Forrest Gump was a very wealthy man at the conclusion of the Oscar-winning movie. Exactly just how wealthy is something that fans have tried to find out, and the number is staggering.
Towards the end of the movie, Gump shares with an old lady that he got a job mowing the lawn at a local college and was in a good place financially. He’d made so much money at that point that he donated some of it to the local church and hospital. The reason? Liutenant Dan Taylor and his sage advice to invest some of their shrimping boat money in a “fruit company”, which, as you might already know, turned out to be Apple.
“Lieutenant Dan got me invested in some kind of fruit company,” Gump shared. “So then I got a call from him, saying we don’t have to worry about money no more. And I said, that’s good! One less thing.”
Now, we go to the golden question – how much would Forrest Gump be worth today if he was alive and all his investments intact?
According to an investigative report by Benzinga, Gump would have made it to the Top 15 of Bloomberg’s Billionaire index if he and his investments were real.
It’s estimated that Gump purchased a 3% stake in a then-startup tech company worth $100,000. Gump would have been categorized as an angel investor or venture capitalist as he invested in Apple before the company went public in 1980. The letter from Apple to Mr. Gump seen in the movie was dated September 23, 1975.
Gump’s 3% stake in the “fruit company” would be worth $90.9 billion in today’s money based on Apple’s current valuation of $3.03 trillion. The value doesn’t even take into account any dividend payments or share dilutions. The investment would have made Gump and Dan the 13th richest people in the world.
Paramount Pictures released Forrest Gump on July 6, 1994, and Apple’s stock was priced at just 24₵ at that time. A $1,000 investment in the company would be worth $801,917.31 today based on Apple’s share price of $192.46.
There were plans to make a sequel for Forrest Gump following its success at the box office. According to Hanks, the talks of a sequel died down immediately and no sequel was ever made.
“I will say that, with a long time in between, we did take a stab at talking about another Forrest Gump that lasted all of 40 minutes,” Hanks shared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And then we never…we said, ‘Guys, come on.'”
When it’s all said and done, it’s safe to say that Forrest Gump and Paramount Pictures are laughing their way to the bank. The film earned $678.2 million against a budget of just $55 million. Forrest Gump also won six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for Hanks.
