Al Gore is “Romney rich ” with a cool $200 million in net worth, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Well, that’s not too amazing to anybody who ever spent any time in Tennessee, where I guess we all thought the Gores were always rich.
Reporters Ken Wells and Ari Levy had a great opening line for the report — a claim that then US vice president and presidential frontrunner Gore sold some cows for $6,000 in 1999.
Honestly, the most surprising thing to me was the statement that he had a net worth of only around $1.7 million that year. Wells and Levy put most of Gore’s “Romney rich” fortune down to the January 2013 sale of his Current TV network that nobody watched but that Al Jazeera Satellite Network was persuaded to buy for $500 million.
Gore’s cut? $70 million. A pretty nice pay day.
So now Al Gore is finally as well-to-do as some of us always thought he was. But is he Romney rich?
Celebrity Net Worth says Mitt Romne y is worth about $250 million, which makes him one of the richest politicians in the United States. So far, so good.
However, they estimate Gore’s wealth at around $300 million, which makes him substantially richer than the 2012 presidential challenger.
Maybe we should start saying that Mitt Romney is “Gore rich.”
As a leading environmental activist and one of the faces of fight against global climate change, Al Gore has plenty of fans and also plenty of haters. What do people on the street think about his wealth?
On Democratic Underground, a discussion forum for Democrats and progressives only, you’ll find plenty of people who take a point of view summed up by a poster called “alcibiades mystery”: “He’s even better than Bush as a businessman…that must sting like the Dickens for GOPers.”
Maybe, but a lot of people on the other side of the aisle had a different view of the sale to Al Jazeera.
A Classic Leftist, get rich by influence peddling~>Gore Is Romney-Rich With $200 Millionbloom.bg/12HWJDN via @bloombergnews #tcot
— Srirama Tanniru (@SriramaTanniru) May 7, 2013
Gets Paid Over $1 Million a Day to Sit on APPLE’s Board, $125,000 per hour… drudge.tw/12MkjPL
— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) May 6, 2013
However, at the end of the day, while you or I might feel like Al Gore overcharged a tad for Current TV, he did spend a long time building the network, and he apparently knows how to market.
Hmmm… Was there some rule that Al Gore wasn’t allowed to participate in capitalism? or is that just for Republicans?
— @ceut (@ceut) May 7, 2013
Did you know that Al Gore was once down to his last $1.7 million? Or, like me, did you always kinda, sorta think Gore was “Romney rich?”
[Al Gore photo by spirit of america / Shutterstock.com ]