The Weeknd Passed Elton John — His Tour Is Now the Biggest Ever by a Male Artist

The biggest male touring act alive just took the all-time money crown off Elton John.

The Weeknd's After Hours Til Dawn stadium tour has closed with a final gross of more than $1.3 billion, confirmed by promoter Live Nation — the highest-grossing tour by a male artist in history. The record it passes is Elton John's Farewell Yellow Brick Road, the five-year goodbye that finished above $939 million. One stadium show at a time, over four years, Abel Tesfaye walked past it.

Put the whole ladder on the table, because the ladder is the story. Only two tours in history have grossed more than this one: Taylor Swift's Eras tour, the highest-grossing tour ever mounted, and Coldplay's Music of the Spheres, past $1.5 billion. That is the entire list above him. The Weeknd is third all-time, first among men, and the gap to the record he took is not a rounding error — it is more than $350 million of daylight between $1.3 billion and Elton's $939 million.

How a show gets this big

The tour kicked off in July 2022 and simply never really stopped: 176 shows, 67 cities, 30 countries, five continents, more than nine million tickets sold. It was still accelerating at the end — in 2026 alone, the tour sold more than three million tickets and grossed over $500 million, a career year stacked on top of three that came before it.

The production was built to be seen from the last row of a stadium: a giant moon hanging over the bowl, a runway reaching into the floor, and the chrome Sorayama figure standing over the stage like a monument. These photographs are from this tour — Paris and Mexico City, 2023 — and they are the honest reason the gross reads the way it does. This was not an arena show scaled up. It was a stadium spectacle from the first night, priced and staged like one, and it ran for four years.

The closing leg

The tour wrapped on November 4 with a final performance at TM Stadium National in Kuala Lumpur, closing a 17-date Asia leg that grew from 11 announced dates as demand kept coming — three nights in Bangkok and four in Hong Kong among them. Promoter tallies carried by Variety and Pollstar put the final shape of it plainly: 176 shows, about nine million tickets, $1.3 billion.

There is a smaller number inside the big one worth carrying. Across the tour, The Weeknd donated $8.5 million to the XO Humanitarian Fund and Global Citizen, including $3 million raised in 2026 for the UN World Food Programme and Global Citizen. A record gross is a receipt about scale; where some of the money went is part of the same ledger.

Records in touring are usually about endurance — who can stay on the road longest without the show getting smaller. Elton's farewell run was the standard: five years, a beloved catalogue, a goodbye in every market on earth. The Weeknd beat it with a single album cycle's world that kept expanding — new legs, new continents, bigger rooms — until the tally came in above everybody else who ever tried it as a man, and above everybody, period, except Swift and Coldplay.

The tour is over now. The number is final. And the next time somebody asks what the ceiling looks like for a male artist on the road, the answer has a name on it, and it is not Elton's anymore.