For NFL players, life after retirement can be more challenging than their careers on the gridiron. However, former Seattle Seahawks defensive end Cliff Avril has been maximizing his second act with various ventures like real estate, broadcasting, and investing. Sharing about how he continues to grow in this part of life, Avril revealed his bet on the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, which could yield him a massive 4,247% return.

“I was fortunate enough to be able to get an allocation and invest in SpaceX. The year I retired, actually. They are supposed to go public this year. And it’s crazy because the valuation that I invested in at the time was like 46 billion at the time,” Cliff Avril said on the No Free Lunch Podcast with Ndamukong Suh before revealing the return he is expected to receive. “Like some trillion, something crazy. So, we’re talking like 30-40x return.”

The star defensive end is expected to secure such a massive return on his investment as SpaceX is targeting a blockbuster IPO valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. The company is expected to raise roughly $75 to $80 billion, which would eclipse Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion at a valuation of $1.7 trillion.

Avril secured this investment the year he announced his retirement in 2019 after suffering a neck injury in 2017, which kept him off the field over the next two years.

While this seems like an investment that will make him millions, Avril also made some rather silly decisions early doors into his NFL career.

“The worst purchase that I made was I brought a brand new Escalade my rookie year,” said Avril on the podcast. “I blame my agent, B-Mac, great agent, but I blame my agent because I had just signed, I just got drafted, I know I’m guaranteed to get a contract of some sort, and I brought a brand new Escalade for $62,000. I didn’t have the money yet, but my agent, he put it on his card.”

Before his injury, the 40-year-old was part of the Seattle Seahawks team that won the Super Bowl in 2014.  He was a key member of the dominant Legion of Boom defense headlined by Kam Chancellor, Richard Sherman, and Earl Thomas, among others.

The defensive end spent five seasons with the Seahawks, joining as a free agent in 2013 after a five-year stint with the Detroit Lions. In Seattle, Avril quickly became one of the defense’s top players and played a key role in the franchise’s first Super Bowl championship in his first season.

He remained a key contributor to a defense that led the NFL in scoring defense for three straight years while recording 33.5 sacks and 13 forced fumbles through his first four seasons with the club. But after his career-ending injury, he was forced to shift his focus from football to other ventures to sustain himself and his family.

“It’s interesting, most fans love you when you’re on the field, but really don’t care about that transition period for you, and that’s probably some of your darkest moments, depending on how long you play,” Avril said on The Reset podcast, discussing this transition. “The longer you play, the harder those next two or three years are for you once you transition because you’ve been in that game for a long time. You’ve been doing something for so long for the majority of your life, trying to figure out what that next passion is, what that next purpose is, can be tough.”

Cliff Avril began a broadcasting career with KJR-AM as co-host of the Cliff and Puck show. He also joined Q13 News as an analyst on the Seahawks Gameday crew. Similarly, he also ventured into the real estate space and credited the city of Seattle and his media gigs with the Seahawks for providing him a boost, which helped him launch this new career.

Cliff Avril shares how Seattle helped him launch his real estate career

After his NFL career was cut short with a neck injury, Cliff Avril found a new life in the media as he worked Seahawks games with Q13 and KJR-AM. As he continued in this new role as a broadcaster, this opportunity acted as a launching pad for his new venture into real estate. Avril founded CA Family Properties, a real estate investment company that works on distressed, multi-family properties.

Addressing this transition, Cliff Avril highlighted that the city of Seattle played a key role with its myriad of Fortune 500 companies that exposed him to brilliant minds that pushed him to take on this new challenge.

“The cool thing about being in Seattle is there are so many Fortune 500 companies and different things that, when the injury happened, a lot of the CEOs actually reached out to me, checking in on me,” Avril said. “They were like, ‘Hey, we don’t have a position for you, but we’d love to have you on the team.’ So I was meeting with Zillow and Microsoft. I was meeting with radio stations because of the media aspect of things.”

Cliff Avril’s story proves that life after football can be just as rewarding as the game itself. Through smart investments, broadcasting, and real estate, he has built a lucrative second career.