As if George Clooney wasn’t already financially comfortable, the Oscar winner and his company partners Rande Gerber and Michael Meldman sold their tequila company to the British company Diageo for $1 billion. “If you asked us four years ago if we had a billion-dollar company, I don’t think we would have said yes,” Clooney said in a statement Wednesday. “This reflects Diageo’s belief in our company and our belief in Diageo.” When asked about the sale, Gerber described the three partners as “kind of shocked” by the sale. “I guess we were kind of shocked because we never planned on starting a tequila company. We made Casamigos just for us to drink,” Gerber said in a phone call from Mexico on “Good Morning America”. “Four years later, when, you know, we’re offered a billion dollars to sell the company, yeah, we were kind of shocked.” Initially, CNBC reported the deal for paying out around $700 million with the potential for another $300 million over ten years based on the performance of the tequila.
After the deal, Diageo tweeted “Deirre Mahlan President NA ‘We look forward to partnering with the founders to realize the full potential of @casamigos’”. Although they sold the company, Clooney emphasized that he and his partners will still be involved, saying, “We’ll still be very much a part of Casamigos.” Married to supermodel Cindy Crawford, Gerber described the brand as a “lifestyle” for its founders. “I think the most important thing for us though was we really love what we do and we love what we made and want to keep drinking it and keep the team together,” he said. “Fortunately, we get to keep our team together and we’ll continue to run the company and stay involved.”
The company, which translates as “house of friends,” is a private collection of tequilas meant just for their friends and family. However, they took the company public in 2013. “It was pretty shocking what we created in four years,” Gerber said, adding they will “definitely not” change any of their tequila recipes. George Clooney was congratulated after the sale, with actor and director Albert Brooks jokingly tweeting “it’s great when someone like that can catch a break.”