Beyoncé declared a billionaire by Forbes
Beyoncé was declared a billionaire by Forbes, making her the fifth musician to join the list of the world’s richest people.
The US star joined an elite group of musicians with 10-figure fortunes, Forbes reports, including Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Bruce Springsteen and her husband Jay-Z, who the business magazine lists as having a net worth of $2.5 billion (£1.85 billion).
Earlier this month, Forbes estimated Beyoncé’s net worth at $800 million (£593 million) and predicted she would cross the billionaire threshold for the first time after years of success.
Her 2023 Renaissance World Tour grossed nearly $600 million, making her one of the world’s biggest pop music icons alongside Taylor Swift.
Beyoncé produced a film of the concert, which was her first solo tour in seven years, and distributed it directly through a deal with the AMC cinema chain, which saw her pocket almost half of the film’s $44m (£33m) worldwide box office gross.
Her 2024 album Cowboy Carter, which celebrated and contextualized the Black roots of country music, received critical acclaim and won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards – the first time Beyoncé had won the prestigious award, although she had been nominated four times.
Forbes estimates that the Cowboy Carter tour — which included appearances by Jay-Z, two of their three children and former Destiny’s Child bandmates — racked up a total of more than $400 million in ticket sales and another $50 million in merchandise sold at the shows.
While the tour broke ticket records at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Paris’ Stade de France, it faced slow ticket sales, with promoters cutting some prices in a bid to fill seats.
However, it was the most expensive ticket of any artist visiting the UK in 2025, at £950, with the cheapest costing £71.
A halftime special of Netflix’s first NFL Christmas game brought in about $50 million, in addition to $10 million from a series of Levi’s commercials, Forbes said.
Bloomberg, which runs its own Billionaires Index, included Selena Gomez among its list of musicians – with a reported net worth of $1.3 billion (£962 million) in 2024.
But Forbes disputed that figure, instead estimating Gomez at $700 million (£518 million).
