Mr. Gore doesn’t disclose much about his personal finances, but Bloomberg News came across a regulatory filing disclosing that he recently invested $35 million with the Capricorn Investment Group, a firm that Bloomberg said puts clients’ assets into hedge funds and invests in “makers of environmentally friendly products.” That’s a big wad of cash for someone who reported barely $2 million in assets in 2000, when his job as vice president came to an end.
Capricorn is an interesting firm: It was founded by Jeffrey Skoll, a former president of eBay who was also executive producer for Mr. Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
- But the juiciest part of the story about Mr. Gore’s investment is this: Where did all that money come from?
Bloomberg suggests that Mr. Gore’s ties to Apple, whose board he joined in 2003, and Google, for which has has been a senior adviser since 2001, could be part of the answer. Shares of both of those companies have surged in recent years.
We would note that a recent regulatory filing shows that in January, Mr. Gore exercised 1,000 options to buy Apple stock for a mere $7.48 a share. (The stock was trading Thursday above $124.) The filing also indicates that he still had 59,000 Apple options left.
- Google told Bloomberg it would not comment on how it paid Mr. Gore for his services.
Mr. Gore also earns substantial sums from speaking engagements, and he was recently made a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
His fortune may soon get even bigger. Current Media, the youth-oriented cable network of which he is a founder and chairman, is planning to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering."
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