The Billionaire Blueprint: How Taylor Swift And Beyoncé Set Up New Business Models

This Week in Billionaires. Voters in California this year could vote on a proposed 5% wealth tax targeting its 246 billionaires, potentially costing individuals like Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian up to $11 billion and $90 million, respectively. This has sparked debate. While Nvidia's Jensen Huang supports it, figures like Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are relocating assets to lower tax states. Critics call it an asset seizure detrimental to the tech economy, and even athletes like LeBron James could also face losses. The tax, which is opposed by Governor Gavin Newsom, is projected to generate $100 billion for the state between 2027 and 2031 if it gets on the ballot in November and is then approved by voters. Chinese AI model firms Xipu and Minimax went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, minting two new billionaires as China's leading artificial intelligence firms raise money to take on the Xipu raised $558 million in its IPO, vaulting its 49-year-old co-founder and chairman Liu Debing into the billionaire ranks with a $2.1 billion fortune. One day later, Minimax, whose backers include e-commerce giant Alibaba and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, raised $618 million in its listing, making its founder, 36-year-old chairman and CEO Jian Junjie, a billionaire with a $3.2 billion net worth. President Donald Trump's ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro could lead to big wins for a group of Trump supporters and financiers. Hedge fund mogul Paul Singer, worth $6.7 billion, stands to profit thanks to his recent acquisition of Venezuelan firm Citgo and its three refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast for $5.9 billion. The deal, which analysts considered a steal compared to the firm's true value, is also backed by alternatives investment firm Oaktree Capital Management, led by billionaires Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. Debt financing for the deal was led by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, run by billionaire Trump supporter Marg Rowan. Welcome to Beyond the Billions. I'm Deputy Editor Giacomo Tunini here at Forbes, and joining me today is Matt Craig, a reporter covering entertainment at Forbes. Matt, you've been at Forbes for a few years now, started out with sports, then moved to media entertainment, and you've met with so many fascinating people. So I wanted to start off thanking you for being on the show today. And also, what's the craziest experiences you've had on this beat so far? Yeah, Giacomo, thanks for having me. As you mentioned, I've got a chance to talk to a lot of really cool people from the entertainment world for Forbes. I think the most memorable for me was probably Snoop Dogg. You can see the cover right above me here. Amazing story. He actually roasted me. You can go back and watch the video. It's still on YouTube. I was asking him about his weed brand and how it used to be illegal, and now he's making a lot of money from it. And he said, if this interview was happening 20 years ago, when the cops would come in, I would say all this weed was yours. And I was like, I didn't know how to respond. And he goes into, oh mom, no, I'm so sorry. I didn't know how to respond to that. So that was definitely memorable. Watching Dana White gamble $350,000 a hand at Baccarat was pretty insane. Asking Jimmy Falun if he thinks he's going to be the last host of The Tonight Show. So yeah, it's been really fun. I think Forbes has needed a shot in the arm on the entertainment side for the past few years. So it's been fun to try to get that off the ground recently. Yeah. And you've done such an incredible job of that. And honing in on one of your recent stories, I guess two of them, right? So you're covering a lot of the intersection of finance, entrepreneurship and media and entertainment. And so you recently had two big stories, one on breaking the news that Beyonce is now a billionaire, and another one looking at the highest earning musicians, right? So break that down a little bit for us. Maybe if you want to start with Beyonce, how did you get to that story? And how important is that as a milestone for her? Yeah, I mean, it's huge because she's the fifth billionaire musician that Forbes ever identified. And as a first-hand analyst, I cover a lot of movies and TV and really all the entertainment, other entertainment spaces are shrinking, consolidating, and there's a financial downward pressure on a lot of earnings, valuations, all those things. But musicians right now are killing it, especially at that top level. And really, the stadium tours are bigger than they've ever been in history, and artists are making more money from them than they ever had before. So that's how it started. Beyonce had the biggest concert tour of 2025 with her Cowboy Carter tour. And yeah, that definitely was kicking off both the musicians list and her personal wealth file, which we have been tracking for a few years. We knew that she had bought back most of her music catalog, which was enormously valuable. She'd been making big cash earnings for a long time, and she was approaching that billionaire status. But the Cowboy Carter tour this year, which grossed in total more than $400 million, is what eventually put her over the limit. But I think from there, it became a more business story about taking control of your career. She brought basically every aspect of her career in-house under her company, Parkwood Entertainment Management. She shoots all her own music videos. She finances her own tour. And essentially, then what you can do is you can capture more of the revenue in case of success. Now, if