Forbes Puts Paul McCartney's Fortune at $1.4 Billion, Third-Richest Musician in the World

The Beatles' first record deal paid the four of them less than a penny per album sold. The songs themselves belonged to publisher Dick James and his company, Northern Songs, which was sold out from under Lennon and McCartney while the band was still the biggest act on earth. McCartney put it plainly in an essay he wrote for Forbes in 2017: "It turned out to be basically a slave contract."

Forbes published its new estimate of his fortune on Monday, in the first edition of The Billie, a newsletter the magazine is launching around the world's billionaires. The number is $1.4 billion, at minimum. It places McCartney third among the world's richest musicians, behind Jay-Z at $2.8 billion and Taylor Swift at $2 billion — and the road to it starts with that penny.

British readers have seen a billion beside his name before. The Sunday Times Rich List put McCartney and his wife, Nancy Shevell, at £1 billion in May 2024, which made him the first British musician to reach the mark, and the 2025 list carried the couple at £1.025 billion. Forbes is counting McCartney alone, in dollars, and its figure comes with the world ranking attached. The number and the company it puts him in are what is new.

The engine is a company most people have never heard of. McCartney founded MPL Communications in 1969, with the Northern Songs lesson still fresh: own the publishing or somebody else will. MPL took his solo work first. Then it started buying.

The biggest early purchase was Buddy Holly's catalog — Holly being the songwriter McCartney idolized as a teenager in Liverpool. Broadway scores followed. So did standards and Christmas songs: "Blue Suede Shoes," "Baby, It's Cold Outside," "Blue Christmas," "The Christmas Song." MPL holds publishing in the songs from Grease, which means every school production and professional revival sends money to the same office. Forbes estimates MPL now controls thousands of songs, likely brings in tens of millions of dollars a year, and is worth at least $250 million on its own — the single most valuable asset McCartney has.

Publishing is the quiet half of the music business. Owning a song is not owning any particular recording of it; the composition earns whenever it is played, performed, streamed or staged, whoever is singing. A catalog like MPL's does not need a tour or a new album to pay out. It pays out because the songs keep getting used.

His own songs took longer to come home. The Lennon-McCartney catalog sat inside ATV, which Michael Jackson bought in 1985 — a purchase McCartney has said Jackson never warned him about, though the two had recorded together. Sony later took control, and McCartney spent years working the legal route back, recovering his U.S. publishing rights piece by piece. Forbes values his share of the Beatles songwriting copyrights at at least $200 million. That same share pays him at least $10 million a year in royalties. Apple Corps, the company the four Beatles and their estates still share equally, brings in more than $50 million a year from streaming, record sales and merchandise. Forbes puts the worth of McCartney's quarter stake at more than $150 million.

The stage did its part, too. McCartney never really stopped touring, and Billboard Boxscore had his career concert grosses past $1 billion by 2022. Grosses are not take-home pay, and Forbes says so. But five decades of sold-out stadiums are in the pile, along with houses in Britain and the United States and an art collection that includes Picasso and Magritte.

The three fortunes at the top of Forbes' list were built three different ways. Jay-Z's is substantially a business empire — drinks brands, tech stakes, art — that happens to have started in rap. Swift's rests on her own songs and her own tours, a catalog she famously re-recorded to own outright. McCartney's is the only one of the three that leans this hard on other artists' work: Holly, Carl Perkins, the Gershwin-era standards writers, the Grease songwriters. He got rich, in meaningful part, from songs he did not write, because he had already learned, young, what happens to a songwriter who does not own his.

He has never pretended the money and the music sit apart. Forbes carries a line of his that predates the estimate: "Is it more noble if we don't write for money, if we just write for art and love? I think the two can coexist. I'm happy to enjoy both." He did not comment on Forbes' figures.

December will make the point without him. In the same shopping centers and radio rotations, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," "The Christmas Song" and his own "Wonderful Christmastime" will all play within the hour of each other. Three separate royalty streams, one destination: a publishing company founded in 1969 by a man still in his twenties, because the last one had been sold over his head.