Forrest Gump's momma always said life was like a box of chocolates, but when it comes to the slow-talking protagonist of Robert Zemeckis' 1996 movie, that box of chocolates would likely be made of solid gold in 2026.
Apple has just reached a major milestone, with the tech giant turning 50 today (April 1).
It’s come a long way from being founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne while building Apple I computers, although it's something of a myth that it was founded in Jobs' garage.
Even though Forrest Gump’s titular character made a good wedge of money from the Bubba-Gump Shrimp Co., a throwaway line toward the end of the film suggests that Forrest (played by Tom Hanks) and Lieutenant Dan (played by Gary Sinise) had invested in "some kind of fruit company." There isn't much more to go on whether this was a shrewd financial move, but in the world of movies, it sounds like the pair would be living on East Street as Gump concluded: "I got a call from him saying we didn’t have to worry about money anymore."
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We've previously covered those who've made bank off their Apple investments, with Rob Gronkowski's $69,000 punt flourishing to $250,000 just two years later.
Even though we know Forrest Gump isn't a real character, getting in early with Apple could've made him one of the richest people in the world.
In 2023, Investing.com suggested that Forrest and Dan made a mythical investment after 1974's Hurricane Carmen and likely put in $100,000 for a 3% stake. With Apple going public in 1980, that hyprothetical 3% would've been worth $90.9 billion in 2023 (based on a market cap of $3.03 trillion). Although that admittedly doesn't take into account share dilution or dividend payments, a tasty $45 billion each for Forrest and Dan doesn't sound too bad.
But what about in 2026?
Someone else has crunched the numbers, with X account Trung Phan suggesting that Forrest and Lt. Dan got to Jobs and Wozniak before Mike Markkula invested $250,000 for a third share of the company. While Wozniak has praised Markkula for Apple's success due to his gamble, convincing Wozniak to choose working at Apple instead of HP, and writing some software for early Apple computers, let's take him out of the equation for this.
Using some conservative estimations, Phan goes with the idea that the pair of shrimp bros got 'pinched' and invested $100,000 for 10% of Apple. This would've leaped to $180 million at the time of the Apple IPO in 1980, which represents a 1,8000 times return in just five years.
There's a joke that Gump was likely a loyal supporter of Jobs, so he sold it all when the Apple co-founder was fired in 1985, but if he held onto his stake, he'd now be sitting on an absolute fortune. Taking that $180 million from 1980 and reinvesting it means Gump and Lt. Dan could now be worth in excess of $300 billion. While that's a far cry from Elon Musk's current net worth of $817 billion, an even split of $150 billion each would make Gump one of the world’s richest in 2026. Although the OP said their calculator broke when trying to figure out the ROI, Grok reiterated it would be a 3,650,000x return and added: "Gump's still holding and laughing all the way to the bank. 🍎."
We obviously know that stock markets don't work like this, and various other factors come into play, but if Forrest Gump and Back to the Future were real, we know what we'd be using our DeLorean to go back in time for and investing in.