremony.

The couple lived in Ponte Vedra Beach, near St. Augustine, until it was drawn into the neighboring 4th congressional district. They then moved to a condo owned by Kent Stermon in Palm Coast, north of Daytona Beach, which remained in the district he represented: the 6th. They have three children, born in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

He is a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. In 2022, DeSantis appeared on Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. As of September 2023, his net worth was estimated at $1.5 million, up from $300,000 in 2021; his $1.25 million book deal with HarperCollins in 2022 made him a millionaire by the end of that year.