Clooney, his neighbor, and a billionaire built a tequila in a Cabo garage. Diageo paid them up to $1 billion.

George Clooney, his Cabo neighbor Rande Gerber (married to Cindy Crawford), and real-estate billionaire Mike Meldman drank a lot of tequila together. They could not find one they liked. So they hired a distillery in Jalisco, kept tweaking samples for two years, and started giving the bottles away at Gerber's house parties.

The Garage Brand

The trio named it Casamigos - "house of friends" - and only formed a company in 2013 because the distillery refused to keep producing what it now considered a commercial product without a license. Clooney would later tell AdWeek the original plan was simply to drink it themselves: "We didn't build it to sell it. We built it because we wanted the best tequila for the lowest price."

What Diageo Filed

On June 21, 2017, Diageo announced the deal in a regulatory release to the London Stock Exchange and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The structure, in the company's own words: $700 million on completion, with up to a further $300 million based on performance over a 10-year period. Casamigos was selling around 170,000 nine-litre cases a year at the time and was the fastest-growing super-premium tequila in the U.S.

Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes called Casamigos "an outstanding super-premium tequila" in the announcement. The headline number every outlet ran was the ceiling: up to $1 billion. The actual cash that hit the founders' accounts in 2017 was the $700 million upfront tranche, split three ways.

The Suitcase Detour

Four years before the sale, in September 2013, Clooney did something else with a pile of cash. He invited 14 of his closest friends to dinner at his Studio City house and handed each a black Tumi suitcase containing $1 million in $20 bills. He paid the gift taxes himself. The money came not from Casamigos - which had not yet sold - but from what Gerber later told MSNBC were Clooney's Gravity earnings. Clooney has confirmed the story in multiple interviews; Gerber has too.

Why It Matters

Celebrity liquor brands had been a punchline before Casamigos - Trump Vodka, Dan Aykroyd's Crystal Head, Justin Timberlake's 901. The Diageo deal made it a category. Within five years, Ryan Reynolds sold Aviation Gin to Diageo for up to $610 million, The Rock's Teremana hit valuations north of $3 billion, and every other A-lister suddenly had a tequila brand. The garage hobby that turned into a regulatory filing turned into a playbook.