Tony Hawk went from only spending $5 a day on Taco Bell to being a millionaire investor. Here's how the world's most famous skateboarder makes and spends his fortune.

Hawk frequently takes to Twitter to joke about being mistaken for other celebrities, particularly in airports.

He previously told Business Insider's Meredith Cash that he is often confused for legendary NFL quarterback Tom Brady. He assumes this particular confusion happens because "they know there's some sports star whose name starts with a T."

"I get recognized all the time, to the point where it's kind of strange. I never imagined I'd ever be famous from skateboarding," he told Cash. "But it's cool!"

According to a 2018 Sports Illustrated profile, Hawk shuttles his family around in a Tesla Model S with an all-white interior. The car has a base price of $74,490.

Hawk told MotorTrend in 2010 that his daily driving car at the time was Jeep Cherokee. He also mentioned that he had a manual 1964 Chevy Corvette Sting Ray, which auction for about $50,000.

His home base is in Encinitas, California. The private home is equipped with an infinity pool that overlooks San Diego and its own skate park, according to a 2015 GQ profile. It's filled with art Hawk has collected over the years — including a framed image of his "Simpsons" cameo that is signed by the cast.

Hawk also reportedly purchased a three-unit apartment building in Detroit in 2016 for an undisclosed price, according to the Detroit Free Press. (Hawk's wife, Cathy Goodman, is from the Detroit area.) They reportedly planned to rent two of the units and keep another available for Hawk family visits to the area, the Free Press wrote at the time.

Happy Holidays from ours to yours. Thank you for all the kind words about my mom; she is the star on top of our tree. Hug your parents and hug your kids (ours are awesome btw). Let’s all make the world a better place in 2020.

A post shared by Tony Hawk (@tonyhawk) on Dec 26, 2019 at 9:45am PSTDec 26, 2019 at 9:45am PST

Hawk, who has been married four times, has four children and two stepchildren from his marriages.

His oldest son, Riley, followed in Hawk's footsteps and became a professional skateboarder. At one point, he even skated for Hawk's Birdhouse team. Riley is also a musician.

Hawk founded a video production company called 900 Films in 1999, named for his famous move, originally geared toward filming skateboarding.

Now, the San Diego-based company produces action sports content, like the popular YouTube account RIDE Channel, as well as advertisements for companies like Kraft, Sony, and Adobe.

Hawk was an early investor in California's Blue Bottle Coffee chain, which was sold to Nestle in 2017 for $500 million. He, and other early investors including Bono and Jared Leto, likely received a nice payout.

Hawk was also an early investor in Nest, which was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion in 2014. He has also invested in a San Diego brewery called the Black Plague. He told Reuters in 2017 that he has also invested in "DocuSign and a few other tech companies," because he like startups and "being on the ground floor of stuff."

In 2017, Hawk told Business Insider's Shana Lebowitz that one of the proudest moments of his career was a cameo on "The Simpsons" in 2003. He played himself in an episode where Homer challenges him to a skateboard match. "It was a tipping point of skateboarding being accepted into the mainstream in a lot of ways," he said.

Although he has a long list of TV and film appearances, it was a separate early 2000s TV appearance that got Hawk to start a charity.

Hawk won $125,000 on a celebrity edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" in 2002. He used the winnings to create the Tony Hawk Foundation, which funds the creation of safe skate parks across the country. The foundation has gone on to award over $10 million to more than 600 public skate park projects in low-income areas in all 50 states.

Hawk told CNBC was offered a flat fee of $500,000 to put his name on the Activision game. He turned the deal down, and instead asked for royalties, which was a gamble.

It paid off. The franchise has surpassed an estimated $1.4 billion in worldwide sales as of 2019, according to Hawk's website.

The first editions of the game earned Hawk royalties of more than $6 million per year in the early 2000s.

The X Games were founded in 1995. The event poured new life into the skateboarding industry.

Birdhouse then became more than a skate team — it started producing boards and accessories around 1993 or 1994. Hawk told Rolling Stone that, at the time, he was "just calling shops and saying ... 'You wanna buy a board or two?'"

Birdhouse saw a sales spike after exposure from the X Games. The company, according to Sports Illustrated, was doing nearly $25 million a year in sales around 2002.

Hawk also created his own clothing line in 1998, which he then sold within two years to Quiksilver for an undisclosed amount. Hawk's clothing sales in 1999, before he sold the line, hovered around $1 million.

As skateboarding developed a negative reputation in the early 1990s, Hawk started to see the impact on his own wallet.

"My income was literally dropping in half every month," Hawk told CNBC in 2019. "And people just weren't buying skate stuff, nor Tony Hawk stuff."

He took on skate demo jobs that provided about $100 a day. At one point, he was surviving on a $5-a-day Taco Bell allowance.

He stayed focused. He refinanced the house and founded Birdhouse, a skateboard team and company, with fellow skater Per Welinder in 1992, preparing for skateboarding to make a comeback.

Hawk was winning amateur skateboarding competitions at age 12, and started skateboarding professionally at age 14. By the time he was 16, he was touted by many as the best competitive skateboarder in the world.

As a 17-year-old high school senior, his "annual income surpassed that of his teachers," according to his website. This was mostly due to his primary sponsorship with Powell-Peralta skateboards and his participation in the Bones Brigade skateboard team. He was even doing commercials for brands like Mountain Dew.

"We were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as teenagers and traveling the world," Hawk told CNBC in 2019.

"When I started making money ... I thought I'd continue to do so forever," Hawk said earlier this year. "My dad knew better and encouraged me to save and invest in a house. So I owned my own home when I was only 17 years old."

Hawk accomplished the feat in 1999 at the X Games. It took him 11 tries. "This is the best day of my life," he told the crowd.

At the time, he was 31 years old. It was his last year of professional competition — but his wealth only grew from there. He is estimated to have a net worth above $100 million.