Niamh Shackleton
There's one company in particular that's helped Shaquille O'Neal achieve his multimillionaire status.
O'Neal is best known from playing basketball for teams like the LA Lakers, Orlando Magic, and Miami Heat and has a net worth of around $500 million.
While he made some of his money from his sports career, he's managed to keep the cash rolling in since his retirement in 2011 by investing in businesses.
O'Neal's said to have invested in several different companies; from Apple and Papa John's to Krispy Kreme and Five Guys.
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But it's one of O'Neal's earliest investments that he's benefitted greatly from - and it all happened after a chance encounter.
Discussing why he started investing his money, O'Neal explained that he was inspired by Amazon creator Jeff Bezos.
"I went to a conference in ‘97 or ‘98 and I heard a beautiful bald-headed man by the name of Jeff Bezos say if you invest in things, it’s going to change people’s lives," he said, as per TechCrunch.
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And one of his best investments to date? Google.
Explaining how he happened to learn of the then-start up, O'Neal said: "I was at Four Seasons, I was eating lunch and there were four distinguished gentleman sitting there playing with their kids and the kids recognize 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 just talking about search engines and 'you’ll be able to type in anything,' and I was like, 'That sounds good.'"
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The pair then set up a meeting and O'Neal decided to invest.
But it wasn't until Google blew up that he remembered he'd put money into the firm.
"The newspaper told me how much I made and I couldn’t believe how much I made," he said.
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It's thought that O'Neal put in £250,000 in 1999. Now, it's not totally clear how much money he made from the decades-old investment, but had the retired sports star invested in Google in 2004 and contributed $10,000, that money was worth over $300,000 (in 2019), reported The Motley Fool.
As to how much he makes on a early basis, O'Neal reportedly rakes in $60 million a year from his business investments, as well as endorsements.
It's thought that he earns more now than he did at the peak of his basketball career, says talkSPORT.