How much did George Foreman get paid to fight Muhammad Ali?

George Foreman and Muhammad Ali earned $5 million from their popular fight dubbed The Rumble in the Jungle. That’s the same as $26 million today.

The Rumble in the Jungle, was a heavyweight championship boxing match on October 30, 1974, at the 20th of May Stadium (now the Stade Tata Raphaël) in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), between undefeated and undisputed heavyweight champion George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.

The event had an attendance of 60,000 people with 60% of world population watching at one time. Ali won by knockout in the eighth round.

Some sources estimate that the fight was watched by as many as one billion television viewers around the world, becoming the world’s most-watched live television broadcast at the time.

This included a record estimated 50 million viewers watching the fight on pay-per-view or closed-circuit theatre TV.

The fight grossed an estimated $100 million (inflation-adjusted $500 million) in worldwide revenue.

Decades later, the bout was the subject of the Academy Award winning documentary film When We Were Kings.

The Rumble in the Jungle has been called “arguably the greatest sporting event of the 20th century.”