Patrick Schwarzenegger's Next Big Flex

Forbes

2 days ago

Jet-lagged and hungry, Patrick Schwarzenegger eyes a craft services table stacked with pastries and sandwiches before turning his attention to the Sugarfish sushi delivery on the table in front of him. The 31-year-old actor and entrepreneur has barely had time to catch his breath in the past two months, having traveled to 15 countries to promote his cult HBO series, The White Lotus.
'I always carry bars on me,' he says, reaching into his pocket to pull out two Mosh protein bars, the brand he cofounded in 2021. 'Especially on filming days when you don't know what the snacks are. I always bring my own.'
Cody Pickens for Forbes
Much like his protein shake–obsessed White Lotus character, Saxon Ratliff, Schwarzenegger watches what he eats. The similarities continue: He also graduated from an elite university with a business degree, comes from a powerful family and is no stranger to wealth. But while Saxon had yet to move beyond the luxe life he inherited from his parents, Schwarzenegger is finally making a name for himself—in business and onscreen.
The son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, he grew up in a world of the Hollywood and political elite as the child of an actor-turned-billionaire California governor and a broadcast journalist who happens to be a Kennedy. He fell in love with acting early, often visiting his father's movie sets as a boy.
'There were times where I was, like, 'Oh, God, these are big shoes to fill. Should I change my last name and have a stage name?' Those things crossed my mind,' Schwarzenegger admits. 'But ultimately, I'm very proud of my dad and the life that he's given me, and the last name he's built and the brand he's built.'
It was his father's penchant for business that Schwarzenegger adopted first. His mother remembers him as a preteen glued to the TV when Shark Tank came on and asking for a few hundred bucks for his birthday to start an E-Trade account and buy Apple stock. In 2008, Schwarzenegger—then 15 years old—interned for film producer John Davis, a large investor in Wetzel's Pretzels, who had just sold his stake (with an investor group) for around $36 million, or 13 times his initial investment. That caught the high schooler's attention, especially when he learned that Elise and Rick Wetzel were founding a new fast-casual pizza venture. Schwarzenegger's parents loaned him around $50,000 to invest in Blaze Pizza, joining investors including LeBron James. Six years later, in 2014, Schwarzenegger opened the first of his two Blaze franchises in his native Los Angeles.
Superfinery: Schwarzenegger wore custom Balmain to this year's Met Gala.
Dia Disasupil/Getty
'What I got to see were consumers looking for healthier alternatives, vegan topping options, the healthier crust,' he says. 'So I was like, 'I'm going to continue to invest in [other] companies that are doing this.' '
In 2015, nearly eight years after his initial investment, Schwarzenegger (then a senior in college) sold his shares of Blaze for at least $2 million, Forbes estimates. He then paid his parents back for the initial loan and invested in other better-for-you brands, including the hydration powder brand Liquid IV and two prebiotic sodas, Olipop and Poppi, the latter of which sold for $2 billion earlier this year.
As his portfolio grew, so did his acting credits. While attending USC, Schwarzenegger started taking acting classes—a weekly commitment he made for the next decade. He landed a few small TV and film roles in those early years, including Grown Ups 2 and the TV series Scream Queens, but nothing felt quite like a big break.
When the pandemic brought the film industry to a standstill in 2020, he moved in with his mother, and the two launched Mosh—a protein bar company designed to promote brain health. (Shriver is a longtime advocate for Alzhei­mer's research after witnessing the disease's effects on her late father, Sargent Shriver, who helped found the Peace Corps, Head Start and other Kennedy-era programs.) Mosh contains ingredients such as citicoline, lion's mane mushrooms and omega-3s, which advocates believe improve cognition.
'[My mother] is way more of the visionary, and I'm the one that's making her dream come true,' Schwarzenegger says. 'And playing devil's advocate on the business side.'
The duo has personally invested nearly $1 million so far growing Mosh. 'It wasn't like some celebrity-backed brand where we raised money or hired an agency,' he says. 'We made the bars with a doctor and formulator; we did everything. But then it was also Covid, when the supply chain was terrible—everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.'
Otherwise, their timing was perfect. The burgeoning protein bar industry, which had combined revenue of around $5 billion in 2024, experienced a major resurgence after 2020 when consumers became less limited by Covid policies. Mosh had $4 million in sales in 2022, its first full year.
'He was very deliberate about how we built the company,' Shriver says. 'I wanted to [put the bars in] Target the first year and he said, 'No, we have to build; we have to get to know our consumer.' He's not totally calm in the rest of his life, but in business, he's really calm and knowledgeable.'
In 2023, Mosh raised $3 million to support retail expansion in a Series A round led by Arnold Schwarzenegger's longtime financial advisor's investment firm and earned $7 million in revenue. By 2024, Mosh was being sold in Erewhon and Sprouts and ended the year with $12 million in sales. It has yet to turn a profit.
Schwarzenegger hadn't abandoned his acting career, but there was a moment early in Mosh's launch when he considered walking away from Hollywood 'if acting didn't take off.' That was, until he booked a role in an HBO Max miniseries starring Colin Firth. He later played a main character in a spin-off of Amazon Prime's show The Boys in 2023 before landing The White Lotus. He left to film Mike White's hit series in Thailand in early 2024, but pulling double duty took a toll on him.
'It was near impossible to try to work on Mosh while filming in Thailand,' Schwarzenegger recalls. 'There were nights that I would have to wake up at 2 or 3 a.m. and have meetings with Sprouts or Kroger on Zoom.'
For now, he doesn't plan to leave the company, even though he has already reached his modest first milestone—to grow the business past $10 million in revenue. 'That was my goal, to be the one running the ship to get it there,' he says. 'It's a very different type of business to build from zero to $10 million [versus] $10 million to $100 million. And you need someone that's in the streets every day, all day, to grow it to that next level.'
This year, Mosh is on track to book more than $20 million in revenue and is raising money again this summer with the hope of accelerating growth in retail and becoming profitable, says Jeff Gamsey, Mosh's president and COO. Schwarzenegger and Shriver are now looking to expand the brand into Costco and Walmart.
In the meantime, life is only getting busier. But for Schwarzenegger, busier is almost always better. 'A few years ago, I had a studio executive tell me that I needed to stop the business stuff, that it was too much having one foot in one area and one foot in another,' he says. 'But I think there's a lot of symmetry between film and business, and understanding that as my brand grows, hopefully [my acting career] grows. At the end of the day, as an actor, you are a business—you are a brand.'