Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a message for anyone who spent the last few months wondering whether America’s gold reserves actually exist: they do, they’re at Fort Knox, and there are receipts.

Bessent confirmed this week that all US gold is fully accounted for, pointing to an audit report dated September 30, 2024, as the documentary evidence. The statement comes after President Trump and Elon Musk both raised public questions in early 2025 about the status of the reserves, turning what is usually a sleepy government accounting matter into something considerably more dramatic.

The numbers behind the vault door

The US officially holds 261.5 million ounces of gold, which makes it the largest official gold stock in the world by a significant margin. Roughly 56% of that sits at Fort Knox in Kentucky, with the remainder distributed across other Federal Reserve and Treasury facilities.

The government carries that gold on its books at $42.22 per ounce, a figure that has not been updated since the early 1970s when the US formally abandoned the gold standard. At that official accounting price, the total book value comes to approximately $11 billion.

Bessent addressed this directly, noting there are currently no plans to revalue the reserves or to leverage the gold for any sovereign wealth fund purposes. He also confirmed he has no plans to visit Fort Knox personally.

Why Trump and Musk started asking questions

The public skepticism that prompted Bessent’s statement originated with remarks from Trump and Musk in early 2025. Musk, who has been deeply involved in federal spending reviews through the Department of Government Efficiency, floated questions about whether the gold was actually present, echoing a long-running conspiracy theory that has circulated since at least the 1970s.

Fort Knox has not been subject to a full independent public audit in decades. The Treasury does conduct its own annual audits, which is what Bessent cited, but critics have long argued that an internal audit is not quite the same thing as an independent one.

The US abandoned the gold standard under Nixon in 1971, which means the gold at Fort Knox no longer backs the dollar in any formal monetary sense. It exists as a reserve asset, a relic of a different monetary era that still shows up on the government’s balance sheet at a price that has not been updated in over fifty years.

Bessent, confirmed as Treasury Secretary on January 27, 2025, with a Senate vote of 68 to 29, brings a hedge fund background to the role. He became the first openly gay Treasury Secretary in US history.

What this means for markets and the gold conversation

The more consequential question that Bessent deliberately left open is the revaluation issue. The $42.22 per ounce book value is a genuine accounting anomaly. If a future administration chose to mark those reserves to market, the paper gain on the government’s balance sheet would be substantial, and some economists have floated that as a potential mechanism for funding a sovereign wealth fund or reducing debt obligations without issuing new currency or bonds.

Bessent’s position is that this is not currently under consideration.