Cristiano Ronaldo

Cristiano Ronaldo (born 1985) is one of the greatest footballers ever — five Ballon d’Or awards, five Champions League titles, all-time leading scorer in men’s international football — and, with more than 650 million Instagram followers, the most-followed individual on the planet. That combination of athletic legend and unmatched reach made his AI moves headline news twice over: once as an investor, and once as a deepfake target.

Buying into the answer engine

In December 2025, Ronaldo announced an equity stake in Perplexity AI — his most high-profile investment to date — paired with a global partnership that launched an interactive “Ronaldo Hub” inside the search product, where fans can explore his career through curated AI answers. Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas said the company would work with Ronaldo to make Perplexity “the best AI for asking questions.” The endorsement wasn’t just contractual: two months earlier, accepting the inaugural Prestige Globe Award at the Portugal Football Globes gala, Ronaldo confessed on stage that he had been nervous about the honour, researched it on Perplexity, and let the AI help him prepare his acceptance speech — telling the audience, per Goal’s report, that it helped him a little.

The most-deepfaked athlete

The other side of Ronaldo’s AI story is involuntary. Industry research has repeatedly ranked him among the world’s most-deepfaked athletes, his face and cloned voice recycled into scam ads at industrial scale. In July 2026, during the World Cup, a deepfake built from a real tournament interview made him appear to shill an obscure crypto token — the latest in a wave of AI celebrity-bait fraud that has also hit Tom Hanks and Lionel Messi. Ronaldo has not made the fakes a personal crusade; his answer, so far, has been to invest in the technology’s legitimate side rather than campaign against it.