her tours had been a failure, or if these other projects have been a failure, she's on the hook for it. But when you're Beyonce, and you have a giant fan base, when you're the queen bee, and you got the beehive behind you, and you know there's a safety net there, you're able to capture more of the upside whenever you bring a lot of stuff in-house. Yeah, it's sort of fascinating to see how she's sort of combined her musical success with sort of that business know-how. But break down her fortune a bit for us, because I know when you look at other musicians like Taylor Swift, her fortune is sort of entirely from the music. Then you look at Beyonce's husband Jay-Z, it's more from his investments. So how does that look like for Beyonce? Yeah, for her, it is mostly her music. So her cash earnings from touring, especially the Renaissance tour and the Cowboy Carter tour. And then of course, over the years, through Parkwood Entertainment, she's bought back the rights to her catalog, which is enormously valuable, especially when you're someone as famous as Beyonce. If she were to ever want to sell that, it would go on a premium because of the name value, not just the statistics, how much the songs are getting streamed, but someone wanting to own Beyonce's catalog, right? So it's a really, really valuable asset. On top of that, she does have some other business lines. She has Sir Davis Whiskey, which Forbes believes is more of a licensing deal, but she earns money off of that. She's got Sacred, her haircare line. She's got Lemon Perfect, which is basically a flavored water. And then she has joint assets with Jay-Z. They have a huge real estate portfolio specifically. Apparently, they have a pretty insane art collection also that's populating the walls of all those houses. So she gets some credit for all those things as well. But in her case, it was still mostly music. It was touring and it was the catalog. And so she had this incredible Cowboy Carter tour. I went to one show, the one in Jersey, and it was, I mean, I'm a fan. I'm not a huge fan, but it was just the production was insane, and obviously her performance. But she actually didn't have the sort of highest grossing album sales, right? That was more, I think, Sabrina Carpenter and other artists. I guess, what do you make of that in terms of what it means for her fortune and for these other artists that did get that milestone? Yeah, no, this is actually probably, for me, the most interesting thing about doing the musicians list, and then obviously the way I fed it into Beyonce, was that they're starting to become kind of a real, I guess, between, in the industry, between top recording artists and top touring artists. Now, at the highest level, like Taylor Swift, you're both, but Beyonce is not the only example. When I think of like Coldplay, Shakira, to a lesser extent Ed Sheeran is like this as well. Their streaming numbers are all, I mean, they're still very good, but more in like the 10 to 20 to 30 range as far as artists go. But they're the types of artists that are able to sell out stadiums. And I think it really points to kind of this directional trend in music toward like more is more while touring. For example, you know, you mentioned going to the Beyonce show, and it's so much more than just watching Beyonce sing and dance, you know, there's, like, she was riding a bull, she's flying, you know, through the air, like, yes, the car, yes, spectacle. And what that's allowed, you know, first Taylor Swift in the years tour, and then Beyonce to do is kind of set up a new business model with touring. I mean, that amount of production is incredibly expensive. And in kind of the traditional way of touring, it wouldn't even be worth it, you'd make a ton of money, but you'd spend it all. But what these bigger artists have learned is that if we put on a huge show, our fans will come from a long ways away to come see it. And so particularly in Beyonce's case, she, you know, only played a handful of cities over the summer, but she'd play for three, four or five nights in a row. And then fans from all over that region would come and see her and she could sell out the shows. And what that does allows you to do is basically set up, you know, the production one time. Generally, these huge tours, they actually have two sets of production, and they will kind of stagger and go to different cities. So while one is in one city, the other will be setting up in the other one, which is why her tour needed like, I don't remember what it was like 10 planes, 100 production trucks, just like this absolutely insane thing. But again, like I have friends for the Taylor Swift tour that flew to Portugal to go see, you know, Argentina, right. And so, you know, if you put on a big enough show, basically, you know, if you build it, they will come. And from an earnings perspective, the touring is where artists make the vast majority of their money. So while, for example, Sabrina Carpenter, or Chapel Rowan, or I'm thinking of, you know, even Olivia Dean is like a big breakout artist, probably will win Best New Artist in the Grammys. They haven't built up to that point from a touring perspective. So while they might be among the most streamed artists, they are, you know, among the most highest earning artists, at least at this point. Yeah, there's some amazing details in your story about, like, just the logistics that goes into it, which folks should definitely read. I mean, to your point about this, like, most of the money is from touring, right? You mentioned, you know, other acts like Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, who, they're not dominating the charts necessarily, I mean, obviously not Coldplay at this point, but are still doing these huge tours. And how much money