Magic Johnson joins the club of billionaire athletes

The small club of billionaire athletes has added a fourth member. It was the great basketball player Magic Johnson. Unlike his predecessors, he got into this club solely due to income received after retirement as a result of smart investments, and not his earnings as a player, which were simply meager by today’s standards of NBA superstars.

According to Forbes, former basketball player Magic Johnson’s net worth has surpassed $1 billion, reaching $1.2 billion. This is an extremely remarkable development, since Johnson has joined the tiny club of billionaire athletes. Before Magic Johnson, it included two other basketball players – Michael Jordan and LeBron James, as well as golfer Tiger Woods.

The case of 64-year-old Johnson, however, differs quite significantly from the cases of his predecessors. All of them received a significant share of their income from “side” sources, for example, from advertising contracts. But in Johnson’s case, almost all of his income is the result of activities after his career.

At the same time, she was undoubtedly great. Magic Johnson joined the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers in 1979, and he, then still very young, was already considered a unique phenomenon in basketball. The fact is that with a height of 206 cm, typical of heavy forwards, Johnson played the position of a point guard, although at that time it was believed that only kids could play them.

Meanwhile, subsequent events showed that the experts were right in seeing him as a future frontman. Johnson quickly became the leader of the team that took him first overall in the draft and won five NBA championships with him in the 1980s. There are a huge number of individual prizes on his track record. Johnson was named the league’s best player three times and appeared in all-star games 12 times.

Already a veteran, he added one more notable touch to his biography. In 1991, Magic Johnson, a living basketball legend, shocked the world by announcing that he was HIV positive. He retired from the NBA. However, in the summer of 1992, Johnson played for Team USA, made up almost entirely of basketball legends and forever remembered in history as the only true Dream Team, at the Barcelona Olympics, and two years later, despite his problems, he unexpectedly returned to the Lakers. At first he worked as a coach at the club. But in 1996, Johnson briefly turned into a player again before saying goodbye to basketball.

So, Magic Johnson was unlucky in the sense that in his era the NBA, which now pays its celebrities like LeBron James more than $50 million a year, was still relatively modest in terms of financial capabilities. Johnson earned a total of about $40 million with the Lakers.

According to Forbes, he was made a billionaire primarily by extremely smart investments after leaving basketball. Johnson at various times acquired stakes in various sports clubs – baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers, football’s Los Angeles FC, Washington Commanders from American football, Los Angeles Sparks from the WNBA, and also invested in areas and companies not related to sports – Starbucks, Burger King, 24 Hour Fitness, EquiTrust. Surprisingly, there were virtually no failed investments among them.

In fact, only one business decision of Magic Johnson, which American sources often talk about, was a failure. He took it before entering the NBA. Advertising contracts were offered to the ripening genius by three companies producing basketball equipment – Converse, Adidas and Nike. The latter tried to lure Johnson not with money, but with a package of 100 thousand shares plus an obligation to pay him a dollar for every pair of sneakers sold. Magic Johnson chose Converse and a guaranteed $100 thousand annually simply because at the end of the 1970s he did not really trust the not very popular company, named after the Greek goddess of victory, although it later turned out that cooperation with it would have brought him $1 billion, maybe even already in the previous century.

Alexey Dospehov