Hundt, whom Gore helped get appointed to run Bill Clinton’s Federal Communications Commission in 1993, didn’t detect a business gene in young Al back in their days at Washington’s private St. Albans School.
Gore went on to graduate with a degree in government from Harvard University, dabble in journalism and study but never graduate from law school at Vanderbilt University. Instead, he quit to run for public office.
‘Going Places’
Still, says Hundt, “it was clear that Al was smart and was going places.”
Gore hasn’t tried to hide his prosperity. Back in 2000, about $750,000 of his net worth was tied to two homes he and his then-wife Tipper owned in Virginia and Tennessee.
Most of the rest had been recently inherited, including an undisclosed number of shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp. left to him by his late father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., and valued at between $500,000 and $1 million, according to disclosure forms.
He’s moved up the housing ladder since then. He owns a 20- room, 10,000-square-foot antebellum mansion in Nashville’s wealthy Belle Meade neighborhood that’s mostly shrouded from view by a thicket of Southern foliage and a massive iron gate. In 2010 -- weeks before the Gores announced they were dissolving their 40-year marriage -- he purchased an oceanfront six- bedroom, $8.9 million villa in Montecito, California, where Oprah Winfrey and Kirk Douglas have lived.
Utility Bill
It isn’t clear how the divorce affects Gore’s net worth. No settlement has ever been published and Betsy McManus, Al Gore’s director of communications, declined to comment on it.
Such lavish living isn’t lost on Gore’s critics. In 2007, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, using a public records request, published Gore’s Nashville home utility bill, showing it used almost 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006 -- 20 times the national average household consumption. Gore’s people dismissed the revelation.