American actor and producer Robert Downey Jr. topped the Forbes list as the highest-paid actor in Hollywood from 2013 to 2015. The actor gained popularity after playing the role of Tony stark in the film adaptation of the Marvel comics "Iron Man", as well as Sherlock Holmes from the Guy Ritchie trilogy. The actor's fee for the movie "Avengers: Infinity War" ranges to $75 million. Downey received the same amount for the blockbuster "Avengers: Endgame". Such an impressive amount can be spent on real estate, cars, and various luxury items. The list of what Robert Downey Jr. prefers to invest in includes very interesting projects.
2011 was the year of the birth of Iron Man's investment company Downey Ventures, which invests in digital telecommunications startups and also incubates consumer entertainment technology companies. Downey Ventures is part of the larger entertainment film company Team Downey, which implements film and television projects.
Team Downey has an extensive staff of writers, producers, designers, researchers, and engineers. It was based at Warner Bros. since 2010, and although left the largest concern in 2016, it still remains a part of such Warner Bros. projects as the film adaptation of Pinocchio and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
A year after its founding, Downey Ventures invested in the media company Maker Studios. Initially, Maker Studios was a mechanism for collaboration on content, a community of authors of popular Youtube channels. Gradually, this community transformed into a large business, providing services for promotion, marketing, sales, and distribution of content. And in 2014, when Maker Studios had 380 million subscribers, it was acquired by Walt Disney for $500 million.
An equally important step for Downey Ventures is investing in the online platform MasterClass to provide educational courses from celebrities. Through MasterClass, you can access acting lessons from Natalie Portman or Samuel L. Jackson, and learn the basics of filmmaking from Martin Scorsese.
In 2019, at his speech at the Amazon Re: Mars conference in Las Vegas, Robert Downey Jr. announced the creation of an equally interesting project than all his previous ones – the Footprint Coalition investment group. This is a new organization designed to use robotics and artificial intelligence to clean up the Earth and reduce its carbon footprint within a decade. The official launch of the Footprint Coalition took place in April 2020. It is noteworthy that in September of this year, the Footprint Coalition, along with the Greycroft Venture Fund, actors Ashton Kutcher, Gwyneth Paltrow, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and other famous people, invested $3 million in a new Cloud Paper startup.
Cloud Paper company produces toilet paper based on bamboo, that is, without the use of primary wood. According to Cloud Paper, the production of toilet paper destroys 15% of all forests, and for the production of paper towels and toilet paper in the United States, about 40,000 trees are destroyed every day. The Cloud Paper approach should serve as an example and a call to stop deforestation for paper production and thus preserve nature. In the future, the company plans to produce products without the use of wood for other areas.
Recently, it was reported that Downey's Footprint Coalition investment group also invested in the French startup Ynsect, which is engaged in growing insects for fertilizing plants, producing food for fish, and other Pets. It is worth noting that, according to research by Arcluster, the global insect market in the next five years will be more than $4.1 billion.
