Paul McCartney, 84, is worth at least $1.4 billion, according to new estimates from Forbes. That makes him the world’s third-richest musician, behind Jay-Z at $2.8 billion and Taylor Swift at $2 billion.
The biggest piece of that fortune is not his share of The Beatles. It is MPL Communications, a music publishing company that owns the rights to thousands of songs, many of them written by other artists. Forbes values it at at least $250 million.
That makes McCartney an outlier in an industry where many artists have been selling off their catalogs. He spent decades buying them, and fighting to own his own.
The milestone has been coming for a while. 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).
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.
“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.
After John Lennon’s death, McCartney had a chance to buy the songs back. Sir Lew Grade, who owned Northern Songs, the company that held the Beatles’ publishing, told him he would sell for $20 million. McCartney proposed splitting the cost with Lennon’s representatives, and the deal fell through.
Michael Jackson bought the catalog in 1985 for $47.5 million. Jackson did so after McCartney had urged him to get into music publishing. 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. The company gave him control of the publishing on his solo work and a larger share of its future royalties.
He then began buying other people’s songs. MPL’s holdings include Buddy Holly’s catalog, Broadway scores such as Grease, and Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes,” the rockabilly hit Elvis Presley made famous.
It also owns Christmas standards that pay out every holiday season, including “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” “The Christmas Song,” “Blue Christmas,” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
Every school production of Grease earns McCartney money, as does every stream of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Forbes estimates MPL likely generates tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. McCartney declined to comment on the estimates.
Winning back the Beatles songs
McCartney still profits from the band itself. Apple Corps, The Beatles’ holding company, brings in more than $50 million a year from streaming, vinyl sales, and merchandise.
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 songwriting took longer to recover. In January 2017, McCartney sued Sony/ATV to reclaim his U.S. rights to Beatles songs under a provision of U.S. copyright law that lets songwriters take back their work after a set period. The two sides reached a confidential settlement in June.
Those U.S. copyrights now earn McCartney at least $10 million a year and are worth at least $200 million, according to Forbes.
Touring, real estate, and a Picasso or two
Touring has earned McCartney hundreds of millions of dollars over his career. His latest run, the Got Back tour, spanned 79 shows from April 2022 in Spokane, Wash., to November 2025 in Chicago.
He also owns real estate across the U.K. and in the Hamptons, and an art collection that includes works by Picasso and Magritte.
McCartney is an artist in that medium too. 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. “I think the two can coexist,” he said, according to Forbes. “I’m happy to enjoy both.”
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