The "richest man in football" worth 10 billion yuan has invested in the hottest AI unicorn.
Cristiano Ronaldo is saving more for his retirement pension.
In November 2025, on the eve of the US-Saudi Investment Forum, Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo appeared as a guest at a dinner hosted by Donald Trump for Saudi princes, where he interacted with many American political and business figures and representatives of Saudi capital.
When an athlete is invited into the core social circle of national capital and technological capital, it means that what he has accumulated is no longer just trophies and goals, but a form of capital credit that can be monetized in the long term.
Cristiano Ronaldo came from a poor family and dropped out of school at the age of 14 to pursue a football career. From Sporting Lisbon to Manchester United, Real Madrid, and then to the huge contracts in Serie A and Saudi Arabia, his salary has been on the rise. In 2024, his total annual income reached a staggering $260 million (approximately 1.836 billion RMB).
In 2025, with the sky-high contract worth over $400 million he signed with Al Nassr FC in Saudi Arabia, along with his past sponsorship and commercial earnings, his personal wealth reached $1.4 billion (approximately 10 billion RMB) for the first time, making him the first billionaire in football history and entering the "Bloomberg Billionaires Index" for the first time.
In addition to his on-field earnings, Ronaldo's personal brand "CR7" has also contributed a considerable amount of assets: he has launched clothing, footwear, underwear, and perfume lines, and has also collaborated with several companies to launch product lines such as CR7 hotels and gyms.
Now, in his forties, Ronaldo is not only a legend on the football field but also frequently makes moves in the capital market. On December 5, 2025, Ronaldo announced via social media that he had invested in the American AI startup Perplexity and became one of the shareholders of the company. Meanwhile, Perplexity will also launch an interactive section called "Perplexity x CR7" on its search engine, allowing fans around the world to participate in content and Q&A related to Ronaldo in real-time.
This "richest man in football" is actively expanding his traffic advantage and commercial influence into the field of technology investment.
Cristiano Ronaldo's Business Empire
Professional sports have almost no barriers in terms of background but are extremely sensitive to talent, health, and competition results. The vast majority of people are eliminated during the youth training stage, but once they enter the global top tier, the rewards show a highly concentrated "head effect."
Because the probability of success is extremely low, the top winners in professional sports often accumulate wealth far beyond that of traditional occupations. Ronaldo is an extreme example of this logic: starting from an ordinary background, he has finally achieved multiple leaps in the sports, business, and capital sectors.
For top athletes, salary and bonuses are just the starting point. More importantly, it's about how to make the huge wealth "generate more money" and how to continuously monetize their fame.
Taking Ronaldo as an example, his business empire is centered around his personal brand "CR7," covering multiple aspects of daily life such as clothing, food, housing, and transportation. CR7 has launched daily necessities such as clothing, jeans, sports shoes, underwear, and perfume; he has also collaborated with the Portuguese Pestana Group to create the Pestana CR7 hotels, which are now located in Funchal on Madeira Island, Lisbon, Madrid, New York, and Marrakech.
The success of this brand system is inseparable from Ronaldo's unparalleled global influence. He has over 669 million followers on Instagram, and his single advertising revenue ranks among the top of global celebrities. Such a huge fan economy has led to a continuous increase in the value of his brand and endorsements. Ronaldo has signed a lifetime contract worth over $1 billion with Nike and also holds endorsements for high-end brands such as Louis Vuitton.
These collaborations have enabled him to have a stable off-field endorsement income of approximately 55 million euros per year. In 2024, he even ranked first in Sportico's global athlete income list with an income of $260 million (Stephen Curry, in second place, had an income of $153.8 million, more than $100 million less than Ronaldo). Continuous brand collaborations have further consolidated his global commercial influence.
In the sports field where he has been deeply involved for many years, Ronaldo is steadily transitioning from a player to a capital provider.
In August 2025, Ronaldo renewed his contract with Al Nassr and obtained a 15% stake in the club, becoming the second-largest shareholder of this Saudi Arabian football powerhouse.
On November 27, 2025, Ronaldo announced an investment in the Spanish mixed martial arts event brand WOW FC, one of the most influential emerging fighting events in the region. He anchored the cooperation with the four concepts of "self-discipline, respect, resilience, and excellence," achieving an ecological extension from team equity to event company equity.
Ronaldo has also invested in the construction of the "Padel City" sports complex. In 2024, he acquired the Lisbon Racket Centre in Lisbon and plans to replicate the Padel City model in Spain and other places.
Outside the sports field, Ronaldo has shifted his investment focus to the high-growth technology track in recent years.
In 2023, he participated in a $40 million investment in the free football game "UFL" and became one of the iconic investors in the project.
