Kobe Bryant's Advisor Cost Him $23 Million on Beef Jerky. His Own Instincts Made Him $400 Million on Sports Drinks.

Kobe Bryant didn't wait around after basketball to figure out money. According to Darren Rovell, the sports media veteran who became Bryant's business partner, the Lakers legend cornered him at a media day years before retirement with a blunt pitch: help me learn business, and let's find something to invest in together.

That relationship produced one of the more instructive contrasts in athlete investing: a deal Bryant almost made and deeply regretted passing on, and one he made anyway that turned into a fortune.

The Jerky Deal He Didn't Make

Rovell told OutKick's Craig Carton Show that in 2012 he brought Bryant a chance to buy a 10% stake in KRAVE Beef Jerky for $8 million, valuing the company at $80 million. Bryant wanted in. His financial advisor didn't.

Six months later, Hershey bought KRAVE for $291 million, according to Rovell. Bryant's stake, had he made it, would have been worth roughly $29 million before subtracting his $8 million buy-in. Rovell put Bryant's missed payday at $23 million.

Bryant didn't take it well, according to Rovell, but he also didn't sulk. He turned around and told Rovell he trusted his read on deals enough to hand him $10 million on the spot, no conditions attached, according to Rovell's account on the show.

The Sports Drink Bet That Paid Off

Two years after the KRAVE miss, Bryant put $6 million into BodyArmor in 2014, taking roughly a 10% stake and becoming the company's fourth-largest investor, according to Dealroom. He didn't just write a check. He sat on the board and co-directed BodyArmor advertisements featuring athletes including James Harden, Mike Trout, and Skylar Diggins-Smith, Dealroom reported, citing ESPN.

BodyArmor co-founder Mike Repole credited Bryant directly for the company's trajectory. "Without Kobe Bryant's vision and confidence, BodyArmor wouldn't have been able to reach the level of success that we did," Repole said in a statement cited by Dealroom.

The payoff arrived in stages. ESPN had earlier estimated Bryant's stake at around $200 million, a roughly 30-times return within about four and a half years, according to a report carried by economictimes.indiatimes.com. Then in 2021, Coca-Cola bought full control of BodyArmor for $5.6 billion. That deal pushed the estimated value of Bryant's stake to about $400 million for his estate, a figure reported by the Wall Street Journal and cited by both Dealroom and economictimes.indiatimes.com.

Dealroom calculated the full run as roughly a 67-times return over eight years, a 69% compound annual growth rate, dwarfing anything Bryant earned on the court. His career NBA earnings totaled more than $323 million, according to Dealroom, on top of endorsement deals with Nike, McDonald's, and Mercedes-Benz.

Two Numbers, One Company

There's a real gap between ESPN's earlier $200 million estimate and the Journal's $400 million figure after the 2021 acquisition. The sources don't fully reconcile it beyond timing: BodyArmor kept growing, and Coca-Cola's full buyout came at a higher valuation than the company carried in ESPN's earlier estimate. Readers should treat the $400 million figure as the post-acquisition estimate, not a static number Bryant's estate has held constant since 2018.

A stake valuation isn't the same as cash in hand. Neither Dealroom nor economictimes.indiatimes.com detail how much of that $400 million has actually been paid out to Bryant's estate versus held as an ongoing equity position, and nothing in the record here answers that.

Fox News' write-up, drawn from Rovell's OutKick appearance, focuses almost entirely on the KRAVE miss as the defining lesson: bad advice cost Bryant real money. That's accurate as far as it goes. But it underplays the flip side that Dealroom and the Journal reporting establish. Bryant didn't get gun-shy after KRAVE. He doubled down on his own judgment two years later with BodyArmor, ignored whatever caution had steered him wrong before, and it produced a return that made the jerky loss look like rounding error.

Bryant retired after the 2015-16 season and died in a helicopter crash in 2020, according to Dealroom. He never saw the full BodyArmor payout land. His estate did. What remains unclear from the available reporting is how BodyArmor's valuation and Bryant's stake were treated in estate proceedings after his death, and whether any of that $400 million estimate has since been realized in cash for his heirs.