TIGER'S FORTUNE
Through victories and endorsements, Tiger Woods made multi-millionaires of those around him – and a billionaire of himself
How much has Tiger Woods accumulated since he turned professional in 1996? The answer to that only Tiger’s accountant truly knows, and calculating the fortune of the notoriously private, 15-time Major winner is an almost impossible task.
But since 1996, the people at Forbes magazine in the U.S. have had a specialist team tracking Tiger’s earnings. At the peak of his playing and earning powers, back in 2009, Forbes announced that Woods had become the first athlete to reach one billion dollars in cumulative earnings, reaching that figure ahead of former NBA legend Michael Jordan.
That billion-dollar sum was a gross figure however, and did not take into account taxes and business and general living expenses – which included spending $60m on a Jupiter Island mansion, $65m for a private jet and $20m on a yacht. You’d also have to factor in the $110m Tiger would soon be paying to ex-wife Elin Nordegren in their divorce settlement, plus other tough-to-chart expenses in the wake of the scandal, but even so, Tiger was doing OK.
The combination of a tarnished image that arose from his divorce settlement and poor form on the golf course blunted Tiger’s earning power in the years that followed, and the confidential nature of many commercial tie-ups and the current volatility of his annual earnings make it almost impossible to calculate his bank balance at the this point in time.
“His peak annual earnings were $125m in 2009, but dropped to $75m by 2011,” noted Forbes’ senior editor Kurt Badenhausen. “This was not all sponsorship-related. His appearance fees and prize money were o the charts in 2009 and recent sponsorship deals have all been for much lower amounts than his previous ones. Our most recent estimate of his fortune is around $500m, but I don’t think it’s black-and-white at this point.”
While highly lucrative endorsements have always dominated Tiger’s earnings, utterly dwarfing his on-course winnings, this has been increasingly the case since 2012, when
AT THE PEAK OF HIS POWERS, IN 2009, TIGER BECAME SPORT’S FIRST BILLION-DOLLAR ATHLETE
injuries and advancing age slowed and at times stopped entirely his Majors chase. Forbes predicted that his total earnings ‘slumped’ to ‘just’ $37.1 million by 2017, with prize money making up just $0.1 million of that total. The unexpected Masters victory in 2019 contributed to an upturn, with Woods earning $63.9 million that year and $62.3 million in 2020. Earlier this year, Tiger’s $60m earnings put him at 12th in Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid athletes for 2021, some way from his peak and well short of top spot.
However, as Jack Nicklaus said in 2014, “I stopped playing competitive golf, but that was just one part of my business life.” Jack has spent the decades since retirement adding to his wealth, as have Gary Player and Greg Norman, and as did Arnold Palmer. Tiger will do the same, but very likely on a whole di erent level.