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It can be hard to make money in media—but for those lucky enough to make it to the big leagues, the payoff can be astronomical .
In 2021, the world’s 10 highest-paid celebrities earned a combined $2.7 billion. Who are these high-earning entertainers, and how do they make their hundreds of millions?
Using data from Forbes, this graphic by Athul Alexander highlights the top paid entertainers around the world, based on 2021 pre-tax earnings (minus business expenses such as management fees, agent costs, etc).
The world’s celebrities may be well known for the media they produce, but the bulk of their earnings are made through business dealings.
First on the list is New Zealand director Peter Jackson, best known for directing, producing, and writing the screenplays for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.
In addition to creating and directing blockbuster hits, Jackson is also the founder of the VFX studio Weta Digital, which he sold a portion of last year for a whopping $1.6 billion and the bulk of his earnings.
Second on the list is singer, songwriter, and musician Bruce Springsteen, who earned an estimated $435 million in 2021. Like Jackson, Springsteen’s earnings came from a major sale, as he sold Sony Music the rights to his entire music collection in a deal worth nearly $500 million last December.
One of the only actors on the list is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who comes in fourth place with an estimated $270 million in 2021 pre-tax earnings. But only about a quarter of his earnings came from leading roles in movies like Jungle Cruise and Red Notice, with the bulk coming from his tequila brand Teremana.
Taking a closer look at this list reveals a few trends worth highlighting:
Hollywood’s gender pay gap has been a hot topic of conversation over the last few years. Research indicates that there’s about a one-million-dollar pay gap between male and female actors at the “superstar” level.
But the gender gap in the entertainment industry extends further than that—women aren’t just underpaid compared to their male counterparts, they’re also just underrepresented, especially in big-decision, behind-the-scenes roles, and may subsequently miss out on the business opportunities made available.
Women have made the top 10 earners in Forbes celebrity rankings in recent years, including Kylie Jenner from 2018-2020, Taylor Swift in 2019, and Judge Judy Sheindlin in 2018. But they were the only females in an upper echelon of celebrity earners composed mainly by males.
As social media and online entertainment continue to gain traction, it’s interesting to see how much social media creators are earning compared to their traditional media counterparts.
According to Forbes, the highest-paid YouTuber (Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast) earned $54 million in 2021. Notably, that would place MrBeast in the top 25 of celebrity earners, just ahead of Taylor Swift’s $52 million in 2021.
With more celebrities embracing social media to grow followings and earnings revenue, it might not be long before we see more influencers and social media creators in the list of the world’s highest-earning celebrities.
This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist’s Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.
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From someone born in the 19th century, in the midst of historic population growth, comes this vintage visualization showing world cities growing ever bigger.
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This chart is the latest in our Vintage Viz series, which presents historical visualizations along with the context needed to understand them.
The explosive world population boom in the last 300 years is common knowledge today. Much and more has been written about how and why it happened, why it was unusual, and how the specter of a declining population for the first time in three centuries could impact human society.
However, equally compelling, is how people in the past—those living in the midst of the early waves of this boom—were fascinated by what they were witnessing.
Evidence of this comes from today’s vintage visualization, denoting the increasing number of world cities with at least one million inhabitants through the years.
The above pictogram was made by Austrian philosopher and sociologist Otto Neurath (1882–1945), found in his book, Society and Economy, published in 1930.
In 1800, the world population crossed 1 billion for the first time ever.
In the next 130 years, it doubled past 2 billion.
The Second Agricultural Revolution, characterized by massive land and labor productivity, grew agricultural output more than the population and is one of the key drivers of this population growth.
And in the pictogram above, where one silhouette indicates one million inhabitants, this exponential population growth becomes far more vivid.
In 1800, for example, according to the creator’s estimates, only London had at least million residents. A century later, 15 cities now boasted of the same number. Then, three decades hence, 37 cities across the world had one million inhabitants.
Importantly, the data above is based on the creator’s estimates from a century ago, and does not include Beijing (then referred to as Peking in English) in 1800. Historians now agree that the city had more than a million residents, and was the largest city in the world at the time.
Another phenomenon becoming increasingly apparent is growing urbanization—food surplus frees up large sections of the population from agriculture, driving specialization in other skills and trade, in turn leading to congregations in urban centers.
Other visualizations in the same book covered migration, Indigenous peoples, labor, religion, trade, and natural resources, reflecting the creator’s interest in the social life of individuals and their well-being.
This vintage visualization might seem incredibly simple, simplistic even, considering how we map out population data today. But the creator Otto Neurath, and his wife Marie, were pioneers in the field of visual communication.
One of their notable achievements was the creation of the Vienna Method of pictorial statistics, which aimed to represent statistical information in a visually accessible way—the forerunner to modern-day infographics.
The Neuraths believed in using clear and simple visual language to convey complex information to a broad audience, an approach that laid the foundation for modern information design.
They fled Austria during the rise of the Nazi regime and spent their later years in various countries, including the UK. Otto Neurath’s influence on graphic design, visual communication, and the philosophy of language has endured, and his legacy is still recognized in these fields today.
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