London, 10 November 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Anthony Gill
On 9 November, Forbes estimated Paul McCartney’s fortune at about $1.4bn, making him the world’s third-richest musician behind Jay-Z ($2.8bn) and Taylor Swift ($2bn), according to Forbes. The surprising detail is where the money comes from. His largest business is not the Beatles at all. It is MPL Communications, a publishing company that owns thousands of songs, many written by other people, and earns every time a school stages Grease or a radio station plays a Christmas classic.
For anyone in business, McCartney’s fortune is a lesson in ownership. He lost control of the Beatles’ songs early, through what he later called “basically a slave contract”. He spent the next half-century building, buying back and suing to reclaim what he could. The result is a fortune built less on fame than on owning rights that pay out for decades.
The Business Nobody Talks About
McCartney set up MPL in 1969, months before the Beatles split, to control his solo work. He then did something few musicians have done: he started buying other people’s songs.
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SubscribeIn 1976, MPL bought most of Buddy Holly’s compositions and the North American rights to the Edwin H. Morris catalogue, which brought Broadway scores into his portfolio. Over the years, MPL has added works by Frank Loesser, Jerry Herman and Carl Perkins. It also owns Christmas standards, including “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, as well as McCartney’s own “Wonderful Christmastime”.
Forbes values MPL at at least $250m, making it his biggest single business. Every December, and every time a musical is performed somewhere in the world, the money keeps coming in.
The Beatles: Lost and Regained
The Beatles still matter, but McCartney’s share came the hard way. In the 1960s, the songs he wrote with John Lennon were published through Northern Songs, which he and Lennon eventually lost control of. The catalogue later passed through several owners and ended up with Sony.
McCartney fought back using a US copyright law that allows songwriters to reclaim rights to works transferred before 1978 after 56 years. He sued Sony in January 2017, and the case was settled in June that year on undisclosed terms. Today, Forbes estimates his Beatles songwriting share earns at least $10m a year and is worth at least $200m.
The band’s recordings are a separate stream. Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, earns more than $50m a year from streaming, vinyl and merchandise, and McCartney, Ringo Starr and the estates of Lennon and George Harrison each take 25%. Forbes values McCartney’s stake at more than $150m.
Touring and Timing
The rest comes from relentless work. McCartney has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from touring, including 79 shows on his Got Back tour between 2022 and 2025. Ringo Starr has called him “the workaholic of our band.” He also owns property in Britain and the Hamptons, and art by Picasso and Magritte.
Timing has helped too. Streaming has turned old catalogues into steady income, and fresh interest in the Beatles, from “Now and Then” in 2023 to Beyoncé’s version of “Blackbird”, has kept the songs in front of new audiences. In Britain, the Sunday Times Rich List had already put McCartney and his wife Nancy at £1bn in 2024. Forbes’s estimate is of his fortune alone.
The Bottom Line
McCartney is a billionaire not just because he wrote great songs, but because he learned the value of owning them. Losing the Beatles’ publishing taught him a costly lesson, and he spent 50 years applying it, buying catalogues that pay out long after the music was written. Like the sporting empires of Carlos Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, the real wealth lies not in the performance but in the assets built around it. For a man who once signed away his rights, there could be no better revenge.
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