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actor George Clooney and wife Amal over a background of money
George Clooney is Hollywood royalty and has been for decades. He got his start after moving to Hollywood in 1982 at the age of 21 with just $300 in his bank account and worked his way up to a starring role on ER before taking over the film industry, winning 2 Oscars, and being named ‘Sexiest Man Alive.’
George Clooney came a LONG way from the days of just $300 in the bank to selling Casamigos Tequila for $1 billion and raking in a reported $20 million per movie. But in Clooney’s world, what goes around comes around, and a story of him helping his friends out while his personal fortune surged is once again making the rounds.
Did George Clooney Really Gift 14 Friends $1 Million Each?
This story was first revealed back in 2017 by George Clooney’s best friend and business partner, Rande Gerber. He is the man Clooney co-founded Casamigos Tequila with and both made out like kings after selling the brand to Diageo for $1 billion back in 2017.
Over on X, someone shared the story and it has picked up 5.9 million views but in an age where everything must be fact checked and verified it seemed like a good time to roll this story out again with proper details included.
Yes, George Clooney did gift 14 of his closest friends $1 million each, in cash, broken out in $20 bills, and he paid the taxes on the gift for each of them so they would not have to pay taxes on the million dollar gift so in actuality he gifted $14 million + taxes. This happened at a dinner party in September 2013, four years before George Clooney would sell Casamigos.
Clooney’s best friend Rande Gerber shared details about the night, saying “every one of us, 14 of us, got a million dollars. Every single one of us. We’re in shock. Like, what is this? He goes, ‘I know we’ve all been through some hard times, some of you are still going through it. You don’t have to worry about your kids, you don’t have to worry about, you know, school, you don’t have to worry about paying your mortgage’.”
He continued, saying “one was working at a bar in Texas at the airport, trying just to support his family. Rides a bicycle to work every day. I mean these are guys that took care of George and now he’s giving it all back. And George said, ‘Not only that, I have paid everyone’s taxes so this million dollars is yours.‘”
To be clear, this is Hollywood and many of the people in the room where already successful but as the story goes, some were having difficulty finding work and this was a life-changing moment for them. In 2013, George had just produced Argo which won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Motion Picture of the Year and he had recently produced August: Osage County. Clooney had been nominated for another Academy Award for the screenplay of The Ides of March. George had also just starred in Gravity, and had a million other credits to his name.
Did Clooney Ever Confirm This Story?
He did. Back in 2020 right after GQ named George Clooney their ‘Icon of the Year’ he confirmed details of the story in an accompanying interview with the magazine. Here’s how it all went down according to George Clooney’s interview six years ago:
“Amal and I had just met, but we weren’t dating at all,” he says. “I was a single guy. All of us were aging. I was 52 or something. And most of my friends are older than me.” This was 2013. Gravity was just about to come out, “and because they didn’t want to pay us, they gave us percentages of the movie, ’cause they thought it was gonna be a flop, and that ended up being a very good deal.” So he had some money — though not, interestingly, as much as he has now; Clooney’s biggest financial windfall, from the $1 billion sale of Casamigos, the tequila company he started with Gerber and another friend, wouldn’t come for four more years. But in 2013, he didn’t yet have a family, nor any real idea or hope that someday he would. “And I thought, what I do have are these guys who’ve all, over a period of 35 years, helped me in one way or another. I’ve slept on their couches when I was broke. They loaned me money when I was broke. They helped me when I needed help over the years. And I’ve helped them over the years. We’re all good friends. And I thought, you know, without them I don’t have any of this. And we’re all really close, and I just thought basically if I get hit by a bus, they’re all in the will. So why the f— am I waiting to get hit by a bus?”
That all sounds great but the logistics of getting $14 million in cash, in $20 bills, sounds like a nightmare right?! That is a problem that most people will never in their lives have to consider but it is a hurdle George Clooney had to overcome in order to gift his 14 close friends $1 million each.
He then explains how he went about getting $14 million in cash for his friends:
The next step was how do you lay hands on $14 million in cash? And Clooney did some research, and what he found was that in downtown Los Angeles, in an undisclosed location, there is a place you can go, “and they have giant pallets of cash.” So Clooney got an old beat-up van that said “Florist” on it, like he was in a heist movie, and he drove downtown, and he got in an elevator with the florist’s van, and he took the van down to the vault and loaded it up with cash. He told no one but his assistant “and a couple of security guys that were s——- themselves. And we brought it up, and I bought 14 Tumi bags, and then I packed in a million bucks, cash, which isn’t as much as you think it is, weight-wise, into these Tumi bags.”
The next day he had all his friends come over. “And I just held up a map and I just pointed to all the places I got to go in the world and all the things I’ve gotten to see because of them. And I said, ‘How do you repay people like that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well: How about a million bucks?’ And the fun part about it was: That was the 27th, the 28th of September. A year later, on the 27th of September, just by happenstance, was the day I got married.”
What A Guy
It is rare to hear a story as outlandish as ‘George Clooney gave $1 million each to 14 of his closest friends’ and it turn out to actually be true. The fact that he went the extra mile and paid the taxes on it upfront is wild too. The logistics of that were certainly complicated as there is no way he had access to each individual’s CPA but I’m sure they all worked it out somehow and in the end it was life-changing money for everyone involved.
These days George Clooney is estimated to have a net worth of around $500 million, likely more. He saw an an opportunity to change the lives of his closest friends and took it. You love to see it.