Dwayne Douglas Johnson was born on 2 May 1972 in Hayward, California, into a family already steeped in professional wrestling. His father, Rocky Johnson, was a pioneering Black Canadian wrestler, and his maternal grandfather, High Chief Peter Maivia, was a legendary Samoan performer, meaning Johnson grew up moving between arenas and territories as his father’s career dictated. According to his Wikipedia biography, the family eventually settled long enough for him to attend Freedom High School in Bethlehem Township, Pennsylvania, where he excelled at football, wrestling and track and field.

That athletic talent earned Johnson a scholarship to the University of Miami, where he played defensive tackle on the Hurricanes’ 1991 national championship team while studying criminology and physiology. He spent much of his college career as a back-up behind future NFL star Warren Sapp, and went undrafted when he left university, a setback that pushed him towards a much longer road into professional sport than he had originally planned.

With no NFL contract forthcoming, Johnson signed with the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League in 1995, earning around $250 to $300 a week on the practice roster while moonlighting on the local Stampede Wrestling circuit. As he later told the league itself, in an interview with CFL.ca, he was released just two months into the season, a blow that left him back in Florida with reportedly seven dollars to his name.

That low point became the turning point. Trained by his father and grandfather, Johnson signed with the then World Wrestling Federation and debuted in 1996 under his birth name before adopting the ring name Rocky Maivia, a tribute to both men. He struggled to connect with audiences at first, but by reinventing himself as the brash, quick-witted “Rock” and joining the villainous Nation of Domination stable, he began the climb that would make him one of wrestling’s biggest ever stars.

By the late 1990s, The Rock had become the face of WWE’s Attitude Era, trading catchphrases and rivalries with Steve Austin and Triple H while winning multiple world championships. That mainstream popularity translated directly into Hollywood opportunity: he made his film debut as the Scorpion King in “The Mummy Returns” (2001) for a reported $500,000, then parlayed that appearance into the lead role in the spin-off film “The Scorpion King” (2002).

His $5.5 million salary for that first starring role set a Guinness World Record for the highest pay ever given to a first-time leading man, a mark reported to still stand, according to Far Out Magazine. The payday signalled that studios saw genuine box office value in Johnson beyond the wrestling ring, and it set the template for the blockbuster career that followed.

In the two decades since, Johnson has become one of the biggest box office draws in the world, anchoring the “Fast & Furious” franchise from “Fast Five” onwards, rebooting “Jumanji” into a billion-dollar series, voicing Maui in Disney’s “Moana” and “Moana 2”, and headlining “San Andreas”, “Baywatch” and “Black Adam”. His production company, Seven Bucks Productions, co-founded with former wife Dany Garcia, had grossed roughly $4.6 billion at the worldwide box office as of 2023, according to its company history.

That commercial pull has repeatedly translated into record paydays. Johnson topped Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid actors for the fifth time in 2024, earning an estimated $88 million, driven largely by a reported $50 million fee-plus-buyout deal for the Amazon film “Red One”, detailed in Forbes’ 2024 rankings, which the outlet described as the largest single-movie payday in history.

Johnson’s crossover appeal has been formally recognised on multiple occasions. He received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 13 December 2017, an honour documented on the Walk of Fame’s official site, cementing his status as one of the entertainment industry’s most bankable names.

He was also named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2016, a title covered widely at the time including by Time, and he has topped Forbes’ highest-paid actors list in multiple separate years, including 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2021, a run of dominance few actors of his generation can match.

For a decade, Johnson’s flagship endorsement was Project Rock, his training line with Under Armour, a global partnership reported by FandomWire to be worth around $25 million when it launched in 2016. That long-running deal came to a close in August 2026, with Retail Dive reporting that Under Armour and Johnson’s camp both confirmed the partnership had ended as part of a wider marketing reset at the brand.

His self-founded ZOA Energy drink, launched in 2021 with Dany Garcia and beverage executives Dave Rienzi and John Shulman, took on a different structure after Molson Coors acquired a majority stake in the brand in late 2024, a deal covered by ESM Magazine, under which Johnson continues to front the brand’s marketing while the drinks giant took over its retail and distribution operations. He has also carried long-running endorsement relationships with Ford and Apple.

Away from acting, Johnson has built a genuinely diversified business portfolio. He co-founded Teremana Tequila in 2020, a brand that grew fast enough that trade press began comparing it to George Clooney’s Casamigos, which sold to Diageo for around $1 billion in 2017. The Hollywood Reporter has cited media estimates placing Teremana’s valuation as high as $3.5 billion, though no sale or independent valuation of the still privately held brand has been officially confirmed.

Johnson has also moved into sports ownership. In 2020, he and Dany Garcia, alongside RedBird Capital Partners, bought the bankrupt XFL out of receivership for a reported $15 million, then merged it with the rival USFL in 2024 to create the United Football League, of which Johnson and his partners retain a 50 per cent stake alongside Fox, as reported by the Hollywood Reporter.

Johnson’s real estate history includes both wins and losses. He purchased a 46-acre equestrian estate in Powder Springs, Georgia, in October 2019 for a reported $9.49 million, complete with a 15,000 square foot main house, only to sell it in September 2021 for $6.1 million, a loss on paper documented by TheRichest.

His primary residence today is a 46-acre estate in Southwest Ranches, Florida, reportedly purchased in 2023 for around $9.5 million and since built out with a private gym, equestrian facilities and extensive family living space that has pushed its estimated value towards $27.8 million, according to a property profile from This Older House. The Florida base keeps him close to both his family and the training facilities central to his public image.