Al Gore's personal fortune, well in excess of $100m, is impressive for a politician who had nothing when he left his job as Bill Clinton's Vice President. And his enjoyment of the business world — in which Gore's personal attraction to "predawn" issues is not as much of a handicap as in a political campaign — seems genuine. But the Democratic heavyweight isn't, despite Fast Company's valiant efforts to make the case, "a remarkable success as a businessman". Nor has he released, as the magazine writes in its pitch for the cover story, his "inner entrepreneur".
What about the venture that Gore can really claim as his own, Current TV? The cable network is said now to be profitable. But it took a $70m purchase of a Canadian-controlled network to get Current TV into enough households, in addition to the costs building up its programming. From Fast Company's own numbers, it's not clear that the TV company makes any significant contribution to Gore's net worth. The channel's survival is an impressive achievement, but it's not yet an unalloyed business success.
Gore's soaring net worth depends above all on the stock options he received as an adviser to Google, from 2001, which are worth more than $30m. And Gore's made $6m from stock options in Apple, where he's a director.
One can blame neither Google nor Apple for recruiting Gore. He's as savvy about high-tech as they come, in politics, at least. And one has to give the former politician, much disappointed in his two runs at the presidency, credit for choosing the right companies to which to attach his name. In his quotes to Fast Company, he doesn't boast, overly, of his business accomplishments. But the decision to give the interview at all — to a magazine that was bound to paint him as a born entrepreneur, finally free of the shackles of politics — is a statement in itself.
And it's a statement that begs to be challenged. Gore has fewer business credentials than someone like Donald Rumsfeld, or Dick Cheney, both of whom had some claim to managerial competence, at least before the disaster of the Iraq occupation. The Democrat's big paydays are testament, not to entrepreneurial drive, but to the former Vice President's support for the high-tech industry, which made him high-placed friends in Silicon Valley such as Google's Eric Schmidt and Apple's Steve Jobs.
Gore has traded on his political connections, rather than his business judgment. Which is no sin, but it makes him no better than the average politician, typically a Republican, who slides into a cushy board role. Just, given the success of Google and Apple, more fortunate.
