Michael Jordan once gave Charles Barkley a tip on a golf course that Barkley says was worth about $50 million. Years later, after their friendship fell apart, it took another golf course to bring them back together.

The advice came in the early 1990s, when Barkley was earning about $3 million a year from Nike.

“We were playing golf, and he said, ‘Chuck, I was talking to somebody. So I want you to quit taking $3 million. Take a million and take the other $2 million in stock options,'” Barkley said on The Dan Patrick Show in June 2025. “So I called my people and said, ‘Hey, Michael told me to do this,’ because Mike’s always been a brilliant businessman.”

However, his advisors were not sure about the idea.

“And they’re like, ‘This is risky. You think he’s going to be that great?’ I said, ‘Man, I ain’t never seen nobody like that dude,’ because I had met him at the Olympic trials. I said, ‘He’s going to be amazing.’And we did it. And like I said, I ended up probably making, seriously, another $50 million, to be honest with you.”

That tip paid off because Nike as a company kept growing. The company has split its stock 2-for-1 seven times since 1990, and Barkley has said he made “probably 10 times the amount of money because it split.”

But not every star that was offered such a deal took it. In 1979, Nike’s Phil Knight offered Magic Johnson stock to sign with them. Converse offered more cash, so he ended up signing with them.

“When you grow up broke, take the money,” Johnson later said on the All the Smoke podcast. That stock would have been worth an estimated $5 billion today. Johnson, however, went on to become a billionaire through his own businesses.

Now, getting back to Barkley and Jordan. They were very close friends for almost three decades. Barkley once recalled Jordan calling him at 3 a.m. after a season-ending loss, telling him he’d pick him up in four hours and fly him off to play golf on his private jet.

However, that friendship ended in 2012. Jordan was the majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, who were 4-29 and on their way to a 7-59 finish, the worst winning percentage in NBA history. On March 1, Barkley went on ESPN 1000’s Waddle & Silvy in Chicago and blamed the people around his friend.

“I think the biggest problem has been I don’t know if he has hired enough people around him who he will listen to,” Barkley said. “One thing about being famous is the people around you, you pay all their bills, so they very rarely disagree with you because they want you to pick up the check. They want to fly around on your private jet, so they never disagree with you. I don’t think Michael has hired enough people around him who will disagree.”

He ended up getting a call from Jordan himself that same night he blamed his friend. “He went ballistic on me,” Barkley later said on The Tom Tolbert Show. “Telling me, ‘You’re supposed to be my best friend, and you’re going to do that bulls–t?’ I said, ‘Man, I gotta do my job.’”

After that night, they ended up not speaking again for 14 years. Their mutual friend and the former MLB All-Star Vince Coleman played a major part in reuniting the old best friends. Coleman was at Jordan’s private course, The Grove XXIII in Florida, when he called Barkley and put Jordan on the phone.

Barkley said Coleman told him he was “sick of you and MJ’s BS.” Later, he went on to explain why he thinks their feud lasted so long.

“We’re both too stubborn to pick up the phone, to be honest with you,” Barkley said on Waddle & Silvy in April. “I got a lot of love for you, and you got a lot of love for me.”

In July, on Pardon My Take, he ended up giving more details about the call that he had with his old friend.

“I said, ‘Oh, man, how you doing?’ I hope you’re doing great.’ And we’re like, ‘Yo, man, let’s let this bulls–t go. We were great friends, brothers for a long time, and both of us being selfish and stupid,’” Barkley explained. “I said, ‘Yeah, we are. We’re both selfish and stupid and stubborn more than anything.’ He says, ‘Hey, man, as soon as basketball is over, come down to my golf course, and let’s play,’ and I said, ‘Man, I’d be honored to. You know, I miss your friendship.’ And he said, ‘I miss your friendship.'”

Just like that, the 14-year-long feud was over. Barkley said he plans to spend a couple of days playing golf with Jordan at his course, and that he’ll be one of the few people willing to give Jordan a hard time. Jordan has not commented publicly on any of it.