Rick Jackson's entire case for being governor of Georgia is that he is good at business. He built a health care staffing empire. He is spending his own fortune to say so. He has promised to "create more jobs than have ever been created in the history of Georgia."

The Daily Beast went and looked at how his companies treated the people who worked for them. It found millions of dollars paid out to settle claims that they were not paid what they were owed.

Nearly $2 million, about 300 workers, five years in court

In 2017, workers sued Jackson Nurse Professionals, the travel-staffing arm of the company Jackson founded. Their claim was not complicated. They said the company failed to properly pay their overtime, failed to pay bonuses they had earned, and failed to pay the wages they were owed when they left the job.

The case ran for five years. In 2022, the company settled for "almost $2 million," the Daily Beast reports, covering "about 300 workers."

About 300 people said they did the work and the money did not come, and after five years the company paid instead of taking it to trial.

The Daily Beast is clear about one limit on this: none of the settlements included a finding that Jackson personally broke labor laws. Companies settle for all sorts of reasons. But he owns them, he ran them, and he is running for governor on the strength of how he ran them.

It happened again, with foreign nurses

The overtime case is not the only one.

Avant Healthcare Professionals, another company inside Jackson's business, settled in June 2026 for $3 million with more than 5,000 current and former international workers. As we reported in August, the nurses who sued said Avant paid them less than the nurses hospitals hired directly, demanded tens of thousands of dollars from anyone who tried to leave, and had staff threaten to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One nurse was billed $41,832 and given 30 days to pay it.

That settlement landed days after Jackson became the Republican nominee for governor, while his television ads promised that immigrants who break the law would be "deported or departed."

Two companies. Two groups of workers. Two payouts. One pattern: the people doing the work said they were shorted, and the money came out at the end.

He is not short of money

Jackson's answer to almost every question about his campaign is that he is rich enough not to need anyone. "I have built a $3 billion business without any outside financial help, and when you know how to do stuff like that, you can do a lot of things to solve problems, and that's what I plan to do all over the state," he told a campaign audience in Augusta in April.

He is now spending close to $200 million of that fortune on the governor's race — an $87 million ad buy in late July, the largest in the race so far, on top of an estimated $100 million-plus already spent.

The company found nearly $2 million for those workers only after they sued and waited five years.

What he wants to do with the state

The gap between what Jackson says he will build and what his companies did shows up in his policy too.

He is invested in a data center in Texas, and told a room of Georgia business leaders that Georgia counties should be able to let data centers operate with no property taxes at all — "It's totally up to them," he said. His company signed a new state contract on July 22, and three weeks later he told voters that as governor he would never do business with the state of Georgia. Asked about Georgians without insurance, he said they still have healthcare, because they can go to an emergency room — a doctor serving in the legislature called that "battlefield triage."

Trump has credited Jackson's success to exactly the thing this record calls into question — his business acumen. "Congratulations to Rick Jackson, who very successfully campaigned on being 'TRUMP', and won," the president said after Jackson won the June Republican run-off.

What the record shows

Rick Jackson is running for governor of Georgia on a promise to create more jobs than any governor in the state's history. A company he owns, Jackson Nurse Professionals, was sued in 2017 by workers who said it shorted them on overtime, bonuses and final wages, and settled in 2022 for close to $2 million covering about 300 workers. A second company he owns, Avant Healthcare Professionals, paid $3 million this June to more than 5,000 current and former international workers who said they were underpaid and threatened with immigration authorities when they tried to quit. Neither settlement found that Jackson personally broke labor law. He is spending close to $200 million of his own money on this campaign.

Source

Farrah Tomazin, MAGA Billionaire Rick Jackson's Ugly Business Baggage Exposed, The Daily Beast, September 7, 2026. Photo illustration: Thomas Levinson / The Daily Beast / Getty / Reuters.