Rob Gronkowski has four Super Bowl rings to his name, but one of his biggest wins came off the field.
In an interview with Fortune this week, Gronkowski revealed that he benefitted from a piece of investing advice that helped him make hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As a 25-year-old in 2014, the Patriots tight end had very little experience investing. But when the contractor who was building his house in Foxborough, Mass. urged him to invest in Apple, Gronkowski decided to give it a shot.
“I’d never been involved in stocks. I really didn’t know how stocks worked,” he said. “So I was like, ‘Alright, let me do this. I’m going to go big.’”
Gronkowski, who through the 2014 season had earned a little over $16 million from the NFL, called up his financial adviser and directed them to purchase $69,000 worth of shares of the iPhone maker.
The five-time Pro Bowler said that he promptly forgot about his purchase until two and a half years later, when he realized that his investment had grown to be worth around $250,000. At that point, Gronkowski cashed out his initial $69,000 investment and left the rest to grow.
“To this date, I have over $600,000 of Apple stock, all because of the investment I made in 2014, having no idea what I was doing but just listening to the man who built my house here in New England,” he said.
While his Apple investment paid off handsomely — the company’s stock is up more than 1,000% since 2014 — Gronkowski didn’t need the financial assist. The Super Bowl champion famously refused to spend his NFL paychecks, choosing instead to live off of his endorsement money.
In a 2020 interview with CNBC Make It, he said he always wanted to be prepared financially for the day the football paychecks stopped coming in.
“The whole point of saving throughout my NFL career was to be set for after football because you don’t know how long football will last,” he said at the time.
The financial discipline has allowed him to enjoy his sporting retirement without having to worry about continuing to make money.
“It feels good to be in [this] position,” he said. “It feels good just to go out there and try to find things that I would just love to do.“