In December 2024, he collaborated with Binance to launch the ForeverSkills NFT series, which includes seven digital collectibles of football skills and skill certification NFTs, and had a remarkable performance in the first week of its launch.
On December 5, 2025, Ronaldo officially purchased shares in the American generative search unicorn Perplexity AI and became a strategic shareholder.
In addition to the technology track, Ronaldo is also optimizing his asset structure as he gets older. In 2023, he acquired shares in the Portuguese media group Cofina Media through an investor consortium and became one of the core shareholders after it was renamed Medialivre. In 2025, according to Spanish media reports, he increased his stake in the Portuguese porcelain company Vista Alegre Atlantis SGPS and also holds shares in the URSU mineral water brand, expanding into the fast-moving consumer goods field. In April 2025, he also co-founded the UR·Marv film studio with British director Matthew Vaughn. So far, it has participated in the production of two action movies and is preparing for a third one.
Behind this series of layouts is the support of his long-term agent Jorge Mendes. As the founder of the Portuguese sports management company Gestifute, Mendes not only plans his career but also provides professional investment consulting and asset management services throughout the process.
Ronaldo's investment strategy is distinct, featuring the characteristics of "not taking control and having a fast turnover." Different from Messi's approach, which focuses on stable sports industry investments, he is more like a venture capitalist, preferring tracks with steep growth curves such as AI and NFTs.
Ronaldo's core competitiveness lies in transforming his global fans into commercial potential. Whether it's driving traffic to Perplexity AI or boosting the sales of CR7 products, the fan economy is the main thread throughout.
Ronaldo has turned his name into a long-term brand.
Investing in Perplexity AI
In recent years, AI technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, and search engines have also undergone a revolution. Perplexity is at the forefront of this change.
Founded in 2022, Perplexity is an AI search startup founded by former OpenAI and former Google Deepmind engineers. It specializes in "conversational search" and intuitive Q&A, aiming to challenge the status of large language models such as Google and ChatGPT. Perplexity AI's flagship product, "Comet," uses natural language processing technology to directly answer users' questions while providing transparent references to information sources.
Perplexity completed a $200 million financing round in September 2025, and its valuation reached approximately $20 billion. It is regarded as one of the fastest-growing AI innovation companies in the Silicon Valley tech circle. Ronaldo's investment comes at a time when AI search has become a new focus in consumer-level applications - this is not only a judgment of the technological trend but also an opportunity to seize the market with his personal influence. The key to its ability to compete with OpenAI and Google lies in avoiding the "heavy asset" route of general large models - focusing on search scenarios for lightweight optimization, retaining ChatGPT's conversational interaction while solving the pain points of Google Search's "information fragmentation" and GPT's "data lag." However, in the face of the traffic barriers and technological iteration pressure of giants, its long-term growth still has uncertainties.
There are three main reasons why Perplexity has become one of the hottest AI unicorns in 2025.
Firstly, its valuation growth rate leads the industry. Its valuation exceeded $20 billion in just three years after its establishment, achieving a 35-fold increase in two years. In 2025, it completed two rounds of financing within half a year, and its valuation jumped two levels in a row, with its growth rate firmly in the first echelon of global AI startups.
Secondly, top-tier capital has flocked to back it. The investors include core Silicon Valley forces such as Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and Sequoia Capital, with a total financing of over $1 billion. The capital recognition is a benchmark in the AI track during the same period.
Thirdly, there has been an explosive growth in user popularity. In March 2024, its global monthly visits were 52.4 million, soaring to 159.7 million in March 2025, a year-on-year increase of 204.77%.
What's more topical is that in August 2025, based on its own valuation of $18 billion, Perplexity made a "David vs. Goliath" move by offering a $34.5 billion all-cash bid to acquire Google Chrome. At that time, it coincided with a critical node in Google's antitrust lawsuit, and this move instantly triggered a global uproar in the tech circle. The label of "Google killer" has maximized its exposure and discussion.
As an investor and brand ambassador, Ronaldo not only provides financial support to Perplexity but also brings in new traffic. The "Perplexity x CR7" section jointly launched by Perplexity and Ronaldo gathers a vast amount of archives and data from Ronaldo's career and allows users to interact with Ronaldo through Q&A. For example, users can query personalized questions such as "How did Ronaldo score in the match against Juventus in 2018" on this platform, and the AI will generate real-time answers. This deeply customized service makes Perplexity more user-friendly and also increases the product's fun and differentiation.
The founding team pointed out that they hope to build this cooperation into "the beginning of inspiring everyone to ask more ambitious questions," which coincides with Ronaldo's concept of emphasizing the relationship between curiosity and success. "Curiosity is the key to success," Ronaldo wrote on social platform X. "Keep asking a new question every day, and you'll win."
