When you are worth almost $150 million, there can’t be too many things in life that you look back on and regret.
Except of course if you leave $955 million more on the table. In that case, you probably would have done things a little bit differently.
Elway, a two-time Super Bowl champion and Hall of Famer, is regarded as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL historyGetty
Just ask John Elway.
On September 23, 1998, Elway received the offer of a lifetime, which he ultimately passed on. It was an offer that would set up his family for generations (and beyond) to come.
Denver Broncos‘ owner at the time, the now deceased Pat Bowlen, offered to give Elway the right to buy 10 percent of the Broncos for $15 million.
Bowlen also gave him the option to buy another 10 percent of the franchise by forgoing the deferred salary Bowlen owed him.
The total deferred salary was roughly $21 million.
Twenty-six years later, the 20 percent stake Elway passed on, based on a Forbes 2024 valuation of the team at $5.5 billion, is now worth $1.1 billion.
That would have been a jaw-dropping 1,831 percent return on the 1998 investment – adjusted for inflation – had he made it.
You think the two-time Super Bowl winning quarterback is kicking himself on that one?
Don’t get it twisted – Elway’s current net worth of $145 million is nothing to scoff at, but $145 million is not $1.1 billion.
He had the chance, but passed it up.
Elway is a two-time Super Bowl winner with a net worth not to be scoffed atAFP
Instead, Elway took the $15 million he could have used to purchase the original 10 percent offered to him by Bowlen and invested with business partner Mitch Pierce, in a company that turned out to be a $150 million Ponzi scheme.
Elway and Pierce were able to withdraw $6 million from their initial investment, but still lost more than $7 million.
The Hall of Famer unfortunately is no stranger when it comes to bad investments.
Elway has invested in failed companies such as Laundromax, Quepasa, MVP.com and most notably the Arena League team, the Colorado Crush.
A couple missteps along the way, but Elway seems to be doing just fine with his $145 million fortune.
After leading the Broncos to two Lombardi Trophies and retiring at the end of the 1998 season, he returned to the organization in 2011 as general manager and executive vice president of football operations.
He was the leading force behind the Broncos signing Peyton Manning in free agency in 2012, which ended up being the catalyst for two more Super Bowl appearances, culminating in winning Super Bowl 50.
Following the 2020 season, Elway stepped down from the role of general manager but served as the president of football operations, until finally stepping away from the team altogether in April of 2023.
Elway and his $145 million fortune can now be found competing at golf tournaments, such as the Alfred Dunhill Links Team Championship in St. Andrews alongside the great and the good of the sporting world and even on reality TV such as The Masked Singer.
Even without the $1.1 billion fortune, Elway is doing just fine.
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