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 real. The real one is smaller, came from a jury, and was about iced coffee.

The number everybody knows

In December 2014 the British tabloid the Daily Express reported that Grumpy Cat had earned her owner £64 million, which most outlets rounded to $100 million.¹ Another write-up of the same report put it at $99.5 million in two years, from speaking engagements, merchandise and a television film.²

The number travelled the way these numbers do. It was quoted, then requoted, then repeated by outlets that had never seen the original and did not need to, because by then it was simply what Grumpy Cat was worth. It was still being written about in 2019.³

Tabatha Bundesen, who owned the cat, told HuffPost the report was "completely inaccurate".¹ She declined to say what the real figure was.¹ That is her right, and it leaves an honest reader with no number at all. The tabloid figure has no working anyone can open. The denial is on the record. Between them sits the actual amount, which nobody outside the business has published.

Where a number like that comes from

Nobody can show how the $100 million was worked out, because the working was never published. It was described as earnings, money that came in to the owner.² That is worth being precise about, because coverage of a famous licence tends to blur three different things: what shops take for products with the face on them, what the licensing company receives as its share, and what the person at the end of the chain keeps after agents, lawyers and tax.

A headline can take the largest of those three and attach it to the smallest. Whether that happened here is not known. It is the usual way it happens.

The money that can actually be found

A famous face is a licence waiting to be signed. Pictures of the cat were first posted online in 2012.⁴ In 2013 the company that held her rights, Grumpy Cat Limited, licensed her name and image to Grenade, a beverage company, for an iced coffee sold as the Grumppuccino.⁵ The deal shared the profits between the two companies.⁵

In 2015 Grenade began selling Grumpy Cat Roasted Coffee, a product the licence did not cover, along with T-shirts it did not cover either.⁵ Grumpy Cat Limited sued in federal court.⁴

Grenade sued back. Its complaint was that the cat had not done enough to sell the coffee: by its count, 17 social media posts, and an appearance on Fox and Friends where the product went unmentioned.⁵

In January 2018 an eight-person jury in the federal court in Santa Ana, California sided with the cat, and awarded Grumpy Cat Limited $710,001.⁴⁵ Her lawyer said afterwards that Grumpy Cat "feels vindicated and feels the jury reached a just verdict".⁴

That is the figure with a court record behind it. It is also about seven tenths of one percent of the number everybody remembers.

Grenade's counterclaim is worth a second look, because it is the licence business described from the other side. A company that pays for a famous face expects the face to do some of the selling, and 17 posts was, in Grenade's view, not enough.⁵ The jury did not agree. But the argument says something true about fame as a product: the buyer is paying for an audience that belongs to somebody else.

The part people leave out

None of this means the cat made little money. It plainly made some: by the time of the tabloid report there was a television film on the way through a deal with Lifetime,¹ and a licensed coffee on shelves.⁵ The point is narrower. Almost none of the money can be seen from outside, and the one piece that can be seen was not income from being famous. It was damages, paid because somebody used the fame without the permission they had paid for.

The audience is what people imagine the fortune to be: millions of followers, a face on every screen, a meme in every group chat. An audience is not money. The money is the licence, and a licence is worth what somebody pays for it and whether they keep to its terms. Most of the work of being a famous animal, it turns out, is being a small licensing company with a lawyer.

It also takes years. The licence was signed in 2013. The unlicensed coffee appeared in 2015. The verdict came in 2018.⁴⁵ Five years from handshake to jury, for a sum the internet's figure would not have noticed.

What it cost

A famous number has its own cost, and it is paid in answers. Once a figure is attached to a name, every later conversation about the name starts with it. In 2014 the owner called the report inaccurate and declined to give a figure of her own.¹ Whatever the reason, it had one effect: there was no second number to repeat, so the first one stayed.

The lawsuit had costs that no report itemises. Three years of litigation is not free, and what is left of an award after lawyers is never published. The $710,001 is what the jury awarded, not what anybody kept.

One honest takeaway

When a fortune is famous and its source is not, the number is usually the least true thing about it. The Grumpy Cat figure anybody can check is a jury award over coffee. The one everybody remembers came from a tabloid, and was denied by the only person in a position to know.

If you would like your own number published, with the working shown and nothing checked, there is a list for that.