For Ronaldo, there are multiple considerations behind his investment in Perplexity. Firstly, he has over 1 billion followers on global social platforms. Such a large user base means huge exposure for the Perplexity brand and potential user growth. This investment serves two purposes - on the one hand, it expands Perplexity's influence in potential markets such as Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia; on the other hand, it injects a technological aura into his personal brand by leveraging the AI hotspot.
Ronaldo said, "Perplexity is powering the curiosity of the world" and believes that AI search is gradually becoming a part of people's daily lives. Some analysts point out that Ronaldo's move is a bet that AI search tools are moving from the "laboratory" to "daily consumer goods."
For him, this is not only a vote for cutting-edge technology but also a way to build an insurmountable "moat" for his future. As the competition for entertainment traffic becomes more intense, having technological content and innovative topics will be the key for celebrities to maintain their brands.
Celebrities Investing in AI
Ronaldo is not the only celebrity who is bullish on AI. In recent years, globally, more and more celebrities from the cultural and sports circles have turned their attention to the artificial intelligence track. From Hollywood to the Asian market, the trend of capital and traffic tilting towards the technology field has become prominent.
In Hollywood, Will Smith once endorsed the smart hardware company Humane founded by former Apple engineers. Its AI Pin wearable device features "screenless interaction" as its core selling point. Although its commercialization did not meet expectations in the end, it still reflects celebrities' attention to cutting-edge technology.
Leonardo DiCaprio started investing earlier. He not only participated in founding several venture capital funds such as Struck Capital and Data Point and served as an advisor to clean technology startups but also accurately bet on the AI cultural intelligence platform Qloo. This platform analyzes users' cultural consumption preferences through algorithms and has become an important data support tool in the entertainment industry.
Kris Jenner, the mother of American socialite Kim Kardashian, targeted the fashion track and, together with Hailey Bieber, completed an $8 million seed round investment in the AI-driven e-commerce platform Phia, leveraging AI personalized recommendation technology to optimize the fashion consumption experience.
The AI investments of Asian celebrities are more characterized by the integration of "IP + technology."
G.E.M. invested in the AI music creation platform "Sound Pulse Technology" through her personal studio. This platform uses natural language processing and melody generation algorithms to assist musicians in quickly producing demos. It also launched a "G.E.M. exclusive voice model," allowing fans to interact with their idol's music style through AI tools, achieving a technological extension of the IP value.
Jay Chou's "Giant Legend" company collaborated with Unitree Technology to develop a consumer-level AI robot dog. It not only features voice interaction and action imitation functions but also incorporates exclusive content such as Jay Chou's classic songs and movie clips, becoming a typical example of the combination of cultural IP and artificial intelligence.
After retiring, Yao Ming co-founded "Yao Capital" and focused on AI health monitoring, intelligent sports equipment, and other tracks in the technology field. One of the AI sports rehabilitation brands it invested in has achieved accurate assessment of sports injuries and generated personalized rehabilitation plans through algorithms.
Zhang Yixing's "Chromosome Entertainment Group" applies AI technology to the entire process of idol incubation - optimizing training directions through AI analysis of audience aesthetic trends and using virtual human technology to create digital avatars for cross-scenario performances, achieving a deep integration of "technology + entertainment."
Andy Lau once joined a Hong Kong AI vision technology company as a partner. The facial recognition and special effects synthesis technology it developed has been applied in film and television post-production; Chow Yun-fat endorsed a smart home robot brand. This product integrates an AI voice assistant and home service functions and quickly opened up the market with his high popularity among the public.
From the music, sports, to the film and television fields, Chinese celebrities' AI investments always revolve around their core resources, forming a closed loop of "IP empowering technology and technology feeding back to IP."
The investment logics of these global celebrities are highly consistent. On the one hand, the high growth potential and technological dividends of the AI industry can help them open up new paths for asset preservation and appreciation beyond their traditional performing arts incomes. On the other hand, by betting on the technology track, celebrities can break free from the limitations of a single professional label - transforming their traffic into a voice in the technology field and enabling their personal IPs to maintain long-term vitality in an industry environment with "accelerated traffic iteration."
From Hollywood to Asia, AI has become a "standard configuration" in the global celebrities' asset portfolios. They use capital and resources to seize the next-generation application scenarios, build new moats, and break through the limitations of time and fields with their personal influence, achieving a leap from "traffic celebrities" to "long-term value creators."
Conclusion
Ronaldo has kicked the ball into Perplexity AI's goal. His investment philosophy is - he doesn't rely on scoring in a single game but continuously lays out for the next scoring point.
In the general trend of global celebrities flocking to invest in AI, his choice is not only a move to follow the technological dividends but also a forward-looking layout for the future. Compared with the momentary glory on the field, embedding his legend in AI to achieve asset preservation and appreciation is the safest "lifetime contract" for the richest man in football.