Near the end of his playing career, Shaq took a walk down Hollywood Boulevard and came back with a business plan. "I seen about 50 people walk around in Elvis shirts. So, now I get pissed off,” he told an audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference in May. “I'm like, ‘Elvis has been passed away for a long time. How the hell is he still making money?’” The question, he said, “made me do my research,” and the research changed how he gets paid.
Underneath the joke was a fear he has talked about for years. “For the NBA, five years after retirement, 70% of athletes have nothing. No income coming in,” he said on the same stage, sitting beside Tom Brady. The most commonly cited source of this number is a 2009 Sports Illustrated estimate that 60% of former NBA players were broke within five years of retiring. The number has been disputed, but the overall concept isn't unheard of: There have been multiple accounts of homeless NFL and NBA players, lottery winners who spend it all, and many other initially well-off individuals who go broke. Shaq's future focus comes from the instruction his late father drilled into him: “He said, 'Don't lose your mother's house.'” It is the same instinct Charlie Munger described when he told young people to secure the first $100,000 before anything else: protect the base, then take the swings.