they're making from that. Why do you think it is that there's sort of, you know, relatively few billionaires or sort of that kind of close to that level of fortunes being made for artists? I think first thing that we need to understand is that a billion dollars is a lot of money. It's easy to forget with how many billionaires we have, but it's still tough to get. Yeah, no, for sure. And on the celebrity billionaire side, about like, I think it was two thirds of all celebrity billionaires we've had, we've named in the last like five years. So yeah, clearly that's becoming, you know, a more common thing, but still you have to be a mega earner for a long period of time or have, you know, a ginormous asset, like, you know, a catalog that is worth that. But yeah, I guess I want to start there where like, you know, getting to billionaire status is incredibly rare. And just because an artist is worth 500 million doesn't mean that they're not, you know, incredibly successful, you know. So I would start there. I guess from a, you know, why is it hard to get there standpoint? I would just say that the touring is where you make most of your money and the touring is maybe not as lucrative as people think. You know, if you are of the level of the Taylor Swift or Beyonce, if you can do this mini residency format, if you can own the production, if you have, you know, the capital to fund your tour up front, yeah, sure. Of course you can make higher profit margins, but for a lot of artists, you know, 10, 15, 20% profit margins would be a successful tour, you know. In some cases, you know, tours never get out of the red. So it can be really tough. The streaming landscape, of course, you know, this is something that's been complained about a million times, but you're getting fractions of a penny for every stream. You don't have a direct relationship with your fans anymore. It used to be that, you know, if you were a fan of, let's say, I'm trying to think of an older artist like Metallica, you would buy an album for Metallica, but now you're actually a customer of a streaming platform. You're actually, who you're paying your money to is Spotify or Apple Music or whatever, and then you happen to stream, you know, Metallica on there. But the point is, fans don't have this direct relationship with the artists. Artists don't make as much money per album sale. And so, yeah, it is a challenging business, especially in that, like, more middle class, breaking through tier of artists, whereas, you know, you get to a certain level of fandom, and you can kind of command them to do a million different things. Like, Taylor Swift is the best example of that, you know, selling coffee table books and movies and theaters and, you know, is able to exploit the fan base in a million different ways. But for most artists, that's really, really hard to do. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about Taylor and Beyonce, which are, you know, two of the biggest names in decades, right? Who can do that? I mean, who are the other, you know, musician billionaires we have on the list currently? If you want to sort of quickly run through them and how they made their fortune. Yeah, sure. So, the richest among the musicians that we have is Beyonce's husband, Jay-Z. We have him work around $2.5 billion currently. And as you mentioned this earlier, you know, he owns all the rights to his catalog. That's worth a lot of money. He's obviously earned a lot of money in his career, similar to Beyonce, but also, like, had a really early investment in Uber that made him huge. Has Roc Nation, which is a management business. He has a champagne brand that's really successful. So, he's in a lot of different business lines. So, he's the richest. Taylor Swift, right, you know, behind around $1.7 billion and rising quickly because, you know, we're seeing cash earnings, like, that we have just not really seen in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. So, she's quickly rising behind her. Of course, famously now owns her own catalog. And really, you know, it's kind of a dart throw on, like, what her catalog could be worth because if someone were to want to buy it, you know, the numbers could go crazy in a bidding war situation. So, it's kind of hard to actually pin down exactly what that catalog is worth. And then, you know, the other two being Rihanna and Bruce Springsteen, just over the mark. Of course, Rihanna from her Fenty Beauty brand, more than her music, way more than her music. And so, yeah, the valuation of that is going to, you know, depend on her wealth. And then, Bruce Springsteen from literally a 50-year career of touring and, you know, having huge tours throughout basically that entire run. We used to have Kanye West on there. He's dropped off. There's a couple of that are close. But yeah, it's a very, very rare air up there in the billionaire status. Yeah, it's interesting that it's starting to become more, I mean, outside of people like Jay-Z who had sort of a long investment career, you're starting to see more of this wealth being created from the touring and sort of their status as musicians, right? But going back to your other story you recently put out, which was the top earning musicians list, the number one person on the spot was The Weeknd, right? So I guess if you want to like summarize how that year was for him and how he's making his money, I guess how you would compare him to sort of these other musicians we just talked about in terms of how he's building up his wealth and success? Sure. Yeah, I guess some of that is a methodology question because what we do in these Forbes earnings list is if you have like a catalog sale, we would give you all the credit for that in the year that you sold it, right? And so in the case of The