Â鶹´«Ã½

Skip to main content

An annual rich list says Paul McCartney is Britain's first billionaire musician

Paul McCartney performs at Glastonbury Festival in Worthy Farm, Somerset, England, Saturday, June 25, 2022. (Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File) Paul McCartney performs at Glastonbury Festival in Worthy Farm, Somerset, England, Saturday, June 25, 2022. (Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File)
Share
LONDON -

Paul McCartney is a billionaire Beatle.

According to figures released Friday, the former member of the Fab Four is the first British musician to be worth 1 billion pounds (US$1.27 billion).

The annual Sunday Times Rich List calculated that the wealth of the 81-year-old musician and his wife, Nancy Shevell, had grown by 50 million pounds since last year thanks to McCartney's 2023 Got Back tour, the rising value of his back catalogue and Beyonce's cover of The Beatles' "Blackbird" on her "Cowboy Carter" album.

A "final" Beatles song, "Now and Then," was also released in November and topped music charts in the U.S., the U.K. and other countries. Surviving Beatles McCartney and Ringo Starr completed a demo track recorded in 1977 by the late John Lennon, adding in guitar by George Harrison, who died in 2001.

The newspaper estimated 50 million pounds of the couple's wealth is due to Shevell, daughter of the late U.S. trucking tycoon Mike Shevell.

McCartney ranked 165th overall on the newspaper's respected and widely perused list of the U.K.'s 350 richest people. Top spot went to Gopi Hinduja and his family, who own the banking, media and entertainment conglomerate Hinduja Group and are worth an estimated 37 billion pounds.

Other entertainment figures on the list include "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling, whose fortune is estimated at 945 million pounds, and singer Elton John, estimated to be worth 470 million pounds.

King Charles III ranked 258th with an estimated weath of 610 million pounds. The king's fortune includes the large inherited private estates of Sandringham in England and Balmoral in Scotland. The total does not include items that are held in trust by the monarch for the nation, such as the Crown Jewels.

CTVNews.ca Top Stories

A B.C. man has been ordered to pay a total of $4,000 to a Coquitlam company and its two owners because of a negative review he posted on Google.

The jury at the trial of a second-degree murder suspect in Sudbury on Wednesday heard graphic details of the crime scene discovered in a Kathleen Street apartment on Boxing Day 2020.

Toronto police are searching for a suspect who they say shot and injured an officer near Yonge and Eglinton Wednesday afternoon.

Local Spotlight

The last living member of the legendary Vancouver Asahi baseball team, Kaye Kaminishi, died on Saturday, Sept. 28, surrounded by family. He was 102 years old.

On Saturday night at her parents’ home in Delaware, Ont. the Olympic bronze medallist in pole vault welcomed everyone who played a role in getting her to the podium in Paris.

A tale about a taxicab hauling gold and sinking through the ice on Larder Lake, Ont., in December 1937 has captivated a man from that town for decades.

When a group of B.C. filmmakers set out on a small fishing boat near Powell River last week, they hoped to capture some video for a documentary on humpback whales. What happened next blew their minds.

A pizza chain in Edmonton claims to have the world's largest deliverable pizza.

Sarah McLachlan is returning to her hometown of Halifax in November.

Wayne MacKay is still playing basketball twice at Mount Allison University at 87 years old.

A man from a small rural Alberta town is making music that makes people laugh.

An Indigenous artist has a buyer-beware warning ahead of Sept. 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.