- Thu Sep 14, 2017 8:42 am
#94052
1999, Al Gore, then U.S. vice president and a Democratic candidate for president, sold US$6,000 worth of cows.
The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about US$1.7-million and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee. Funds from the cattle sale went to three of his kids, according to federal disclosure forms filed as part of his presidential run.
Fourteen years later, he made an estimated US$100-million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network for about US$500-million. After debt, he grossed an estimated US$70-million for his 20% stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.
Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at US$7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a US$30-million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options.
That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000, based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms.
Gore isn’t finished exercising his Apple stock grants. Those 59,000 are part of 101,358 Apple options and shares of restricted stock Gore has amassed, according to company filings, giving his total holdings a gross value of more than US$45.6-million today.
Albert Arnold Gore Jr., 65, is a lot of things to a lot of people. Among friends and fans, he’s the progressive Democrat who should have been president, visionary author and Internet prophet, the man who more than anyone drove climate change to the centre of public consciousness.
Detractors see Gore as a limousine liberal, tiresome pedant and climate alarmist who lives a jet-setting, carbon-profligate lifestyle while preaching asceticism for everyone else.
His work and writing on global warming have earned him a share of a Nobel Prize as well as a South Park cartoon parody in which he tries to scare school kids to his beliefs with a fictitious global-warming surrogate monster known as ManBearPig.
Whatever you think of Gore, one thing is indisputable: leveraging his aura as a technology seer and his political and climate work connections, Gore has remade himself into a wealthy businessman, amassing a fortune that may exceed US$200-million.
Gore declined to be interviewed for this story. Estimates of his wealth are based on company filings, government records, public pronouncements he or his associates have made about past business dealings and interviews with people in a position to know of and evaluate Gore’s holdings.
How Gore achieved this is as much about timing and luck as it is about business skills. His Apple board tenure has coincided with a 5,900% increase in its stock price. Current TV was a moribund “fixer-upper” when Al Jazeera stepped in to buy it at “a huge valuation,” said Derek Baine, an SNL Kagan cable analyst in Monterey, California.
Gore also had his share of flubs, most of them in his efforts at green-tech investing. An investment firm he helped to start took stakes in two carbon-trading firms that fizzled and also racked up tens of millions in losses in a solar-module maker.
The wealth accumulation attests to Gore’s ability, particularly among technology companies and rich political progressives, to attract moneyed and skilled people to do deals with him or seek his paid counsel.
This may be in part because Gore, by reputation, shuns figurehead appointments for real ones. One example: at Apple’s request, he dove into an options backdating scandal, which predated his arrival, chairing a 2006 committee that recommended revisions to company policies.
Gore went on to graduate with a degree in government from Harvard University, dabble in journalism and study but never graduate from law school at Vanderbilt University. Instead, he quit to run for public office.
Gore hasn’t tried to hide his prosperity. Back in 2000, about US$750,000 of his net worth was tied to two homes he and his then-wife Tipper owned in Virginia and Tennessee.
Most of the rest had been recently inherited, including an undisclosed number of shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp. left to him by his late father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., and valued at between US$500,000 and US$1-million, according to disclosure forms.
He’s moved up the housing ladder since then. He owns a 20-room, 10,000-square-foot antebellum mansion in Nashville’s wealthy Belle Meade neighbourhood that’s mostly shrouded from view by a thicket of Southern foliage and a massive iron gate. In 2010 — weeks before the Gores announced they were dissolving their 40-year marriage — he purchased an oceanfront six-bedroom, US$8.9-million villa in Montecito, California, where Oprah Winfrey and Kirk Douglas have lived.
Such lavish living isn’t lost on Gore’s critics. In 2007, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, using a public records request, published Gore’s Nashville home utility bill, showing it used almost 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006 — 20 times the national average household consumption. Gore’s people dismissed the revelation.
The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about US$1.7-million and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee. Funds from the cattle sale went to three of his kids, according to federal disclosure forms filed as part of his presidential run.
Fourteen years later, he made an estimated US$100-million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network for about US$500-million. After debt, he grossed an estimated US$70-million for his 20% stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.
Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at US$7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a US$30-million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options.
That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000, based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms.
Gore isn’t finished exercising his Apple stock grants. Those 59,000 are part of 101,358 Apple options and shares of restricted stock Gore has amassed, according to company filings, giving his total holdings a gross value of more than US$45.6-million today.
Albert Arnold Gore Jr., 65, is a lot of things to a lot of people. Among friends and fans, he’s the progressive Democrat who should have been president, visionary author and Internet prophet, the man who more than anyone drove climate change to the centre of public consciousness.
Detractors see Gore as a limousine liberal, tiresome pedant and climate alarmist who lives a jet-setting, carbon-profligate lifestyle while preaching asceticism for everyone else.
His work and writing on global warming have earned him a share of a Nobel Prize as well as a South Park cartoon parody in which he tries to scare school kids to his beliefs with a fictitious global-warming surrogate monster known as ManBearPig.
Whatever you think of Gore, one thing is indisputable: leveraging his aura as a technology seer and his political and climate work connections, Gore has remade himself into a wealthy businessman, amassing a fortune that may exceed US$200-million.
Gore declined to be interviewed for this story. Estimates of his wealth are based on company filings, government records, public pronouncements he or his associates have made about past business dealings and interviews with people in a position to know of and evaluate Gore’s holdings.
How Gore achieved this is as much about timing and luck as it is about business skills. His Apple board tenure has coincided with a 5,900% increase in its stock price. Current TV was a moribund “fixer-upper” when Al Jazeera stepped in to buy it at “a huge valuation,” said Derek Baine, an SNL Kagan cable analyst in Monterey, California.
Gore also had his share of flubs, most of them in his efforts at green-tech investing. An investment firm he helped to start took stakes in two carbon-trading firms that fizzled and also racked up tens of millions in losses in a solar-module maker.
The wealth accumulation attests to Gore’s ability, particularly among technology companies and rich political progressives, to attract moneyed and skilled people to do deals with him or seek his paid counsel.
This may be in part because Gore, by reputation, shuns figurehead appointments for real ones. One example: at Apple’s request, he dove into an options backdating scandal, which predated his arrival, chairing a 2006 committee that recommended revisions to company policies.
Gore went on to graduate with a degree in government from Harvard University, dabble in journalism and study but never graduate from law school at Vanderbilt University. Instead, he quit to run for public office.
Gore hasn’t tried to hide his prosperity. Back in 2000, about US$750,000 of his net worth was tied to two homes he and his then-wife Tipper owned in Virginia and Tennessee.
Most of the rest had been recently inherited, including an undisclosed number of shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp. left to him by his late father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., and valued at between US$500,000 and US$1-million, according to disclosure forms.
He’s moved up the housing ladder since then. He owns a 20-room, 10,000-square-foot antebellum mansion in Nashville’s wealthy Belle Meade neighbourhood that’s mostly shrouded from view by a thicket of Southern foliage and a massive iron gate. In 2010 — weeks before the Gores announced they were dissolving their 40-year marriage — he purchased an oceanfront six-bedroom, US$8.9-million villa in Montecito, California, where Oprah Winfrey and Kirk Douglas have lived.
Such lavish living isn’t lost on Gore’s critics. In 2007, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, using a public records request, published Gore’s Nashville home utility bill, showing it used almost 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006 — 20 times the national average household consumption. Gore’s people dismissed the revelation.
- By johnforbes
- By brandon