Stories
Why they got rich
Real people, public numbers, and how the money was actually made. Every figure says what kind of number it is, where it came from and when.
Music
$298M
The Weeknd was paid $298 million in a year. The billion-dollar deal everyone reported is three quarters debt.
One of those numbers is a year's income and the other is a financing. Neither is a fortune, and only one of them was ever confirmed.
4 min read
Business
$20.1T
How Forbes counts a billionaire, and why Bloomberg gets a different number for the same person
Two lists, the same fortunes, different answers. The gap is not sloppiness. It is two sets of assumptions about things that have no price.
4 min read
Business
$5.2B
George Lucas is the richest man in Hollywood. He got there by selling Star Wars.
Nobody on the screen gets rich from a salary. The fortunes in film belong to the people who owned the thing being filmed.
4 min read
Animals & their people
$710K
Grumpy Cat was not worth $100 million. She won $710,001, in court, over coffee.
The most famous number attached to the internet's most famous cat was never sourced. The real one came from a jury.
4 min read
Gamers
$7.18M
The top earner in esports history won $7.18 million. Three quarters of it came from two tournaments.
Johan Sundstein played for eight years before the two championships that put him at the top of competitive gaming's prize table.
4 min read
YouTubers
$300M
MrBeast earned an estimated $300 million in a year. The last time anyone saw the books, the videos lost money.
The biggest creator on the internet runs a very expensive television studio. The chocolate is the part that makes money.
4 min read
Stories are written about public figures from public sources. Nobody in them paid, and nobody in them is on the list.
Your turn
Everybody here was counted by somebody else. You can just declare it.
One payment, one listing, your number on the board beside the people you have just been reading about. We price what has a public price and we check nobody, which is the whole joke and the whole product.