Small Business Admin Lead Kelly Loeffler Is Married to Jeffrey Sprecher, a Corporate Bigshot
In a sense, Kelly married her boss.
Published Feb. 20 2025, 2:37 p.m. ET
In February 2025, President Donald Trump tapped former senator Kelly Loeffler to head his Small Business Administration team. The Georgia politician wasn't always the biggest Trump supporter, but she quickly lined up behind the president during his campaign for re-election in 2024.
When she's not moving and shaking the national small business stage, her personal life includes being married to a man who many people consider a corporate royal, and for good reason. Here's what we know about Kelly's marriage and the political path that took her away from Trump and back again.
Kelley Loeffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher, and he's a pretty big deal.
When it comes to her personal life, Kelly doesn't share a ton online. We know she was born in Illinois and raised on her family's corn and soybean farm alongside her brother, Brian. In high school, she was in the marching band, on the varsity track and basketball teams, and graduated in 1988.
From there, she earned a Bachelor of Science in marketing and a master's in business administration before securing a job with Citibank.
In 2002, she started working for Intercontinental Exchange, which is a publicly traded firm that owns the New York Stock Exchange. The CEO of Intercontinental Exchange? Jeffrey Sprecher, whom Kelly married in 2004.
Kelly was later promoted to senior vice president of investor relations and corporate communications. In 2018, she became the CEO of Bakkt, which happens to be a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange.
In 2010, Kelly bought a minority stake in the WNBA team Atlanta Dream before buying the team outright in a joint venture with Mary Brock in 2011. After being embroiled in controversy for criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement, she sold her stake in the team in 2021 and stepped away, according to NPR.
Due to her own career and her husband's, Kelly was the wealthiest member of the U.S. Senate when she served from 2020 to 2021, per PBS.
Kelly's political record once carried her away from, then closer to, Donald Trump.
Kelly's elevation to national politics came in 2020, after Georgia's Governor Brian Kemp appointed her to the role to fill the seat vacated by Johnny Isakson.
At the time, Brian celebrated her as the moderate future of the party, according to PBS. However, nearly as soon as she was appointed to the role, she had to campaign to be re-elected a few months later.
Facing strong headwinds amid American dissatisfaction, PBS writes that she decided to cling to Trump's reputation and hope to ride his popularity back to Congress. She billed herself as “more conservative than Attila the Hun.”
However, it may have been Kelly's connection to Trump that assured that she lost her reelection efforts.
Trump was pushing hard for the idea that the 2020 election was illegitimate, so when Kelly and competitor Democrat Raphael Warnock faced off in a January run-off, Kelly lost. Low GOP voter turnout spelled her doom, a possibly foreseeable outcome of blasting elections as corrupt and pointless.
As Trump's Small Business Administration lead, Kelly returned to national politics.