Weeknd, although he had a very unique deal, actually such that like I talked to several people in the industry and no one really has a hand on exactly how that deal is structured because what I learned from my reporting is that he really, really wanted the $1 billion price tag kind of as the headline of the deal and he was shopping that around for a long time and he couldn't really get it. I think multiples have come down from their peak in the 2021, 2022 range. And so as I understand it, and as we use this methodology for the earnings list, it's closer to about $250 million in equity and then a lot of the rest is convertible debt. If he hits certain benchmarks, that means there will be more value in the deal. But as it stands, he sold a portion of his catalog and of course, that's divided into publishing rights and the actual recordings themselves for around $250 million. On top of, he also toured in 2025, which is big earnings and he had, I think he was like fourth in streams, album equivalent units sold. So he had a huge year kind of in every respect, but ultimately, yeah, if it wasn't for the catalog sale, he wouldn't have been number one on the list. However, yeah, he's kind of ending the era of the weekend and now going to go by his real name going forward. So it was kind of like in some ways like the perfect exclamation point on his career and obviously on our list as well. Yeah, I guess for that catalog deal, he could still stand to earn more, it sounds like, right? If he hits certain benchmarks in the coming years. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Again, we didn't know exactly how all that's structured and what those benchmarks are, but as we understand it, he used some very creative deal-making to get the total possible value to $1 billion and that's the headline that went out there and that's what got shared around. So it was a win for him. Yeah. Amazing. I mean, another person who obviously famously, well, in this case, bought back their catalog in recent years was Taylor Swift, right? Who was also the youngest self-made women billionaire on our list for a couple of years until this year. I think when she bought them back, it was for like $300 to $360 million, I remember reading. But I guess, do you see that as sort of a low mark of value for her whole catalog? You were talking about that before, like no one really knows what the numbers are, but like, I guess, how would you put that into context of like the weekend's deal and others? Sure. Well, I guess the first thing I would say is that it was the first, I think, five or six albums that were the ones that she didn't own because famously, of course, she leaves Big Machine, which by the way, I did a profile of Scott Bruchetta, the Big Machine founder, if you want to know more about that. But as soon as she left that, she went to Republic Records as part of Universal Music Group and all the albums she recorded after that, she had full ownership of from the start, including, of course, famously re-recording most of those original albums. The Taylor's versions, yeah. Taylor's versions, exactly. And they were hugely successful. That was a huge risk. I mean, it's been written about a million times, I'm not bringing any news there, but huge risk to do that, and it became enormously successful. But because of the success of that and the huge cash earnings in the era's tour, she had all the leverage in this negotiation. Basically, I mean, think about what she did reputationally to Scooter Braun, who bought the recordings initially, even to Scott Bruchetta, who sold the recordings initially. Clearly, I mean, there is no more of a bully pulpit than what Taylor Swift has with her fan base, right? And so as I understand it from my reporting, when Scooter Braun sold his company to Hybe, which included the Taylor Swift catalog or those initial albums, it was for around $300 million. So a few years later, and of course, all the success that Taylor Swift had in that time, the value of those albums would have gone up massively. And yet, we believe, reported that Taylor Swift only bought them for around like $360 million. So basically about the same price that they were sold for a clearly below market rates, but she had all the leverage in negotiation. She drove an incredibly hard bargain and was able to get them back for a relative pittance. And on top of that, also had a new album this year, which this was another incredible stat from the musicians list that the way we track recorded music is through a company called Luminate, and they have album equivalent units. So essentially, how do you convert all the streams plus all the physical sales and digital sales into a number that would have been the same as in 1995, how many units you sold? And Taylor Swift had 14.7 million album equivalent units. And that was twice as much as the number two artist, which was Drake, who by the way, also is currently facing a lawsuit about potentially inflating those numbers. So keep that in mind. And then Kendrick Lamar was in third at 6.1 million, and then fourth was The Weeknd at 4.3. So from her to the fourth place artists, almost more than three times as much album equivalent sales. So Taylor Swift, there could not be more of an outlier than her in pretty much every respect of the business right now. And yeah, that kind of allows her to drive some hard bargains on the business side. Yeah. I mean, it'd be amazing to see sort of how much all of that would be worth the catalog if you were to sell it. But you talk about Taylor's sort of album units there and The Weeknd's deal. Is there anything else that sort of stood out to you looking at the list this year of interesting ways that artists made their music or made more money this year that you want to point