Shaquille O'Neal knows what you're thinking. You see him on the cover of this magazinewearing a suit, looking dapper and professional—and as much as you like him, you’re also groaning a little bit. Another superstar athlete presenting himself as a business genius. It is, after all, fashionable among athletes to parlay one’s sports dominance into a global conglomerate, to show that one is as preternaturally gifted in the boardroom as on the basketball court. It’s almost obligatory at this point.
But do you really believe it? Maybe you think O’Neal just needs something to do with his time. He’s a brand name: He’ll do some endorsements, and, hey, good for him. But a serious entrepreneur? Shaq? The guy from Fu-Schnickens? Come on.
O’Neal knows you think this. He might even agree with you.
“I’m not the smartest guy in the room,” he tells me, once, twice, a total of 11 times over the span of our conversations. “I’m not coming in here telling people what to do. I’m not trying to run a business. I’m not an investment guy. When I was younger, I would put a million in something and get nothing back. It was just gone. I knew I had a lot to learn. I still do.”
This has been O’Neal’s thing for decades: Even though he is a 7'1", 300plus pound basketball Hall of Famer and one of the most recognizable humans on the planet, he insists that he is just like the rest of us—no better, no worse.
And to be sure, O’Neal’s approach to business, at least until recently, has looked like a holdover from an earlier era of celebrity business that was rooted in sponsorships, endorsements, and licensing deals. But a new model has appeared in recent years—led by LeBron James and carried forward by Kevin Durant, Patrick Mahomes, and others—that’s less about being a smiling pitchman and more about building empires. Durant’s venture-capital firm, 35 Ventures, was one of the earliest investors in Postmates and Coinbase. James’s production company, SpringHill, has a $725 million valuation. The conventional wisdom holds that O’Neal, by comparison, is just cashing checks.
But then you take a closer look. Consider the
