During his 19-year career, Shaquille O’Neal made approximately $292 million from contracts alone. Even though that’s more than enough money to live comfortably, he didn’t stop there; the NBA legend became interested in the business world early on and strategically made good use of his money to secure his future after retirement.
Since then, he became one of the best athlete investors in the world, with one of his many ventures being an investment in Google during its early years of development in 1999.
Years later, he humorously admitted that he had completely forgotten about his $250,000 investment — until he was reminded of it when Google’s value skyrocketed.
“The newspaper told me how much I made, and I couldn’t believe how much I made,” O’Neal said.
At that point, O’Neal still wasn’t fully invested in building his wealth through off-court ventures — and the story of how he found out about Google perfectly reflects that.
“I was at Four Seasons, I was eating lunch and there were four distinguished gentlemen sitting there playing with their kids, and the kids recognized me and they’re playing with me. Basically, I’m doing a babysitting job and one gentleman says, ‘I want to talk about this company called Google,’ and was just talking about search engines, saying, ‘You’ll be able to type in anything,’ and I was like, ‘That sounds good.‘ We had a meeting with them and it looked good and I put some money in and I forgot about it,” he said.
O’Neal eventually met with the guys and decided to invest his money in the company. After being reminded in the newspaper about Google’s exponential growth and success, which he had capitalized on, the legendary big man instantly started to regret not investing more money.
Based on the reported $250,000 figure that the 1999-00 MVP invested in one of the biggest companies ever, it is said the number skyrocketed to a whopping $16.5 million, but this was never confirmed.
Shaq should be an inspiration to every potential investor, not just an athlete looking to get into business. The reason behind this is his extensive portfolio of various investments, including numerous restaurant and fast food chains, such as Krispy Kreme, Papa John’s, Auntie Anne’s and, at one point, 155 Five Guys locations, which he sold in 2016. He also co-founded the Big Chicken chain.
In addition to Google, O’Neal invested in other tech companies, such as Ring, before it was acquired by Amazon. He also invested in another tech giant, Apple.
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