out? Yeah, well, I think the interesting things that I kind of like learned as I was reporting it out, and by the way, this is the first time Forbes has done this list since 2018. So it was a big learning process for me, talking to experts, trying to work out a methodology for touring, for the catalog earnings, as we've mentioned. Hugely imperfect information. If anyone's listening to this who knows more than I do, I'm certain that these estimates are exactly that. But the interesting things I learned are that one, nostalgia plays big. When I think of like Linkin Park, Metallica was still on this list. Chris Brown had a huge mostly stadium tour this year. So nostalgia is huge in the live event space specifically. And yeah, I guess the other one being a new really like lucrative trend for top artists is they go on a big stadium tour, and then they make a behind-the-scenes movie or concert tour movie on the back end of it. And then of course, again, Taylor Swift set the precedent. Beyonce also did this, partnering directly with the AMC theater chain for distribution rather than a movie studio. And so because of that, you're able to capture a much higher percentage of those profits. Again, in the case of Taylor Swift, sold a second version of the same tour with adding torture posts as like an extra part. So there's something slightly different. And a six-part behind-the-scenes documentary series at Disney for another $100 million. So she went on the Ears tour. She sold the initial Ears tour movie, we believe for around $75 million, then basically used the same product to get another $100 million out of it. So I think you will continue to see that for basically all the stadium tours going forward. They probably won't get the same deals as Taylor Swift, but I definitely see that as a continued trend because ultimately you put so much work into this spectacle of production for one of these giant stadium shows. You might as well try to sell it in multiple ways. And it's something that people have proven they want to watch. They want to watch on TV. Yeah. I feel like ever since COVID, people have been more interested in this kind of thing. And you've also seen these sort of, like you were saying before, just the production value and you get out of it is so much bigger when you go to some of these shows like the Ears tour and Cowboy Carter. Well, so it's January 2026 right now. You made a little bit of prediction earlier about the Grammys. I'm not going to ask you to sort of fill out the slate, but if you're looking towards sort of what this year has in store, do you have any predictions on sort of which artists this is going to be a big year for? And then always hard to predict in billionaire land, but who do you think would be the maybe the most likely next musician to hit that milestone? Yeah. Great questions. I think on the earning side, my mind goes immediately to who has stadium tours this year. So Lady Gaga, Morgan Wallen, it's kind of a mixed, but it's playing some big venues. Foo Fighters, another great example of what we're talking about where Foo Fighters is not a top recording artist, but can draw huge crowds and are going to have a stadium tour this summer. But I guess the one I would have my name on or be predicting as a huge earner this year would be Ariana Grande. She does stream extremely well, I think has gotten more famous from her acting work. But because the acting has gone so well, she actually has said that this might be her last tour or her last tour for a very long time. And so I also think that that sort of like can't miss it element could make her tour among the biggest of this upcoming year. Also, just people, you know, love her and she has a huge fan base. So I guess if I had to predict now, she'd probably be a top five artist of the next year. And then as far as billionaires go, my mind just immediately goes to like the older artists. So and these folks might be billionaires, we just haven't been able to get them there for our estimates. But like, Bob Dylan, who sold his, his catalog for a huge sum at the peak of like these valuations. Paul McCartney, who, you know, is almost a no brainer, because he's one of the Beatles, but on the other hand, has never actually had a very good deal for his recorded music. You know, there's obviously really famous stories about him and Michael Jackson, who ended up buying the Beatles catalog, and him not getting, you know, the best deals and that leading to a rift in their relationship. So I guess I would immediately go toward those like legacy acts who have been earning for a long time, among people who, you know, are young and upcoming, there will be tons of opportunity because of what I'm talking about, of these stadium tours earning more money than they ever have before. We just at this point, we just don't know, you know, who that who that's going to be. But certainly there will be like, could Sabrina Carpenter eventually be an artist who's playing 30 stadium shows in a year? Yeah, it's, it's, it's very possible. But of course, she's kind of like starting from from scratch early. She's, she's very young and new in her career. So who knows, there definitely will be more to track for Forbes in future years, no question. Yeah, I mean, you know, to your point about Ariana Grande, she also has the beauty line too, right? So there's so many different things to keep track of with these folks. And I know you're always on top of it. You had another great story in December about James Cameron. So it's not just music. I urge everyone here to read your stories. And thanks so much for coming on. I was learning so much from chatting with you, Matt. Appreciate it. As always, you can find Matt's stories and the other stories you mentioned in today's episode in the show notes.