Forrest Gump's $100k in Apple stock is now worth almost $49 billion

By Oliver Haslam
published

Forrest Gump Paramount
Forrest Gump Paramount (Image credit: Paramount Pictures)

What you need to know

  • Forrest Gump debuted this week in 1996.
  • The titular character invested a presumed $100,000 in Apple Computer.
  • If real, that investment would now be worth a massive $48.6 billion.

This week 26 years ago saw the arrival of Forrest Gump, one of the best movies ever to star the treasure that is Tom Hanks. And it turns out that Gump's investment in Apple Computer back in the day would have earned him a fortune. A big fortune at that.

As everyone who has seen the movie will remember, Hank's character invested the money hey made from the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company into what Gump called "some kind of fruit company". That fruit company was Apple Computer, with Gump seen receiving a letter about his shares during the movie.

It's never actually explained how much Gump invested, but people over the years have gone with the $100,000 figure for various reasons. Based on that figure and using the movie's timeline we can be confident that Gump would be a very rich man indeed. If he was real, of course.

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Now, who wishes they'd put some money into that fruit company way back when?

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.