Nicholas Riccio

The gap: the 2005 profile behind the “who is he” stories

Most search results about Nicholas Riccio read like appendices to his wife’s biography: a content-farm net-worth figure, the 32-year age gap, a Halloween-photo controversy. The part of his story competitors rarely quote is the part he told himself, in detail, two decades ago. In 2005, the Sunday Herald (via Seacoast Online) profiled him as the “M Street Millionaire,” chronicling his rise from living on the street to running a multimillion-dollar real-estate business ¹. That profile — the single most detailed public record of his early life — is where any serious account of him has to start.

Riccio grew up in Hudson, New Hampshire, as one of four children in an impoverished family of six that moved around frequently ¹. His parents, Marilyn and Anthony, divorced when he was young ¹. By the age of 18 he was homeless, and while attending Plymouth State University he lived out of his car to afford tuition ¹. In the 2005 profile he described the coping habits of that period bluntly: “When I was 19 or 20, I would call my buddies to go over [to] their houses to watch a game just so I could take a shower” ¹.

Hampton Beach and his mother’s memory

The profile also tied his business to his family. His mother Marilyn died of cancer in 1997, and his father died in 2002 ¹. His investment in Hampton Beach’s M Street grew out of a drive he took with his mother, and he has said he honors her memory through the work ¹. What followed was a steady accumulation of property: he owns Riccio Enterprises LLC, along with more than 15 buildings at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, which he rents out to families ². Leavitt has described him as introverted and private — he keeps no social media presence — which is why, apart from that 2005 profile, the public record on him is so thin ¹.

The marriage to Karoline Leavitt

Riccio is the husband of Karoline Leavitt, the former White House press secretary, and is 32 years her senior ¹. The two met in 2022, were engaged at Christmas 2023, and welcomed their son Nicholas Robert Riccio — nicknamed “Niko” — on July 10, 2024 ²³. They married in January 2025, six months after Niko’s birth and days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration ².

Leavitt has given her own account of the relationship on The Megyn Kelly Show in March 2025, calling it “a very atypical love story” ². She said a mutual friend hosted an event at a restaurant that Riccio owns in New Hampshire and invited him; Leavitt was speaking at the event. “We met and we were acquainted as friends. And then we fell in love,” she said ². Of her husband she added: “He is my greatest supporter, he’s my best friend and he’s my rock,” noting that he had built a successful business himself and fully supported her in building her own career ².

What this profile does not claim

• It does not state a net-worth figure for Nicholas Riccio; the “$6 million” number that circulates comes only from unverifiable “reports” and is refused here.
• It does not state his exact date of birth, which was not verified from a citable source.
• It does not reproduce the original 2005 Sunday Herald article beyond what the fully read secondary source quotes, because the original page could not be fetched in full.
• It does not state the unverified details that circulate in content-farm bios, such as a specific school-attendance chronology beyond Plymouth State or a claimed founding year for his company.

Footnotes

1. TheList, “Tragic Details About Karoline Leavitt’s Decades-Older Husband Nicholas Riccio,” 2025. https://www.thelist.com/1832830/tragic-details-about-karoline-leavitt-husband-nicholas-riccio/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. Economic Times, “Karoline Leavitt, 28, called out for ‘photoshopping’ her 60-year-old husband in Halloween photos: Who is Nicholas Riccio and what is his net worth?” November 2025. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/us-news-karoline-leavitt-28-called-out-for-photoshopping-her-60-year-old-husband-in-halloween-photos-who-is-nicholas-riccio-and-what-is-his-net-worth/articleshow/125079004.cms ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. People, “Karoline Leavitt Last-Day Press Secretary Update on Replacement Search,” August 2026. https://people.com/karoline-leavitt-last-day-press-secretary-update-on-repalcement-search-12069328 ↩