Al Gore's ballooning fortune: By the numbers

The former veep and presidential loser is worth hundreds of millions of dollars

Al Gore
(Image credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing)

After losing the excruciatingly close 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, Al Gore firmly stepped off the political stage. But the former vice president didn't let the disappointment drag him down. In the years since, Gore has won an unlikely pile of accolades, including a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, and an Oscar for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Along the way, he has also amassed a personal fortune rivaling that of another fabulously wealthy losing presidential candidate: Mitt Romney. Here, a look at Gore's nest egg, by the numbers:

$1.7 million

Gore's estimated net worth in 1999 as he campaigned for the presidency

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

$200 million

The former Democratic veep's approximate wealth now, according to Bloomberg News

$250 million

Romney's estimated wealth. The 2012 GOP presidential nominee made his fortune as a financier at Bain Capital.

$70 million

Amount Gore reportedly netted in January, thanks to the sale of the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network

$500 million

Total value of the Current TV deal.

70 million

Homes Current TV reached worldwide at its peak

40,000

High end of the number of actual viewers the channel reached at any given time

$30 million

Gore's haul when, two weeks after the Current TV sale, he exercised options on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock. He was granted the options for serving on Apple's board since 2003.

5,900

Percent increase in Apple's stock price since Gore came on board.

$460

Apple's current share price

42,358

Remaining options and shares of Apple stock that Gore has

$45.6 million

Total value of Gore's remaining holdings in the maker of iPhones and iPads

10,000

Square footage of the Nashville, Tenn., house Gore renovated with his wife, Tipper, before they separated in 2010. "It's currently uninhabited but for his dog, Bo (by strange coincidence, the name of the dog in the real White House, too), a chow mix," says Steve Fishman at New York.

$400,000

The annual salary Gore would have collected as president

$230,700

The vice president's salary

Sources: Bloomberg, InfoPlease, MarketWatch, New York

Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.