Clooney really did give 14 friends $1M each in cash

On Monday the history account @Dr_TheHistories wrote that George Clooney once handed each of his 14 closest friends a Tumi suitcase holding $1 million in cash, and covered the taxes. By Tuesday morning the post had been seen more than six million times.

The core of it is true. Clooney's friend Rande Gerber first told the story in 2017, and Clooney confirmed it himself to GQ in 2020. Snopes rates it "True". Some of the viral details are wrong, and the real version is better.

The dinner

Gerber, the nightlife entrepreneur who co-founded Casamigos tequila with Clooney, told the story on MSNBC's "Headliners" in 2017. "There's a group of guys we call 'The Boys,'" he said, as Today reported. Clooney had told them: "Hey, mark September 27th, 2013, on your calendar. Everyone's going to come to my house for dinner."

At the table, "sitting in front of each of us at the table is a black Tumi bag," Gerber said. Clooney spoke: "I came to L.A., I slept on your couch. I'm so fortunate in my life to have all of you, and I couldn't be where I am today without all of you." He asked them to open the bags.

"We open it up, and it's $1 million in $20 bills," Gerber said. "Every one of us — 14 of us — got a million dollars." Clooney told the table: "You don't have to worry about your kids; you don't have to worry about school; you don't have to worry about paying your mortgage."

Not everyone there was rich. One friend, Gerber said, was "working at a bar in Texas at the airport, trying just to support his family", and rode a bicycle to work every day.

Gerber pulled Clooney aside: "I absolutely am not taking this million dollars." Clooney answered with an announcement to the table: "If Rande doesn't take the million dollars, nobody gets it." Gerber took it, and gave all of it to charity.

Clooney's version

For three years Clooney neither confirmed nor denied it. Then, when GQ made him its 2020 Icon of the Year, he told the magazine everything.

He was 52 and single. Gravity was about to come out, and "because they didn't want to pay us, they gave us percentages of the movie, 'cause they thought it was gonna be a flop, and that ended up being a very good deal." His friends had helped him over 35 years, he said: "I've slept on their couches when I was broke. They loaned me money when I was broke." His logic was blunt: "If I get hit by a bus, they're all in the will. So why the fuck am I waiting to get hit by a bus?"

Getting $14 million in cash took some planning. Clooney said he found a place in downtown Los Angeles with "giant pallets of cash". He drove there in an old, beat-up van with "Florist" on the side, took it down in an elevator to the vault and loaded up. Nobody knew except his assistant "and a couple of security guys that were shitting themselves." He bought 14 Tumi bags and packed $1 million into each, which, he said, "isn't as much as you think it is, weight-wise."

He is right. A US banknote weighs about one gram whatever its denomination, according to the US Currency Education Program. A million dollars in $20 bills is 50,000 notes, or roughly 50kg (110lb).

The next day, he said, he held up a map and pointed to all the places he had been "because of them". "How do you repay people like that? ... How about a million bucks?"

What the viral post gets wrong

The X post says Clooney "posed with his wife Amal" at the dinner. In September 2013 he had no wife. "Amal and I had just met, but we weren't dating at all," he told GQ. They married a year later, on September 27, 2014. Clooney called the date happenstance. Gerber called it "good karma."

The post also credits Casamigos for his ability to pay. The brand did launch in 2013, but the windfall came later. In June 2017, Diageo agreed to buy Casamigos for up to $1 billion: $700 million upfront and up to $300 million more over ten years. In 2013, as GQ put it, he had some money, but not as much as he has now.

Who paid the tax

"Covering the taxes" sounds like a second gift. In the US it is how the law works anyway: the giver owes gift tax, not the recipients. William McDevitt, a CPA at Wilkin & Guttenplan, ran the numbers for Money in 2017.

In 2013 the top gift-tax rate was 40 percent. Clooney could exclude $14,000 per friend, or $196,000 in all, and then use his $5.25 million lifetime exemption. If he had not touched that exemption before, $8.554 million was left to tax. On those assumptions, the bill came to about $3.42 million, on top of the $14 million in the bags.

Clooney told GQ that a far richer man he ran into at a Las Vegas hotel had heard the story and asked him: "Why would you do that?"

His answer: "Why wouldn't you do that, you schmuck?"

Image: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. George Clooney at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in 2024.