Kobe Bean Bryant was born on 23 August 1978 in Philadelphia, the only son of Joe Bryant, himself an NBA player. When his father moved to the Italian league in 1984 the family went too, and Bryant spent seven years in Rieti, Pistoia and Reggio Emilia, growing up bilingual and learning the game on European courts, not American playgrounds.

The family returned to Pennsylvania in 1991 and he went to Lower Merion High School, becoming the leading scorer in south-eastern Pennsylvania schoolboy history. He died on 26 January 2020 aged 41.

He entered the 1996 draft straight from school and went thirteenth overall to the Charlotte Hornets, who immediately traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers for Vlade Divac. His first contract was the standard rookie scale: three years and about $3.5 million.

The money that mattered at eighteen was the shoe deal. Adidas signed him before he had played a professional minute, on a six-year agreement reported at $48 million, which was extraordinary for a teenager coming off the bench. He bought his way out of it in 2002, paying a reported $8 million to become a free agent in the sneaker market.

Paired with Shaquille O’Neal under Phil Jackson, Bryant won three consecutive championships from 2000 to 2002, and the contracts followed the trophies. A six-year extension signed in 1999 was worth about $70.9 million; the seven-year deal signed in 2004, after O’Neal had gone and the franchise was his, was worth $136.4 million.

That is the heart of the money story, and it is documented rather than estimated. Forbes calculated that Bryant retired with about $323 million in NBA salary — the most any player had earned in league history at that point — across twenty seasons with one club. Two deals closed it out: a three-year extension in 2010 worth $83.5 million and a two-year, $48.5 million contract in 2013 that made him the league’s highest-paid player in both of his final seasons, long after he had stopped being its best.

Five championships, two Finals MVP awards, the league MVP in 2008, eighteen All-Star selections, two scoring titles, two Olympic golds, 81 points in a game in 2006 and 60 in the last game he played. He finished with 33,643 career points, and the Lakers retired both numbers he wore, 8 and 24.

The off-court total is the other half. Forbes put his career earnings at about $680 million from salary and endorsements combined, the most of any team athlete during a playing career, meaning more than $350 million came from outside the game. That ratio is the achievement: he was paid as much for being Kobe Bryant as for playing like him. In 2018 he won an Academy Award for Dear Basketball, the animated short made from his retirement letter.

He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2020, and the standing behind that election — murals across Los Angeles, a following in Italy that outlasted the seven years he spent there as a boy — was closer to that of a head of state than an athlete.

The commercially important part is the phrase he built himself. “Mamba Mentality” became a licensable idea rather than a nickname, attached to books, a documentary series, a training programme and a foundation. Few athletes turn a temperament into intellectual property, and it is why his name still carries a premium in markets where he never played.

After the Adidas buyout he signed with Nike in June 2003 on a five-year deal reported at $45 million, and the Kobe signature line became one of the most successful basketball shoe franchises Nike has run. Around it sat McDonald’s, Sprite, Turkish Airlines, Lenovo, Hublot and Alibaba, with a particularly large presence in China, where he was for years its most marketable foreign athlete.

The Nike relationship produced the most instructive episode in his commercial record. ESPN reported that the contract lapsed on 13 April 2021 and that his widow and the estate chose not to renew it, over the limited availability of Kobe product and the absence of children’s sizes. Sportico reported a new long-term deal the following year. An estate walking away from Nike and being re-signed is a rare demonstration of where the leverage sat.

He set up Kobe Inc. in 2013 to hold his commercial interests while still playing, and the following year made the investment that outperformed everything else he did. He put close to $6 million into BodyArmor, the sports drink, for a stake above 10 per cent. ESPN reported that a $300 million Coca-Cola investment in 2018, at a $2 billion valuation, had already taken his holding to around $200 million.

In November 2021 Coca-Cola bought the rest of the company for $5.6 billion in cash, as CNBC reported, valuing the brand near $8 billion; Sportico reported that his estate stood to collect about $400 million, some sixty-six times the original stake. Alongside it he launched Bryant Stibel, a venture fund started with $100 million in 2016 with Jeff Stibel, and Granity Studios, which produced his books and the Oscar-winning short.

His property was concentrated in Orange County rather than the Los Angeles neighbourhoods his teammates favoured. The family home was at Newport Coast, bought in the early 2000s, and he held further Newport Beach houses as investments.

We put his California real estate at $40 million to $55 million. The rest was financial rather than physical: the BodyArmor holding, his interests in Bryant Stibel, the equity in Granity Studios and Kobe Inc., and the cash and securities from twenty years of the largest salary in his sport. His car collection was modest by the standards of his earnings.