With all the talk about private equity and Silicon Valley hotshots buying up stakes in sports teams, it seems at least one athlete has turned the tables on those investors and made out big too.
Basketball superstar Kevin Durant has apparently turned a $250,000 venture investment into $60 million, which according to sports business guru Joe Pompliano, is "one of the best athlete investments ever (and more money than Durant will make playing in the NBA this season)." Pompliano says that Durant reaped the windfall as part of Nvidia buying Hugging Face, an open-source artificial intelligence platform used by developers, for $12.9 billion.
"I'm told Durant invested $100,000 in the seed round and $150,000 in the Series A, he likely made more than $60 million on this investment alone," Pompliano writes. Pitchbook data has Durant as a most active investor who besides his stake in Hugging Face, has or had made 96 investments in scores of other private companies including software, sports, entertainment and media businesses.
Durant couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
Other high-profile athletes may be rolling out the welcome mat, as Durant joins an elite club of elite athletes who've done well in the capital markets and investing.
New outlet HITC notes that "Shaq [Shaquille O'Neal] famously landed a pre-IPO Google stake that ballooned into tens of millions. LeBron James also turned a $6.5 million Liverpool FC bet into a $100 million Fenway Sports Group stake, and Andre Iguodala got into Zoom early enough to pull down returns that rivaled his actual playing contracts."
Then there's the late Kobe Bryant who invested $6 million for a 10% stake in sports drink BodyArmour in 2013, which The Wall Street Journal says is worth quite a bit more these days: "The estate of Kobe Bryant, an early backer of BodyArmor, stands to collect roughly $400 million for its stake, some of the people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Bryant invested $6 million and had served on the BodyArmor board before he died in 2020, these people said."
Michael Jordan famously took royalty payments (5% of Jordan Brand sales for life) when signing with Nike in 1984 instead of just cash upfront. (His mother actually drove the deal, at least according to the most excellent HBO movie, "Air.") Over the intervening 42 years, Nike has paid Michael Jordan an estimated $2.35 billion. (Talk about the shoe being on the other foot.) Jordan did well by selling the Charlotte Hornets recently as well.
Beyond basketball, tennis icon Roger Federer got a 3% stake for $50 million in ON in 2019 for endorsing the Swiss shoe brand. Worth about $300 million now, at the stock's peak in January 2025 the stake was worth about $700 million.
And then going back into the time machine, Hall of Fame baseball player Ty Cobb bought 300 shares of Coca-Cola in its 1907 IPO, which served Cobb well over the years. (Both Coke and Cobb are Georgia institutions. Coke's headquartered in Atlanta, while Cobb, who died in 1961, who was born in the town of Narrows, Georgia, was nicknamed "the Georgia Peach.") Cobb's stake would grow to 24,000 shares and he bought three Coca-Cola bottling plants.
Cobb also bought $25,000 of United Motors stock, which was converted to General Motors Company $(GM)$ stock after the company was acquired by GM. At the time of his death, Cobb owned $10 million of GM stock and $2 million of Coca-Cola stock. In today's dollars, his portfolio was paying out more than $3.9 million per quarter in dividends alone.
Cobb used that trove of Coke and GM stock to fund a college scholarship fund. (A bit of a non sequitur here, but Cobb once went out on a date with veteran business journalist Carol Loomis, who used to edit Warren Buffett's letter to shareholders. But that's another story...)
All of these cases belie the trope of athletes being rubes for ruthless Jerry Maguiresque agents and money managers who shuttle them into losing investments or siphon-off money to line their own pockets. Or sometimes it's the athlete's own undoing or friends and family leading them astray, a la Curt Schilling or Bernie Kosar.
Not the case with KD, Cobb or MJ.
And who knows, maybe someday Durant and his pals will buy out a PE or VC firm. That would really be flipping the script.
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