Paul McCartney is worth $1.4 billion. His biggest asset is a $250 million song publisher
In 2024, the Sunday Times Rich List named McCartney Britain’s first billionaire musician, putting his fortune together with his wife Nancy’s at £1 billion ($1.3 billion).
Key points
- McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the estates of John Lennon and George Harrison each own 25%, a stake Forbes values at more than $150 million apiece.
- The publishing deal McCartney called “basically a slave contract” The Beatles became one of the best-selling bands in history, but the publishing contract they signed at the start of their career limited how much they earned from their own songwriting.
- Touring, real estate, and a Picasso or two Touring has earned McCartney hundreds of millions of dollars over his career.
Paul McCartney, 84, is worth at least $1.4 billion, according to new estimates from Forbes.
Jackson’s reply, as McCartney recalled it: “Oh, I’m going to get yours!” How MPL became McCartney’s biggest business McCartney launched MPL in 1969, months before The Beatles broke up.
Additional details
- His photographs of Beatlemania from 1963 and 1964 were shown at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2023 and are now on view at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence through January 2027.
- For someone who once signed away his songs, McCartney has made peace with being both a musician and a mogul.
- “It turned out to be basically a slave contract; no matter how successful we made the company, we didn’t get a raise,” McCartney wrote in a 2017 essay for Forbes.
- The biggest piece of that fortune is not his share of The Beatles.
- In January 2017, McCartney sued Sony/ATV to reclaim his U.S.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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