Al Gore's Net Worth is Environmentally Sound
After being the Vice President under Bill Clinton, Al Gore ran for the office of president. Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 because the chads did not hang right in Florida. The Supreme Court made the call and Gore lost. Gore was not very wealthy at this time. Al Gore’s net worth was not what it is today. He was a millionaire with a net worth of $1.7 million, but he was not a multimillionaire…yet. Here is his story and how he turned less than $2 million into a net worth of over $300 million in 2024.
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Public Servant Al Gore
Gore was in public service as an elected official for 24 years. He first served as a congressional representative of Tennessee for eight years, starting in 1977. Then, in 1985, he became the Senator from Tennessee for eight years until 1993. He became Vice President after that for the Clinton two-term presidency from 1993 to 2001. In 2001, he ran for president of the United States. He won the popular vote. He should have been the president. However, after multiple recounts in Florida, the Supreme Court intervened to give the job to Bush with a narrow vote for the majority opinion.
Al Gore’s full name is Albert Arnold Gore. Jr. He was born on March 31, 1948, which makes him 72 in 2020. His birth town was Washington, D. C. because his dad, Al Gore, Sr., was the senator from Tennessee. During summers, as a young boy, Al Junior went back to the family farm in Tennessee, to help raise cattle.
He grew up knowing that he would seek a career as a politician to follow his father’s example. He went to Harvard and became the freshmen student council president during his first year attending. When Gore graduated in 1969, he joined the military and went to Vietnam.
When he came back from Vietnam, he attended Vanderbilt University to get a law degree. However, he quit suddenly when a congressional representative from Tennessee unexpectedly retired. Gore ran for the position. He won. He continued to win every election thereafter until he finally lost the election for the presidency. Then he retired from politics.
In 1999, Al Gore’s net worth was less than $2 million. He had two homes, one in Tennessee, and one in Virginia. He inherited some stock in Occidental Petroleum from his father that was worth about $1 million.
At that time, he was able to get over $100,000 for a speaking appearance. Now his speaking fee is $175,000. Nevertheless, those fees could not amass a fortune of $300 million for Al Gore’s net worth of today. All this changed in March 2003.
In 2003, Steve Jobs asked Al Gore to be on the board of Apple, Inc. Gore was already a “Machead” and preferred using a Mac to using a PC. When Gore took a position on the Apple board, the stock was trading at $7.50 per share. Gore received stock options that he could exercise while the stock rose over the next years to $450 per share.
During this time, Gore became a co-founder in Current TV that eventually sold to Al Jazeera TV network in 2013.
In 2013, Gore had a banner year. He made $100 million in one month! Current TV sold for $500 million. Gore’s stake, after the company paid off debts, was worth $70 million. Two weeks after this sale closed, Gore decided to exercise the stock options that he received for being on the Apple board to buy and then sell Apple shares at $7.48 per share to buy them and $450 per share to sell them. For this transaction with 59,000 shares, Gore collected another $30 million. Gore still owned 42,358 shares that he did not sell. They add $45.6 million more to Al Gore’s net worth.
Rancher Al Gore
Being a public servant did not make Al Gore’s net worth increase very much. In 1999, while he was still Vice President and running for president, he sold $6,000 worth of cattle that appears as income on his publicly-released tax returns. He made income from renting out pastures on the family land in Carthage, Tennessee, and royalties from a zinc mine. He gave the money from selling the cattle to his kids. His rural roots are the source of his inspiration to go on to become one of the world’s most famous environmentalists.
Today, Al Gore’s net worth is around $300 million. It is very interesting to see how he got so rich after he went into the private sector.
Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?
No article about Al Gore would be complete without having a laugh about the false claim that he supposedly said that he invented the Internet. This was not exactly what he said and his comments were out of context. Nevertheless, he was instrumental in helping pass the legislation that supported the development of the commercialized Internet. He was one of its biggest evangelistic supporters in the early stages of the Internet by constantly promoting the development of the “information superhighway.”
The Internet, as we know it, was first used by researchers who worked for the U.S. government and military. They shared information on a secure system called the ARPANET. The inventors of the Internet are Robert E. Kahn, and Vint Cerf, who invented the communication protocols (TCP/IP), and Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web.
The creation of the hypertext markup language (HTML) protocol became the computer language that makes web pages and links them to each other. The researchers were able to use a web browser system called Mosiac to share data and make links in the web pages to other data. Mosiac was possible by the legislation sponsored by Al Gore. Gore when he created the Performance Computing Act of 1991, which became known as the Gore Bill. This legislation funded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) the led to the networking systems, which birthed the Internet.
Marc Andreessen, as his graduate school project working at the NCSA, helped create Mosaic and then went on to create the Netscape browser. Netscape was the world’s first browser designed for regular people. This started the commercialization of the Internet around 1993 and it caught on like wildfire.
Andreessen says that without the support of Al Gore, the Internet may have never happened. The truth is that Al Gore did not invent the Internet. Nevertheless, Gore enabled it through his legislative efforts. This effort by Gore made the Silicon Valley boom. The techies fell in love with him. This would come in very handy later, for improving Al Gore’s net worth.
Al Gore And “An Inconvenient Truth”
Al Gore made a documentary film, released in 2006, called An Inconvenient Truth. The film is very dramatic and was a serious early warning about the dangers of global warming. As an environmentalist, Gore wanted to warn the global leaders and the people that we are on the path to our self-destruction. The identified problem is that the carbon emissions from human activities that are causing the global temperature to rise.
The film earned $24 million gross box office in the US and $26 million from foreign release making it the 11th highest-grossing documentary released in the United States. The film won two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature Film and Best Original Song. It was a success at the box office and praised by the critics. This film told the audience what is happening to our delicate world. Gore’s work continues to this day as a concerted effort to change human behavior and slow global warming.
The story in the film is about Gore’s work to inform people with his campaign as a private citizen. He went around the world to increase awareness and educate audiences about global warming. The film came from his presentation that he gave to thousands in audiences worldwide. The film’s mission was to increase the exposure of Gore’s message to the rest of the general populace. It succeeded in that mission.
In the film, Gore talks about how the ice sheets could disappear in Greenland and Antarctica. This would eventually raise the ocean level to six feet higher, flooding any cities on the coastlines and causing 100 million climate refugees.
Unfortunately, the predictions made in the 2006 film turned out to be incorrect in a weird way. The predictions underestimated the speed of global warming. It surprised scientists, after the film came out, how fast global warming will leave humanity in a diminished state, with a destroyed environment. The scientific analysis was too conservative. It is happening now faster than expected. There are not 100 million refugees yet, but there are many millions of refugees caused by climate change. Severe weather pattern disruptions now cause more frequent and stronger natural disasters.
A survey in 2007 conducted by Neilson, found that 66% of those who viewed this film thought it changed their opinion about global warming and 89% said it made them aware of the problem with about 74% saying they changed their behavior because of it.
A sequel to the film released in 2017. It is An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Al Gore’s net worth went up slightly by the earnings from his appearance in this film. However, he donated this money to use for his charity work. His leadership strength and recognition increased significantly with these films. To this day, he continues to fight the battle to slow climate change with environmental initiatives to this day.
The Nobel Peace Prize
In 2007, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize as a joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He got this prize for his environmental efforts with the film An Inconvenient Truth.
Al Gore’s Net Worth From Real Estate
Gore’s real estate increased when he had these windfalls. He owns a beautiful 10,000-square-foot home with 20 rooms that is a southern mansion style. It is in the upscale neighborhood of Belle Meade in Nashville. He also bought an $8.9 million home in Montecito, California that Oprah Winfrey used to own, as well as Kirk Douglas before she did. He bought that home just before he divorced his wife of 40 years, so it is not clear how the divorce impacted Al Gore’s net worth exactly.
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Al Gore’s Net Worth From Investments
Gore made a wise investment, by putting $35 million in a Palo Alto, California-based company, Capricorn Investment Group. This hedge fund was founded by Gore’s friend, Jeffrey Skoll. Skoll is a billionaire from Canada who was eBay’s first president.
Gore also co-founded Generation Investment Management (GIM) along with David Blood. Blood previously was the Managing Director for Goldman Sachs. This fund took a sustainability approach to its investments. GIM made about $218 million in profits in three years from 2008 to 2001. Gore received a huge portion of those profits that significantly improved Al Gore’s net worth.
Al Gore’s Net Worth From Going Green
GIM invested in “green” companies and held positions in Amazon, Colgate-Palmolive, eBay, Procter & Gamble. The fund’s headquarters is in London. It has about $8.5 billion under management. GIM has very large institutional investors as clients. For example, Britain’s Environment Agency asked GIM to manage 7.2% of its 1.6 billion-pound investment portfolio in 2014.
Like any hedge fund, GIM had some big winners such as Amazon and big losers like Solar City. Overall, the fund’s performance had a positive impact on Al Gore’s net worth.
Al Gore’s Net Worth Did Not Come From Book Sales
Al Gore published many best-selling books, which include Earth in the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth, and The Assault on Reason. All profits from publishing his books and for the films he made are donations given to his non-profit organization called the Climate Reality Project.
Conclusion
Al Gore continues to make plenty of “green” in the form of amassing tremendous wealth. He also continues to work tirelessly to convince the world that the threat of global warming is real and requires much more action to keep our world from being destroyed.