Sir Paul McCartney is poised to pass £1bn in wealth whilst Ed Sheeran is closing in on the riches amassed by his mentor Sir Elton John, new figures show.
The Sunday Times Rich List 2023 awards Sir Paul an £85m uplift, taking his total wealth, combined with wife Nancy Shevell, to £950m.
The former Beatle, who turns 81 this year, topped up his income with his recent Got Back tour grossing $105m from just 16 shows, whilst his hit back catalogue racked up £25m in royalties.
Sir Paul’s income will tick over this year with a photography book and a major exhibition of his work at the National Portrait Gallery.
Sir Paul is likely to pass the £1bn mark in next year’s list – but he could almost double his wealth overnight if he joined fellow music legends who are cashing in by selling their back catalogues to record labels and investment funds.
McCartney and Shevell, whose family owned a US trucking business, move up to number 175 in the overall Rich List.
Ed Sheeran, Adele and Harry Styles are among the UK’s wealthiest people under the age of 35, according to the 2023 Sunday Times 35 under 35 Rich List.
Sheeran’s net worth rose by £40m to hit £300m, boosted by his sell-out tour and dominance of the music streaming market.
The 32-year-old sold 3m tickets for his 2022 European tour which grossed £202m. He has invested his earnings in more than 20 London properties, including a restaurant and his £4m family home in Suffolk.
With a new number one album Subtract, backed by another sell-out six-month world tour, Sheeran’s riches are set to soar further in 2023.
If Sheeran maintain his current trajectory, he can expect to surpass his friend and career mentor Sir Elton John in the wealth stakes.
Sir Elton, 76, has seen his fortunes rise by £55m to £450m. His Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, set to conclude this Summer after a Glastonbury headline appearance, has grossed $800m.
With the Rocket Man singer vowing never to tour again, Sir Elton will rely on earnings from his hit catalogue and branded stores such as his new Bicester Village “pop-up” outlet, to keep his fortune ticking over.
Adele, who is now 35, has her wealth estimated as £165m.
Earlier this year the singer announced an extension of her Las Vegas residency in Nevada, which had previously run from November 2022 to March 2023.
Adele is believed to earn £500,000 per performance with new dates of the high-budget show due to take place at the Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino from June until November this year.
She has chosen to take the residency over the extensive touring which racks up big money for the likes of Sheeran and Sir Elton.
Harry Styles, 29, has a net worth of £150m according to the list. The success of Harry’s House, the world’s best-selling album of 2022 and its accompanying tour, grossing $250m, added £50m to his wealth.
Outside showbusiness, the Rich List revealed that the personal fortune of Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty has fallen by more than £200m over the last year as the value of her stake in her father’s company plummeted.
The couple’s wealth is estimated at around £529m in the latest Sunday Times Rich List, a fall from £690m a year earlier.
Ms Murty owns a small stake in Infosys, a $64bon (£52bn) Indian IT giant co-founded by her billionaire father.
Her stake is just under 1 per cent of the business, but the company shares have lost around a fifth of their value in the past year as investors have been worried about the future of the Indian technology sector.
The power couple first entered the Sunday Times Rich List last year when Mr Sunak was still chancellor in Boris Johnson’s government.
When running to be Prime Minister his standing was dented by scrutiny of his family’s financial affairs and large wealth.
Elsewhere, Sir Richard Branson has seen his fortune shrink by more than 40 per cent in a year after revealing his Virgin empire suffered big losses during the pandemic.
The British entrepreneur slipped down the list following his satellite launch company, Virgin Orbit, going bankrupt.
Sir Richard’s wealth has dropped by £1.79bn since last year.
It marks a bigger decline in his net worth than the tycoon indicated during an interview with the BBC earlier this month.
He told the BBC’s Amol Rajan that the pandemic “cost us a big percentage of our net worth, maybe £1.5bn.
“There was a time where it really looked like we were going to lose everything”, he said.
The 2023 Rich List also catapulted petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe into second place.
Sir Jim, who has recently bid to buy Manchester United, saw more than £23.6bn added to his wealth, taking it to a total of £29.7bn.
It makes him the second-richest person on the list, but the increase was largely due to “new information about his finances” rather than a change in his financial position, the list’s compilers said.
There were 171 billionaires in the UK this year, which six fewer than last year, but their combined wealth has risen by £30.7bn to £683.9bn.
The number one spot was again occupied by Gopi Hinduja and his family, days after his brother SP Hinduja died.
Robert Watts, the list’s compiler, said: “This year’s Sunday Times Rich List shows a golden period for the super rich is over. For the first time in 14 years we’ve seen the number of UK billionaires fall.
“Two years ago we raised concerns about an unsettling boom in the fortunes of the very wealthy that continued unchecked during the political instability around Brexit and the pandemic.
“This is not a crash, but there are household names who have lost vast sums over the past year.
“The bursting of the tech bubble, the end of rock bottom interests and the jitters creeping through the banking industry have all taken their toll.
“The super rich don’t exist in a vacuum. Many small investors lost money in some of their overblown stock market floats.”
These are the 20 richest people and families in the UK, according to the Rich List:
- Gopi Hinduja and family – £35bn
- Sir Jim Ratcliffe – £29.7bn
- Sir Leonard Blavatnik – £28.6bn
- David and Simon Reuben and family – £24.4bn
- Sir James Dyson and family – £23bn
- Lakshmi Mittal and family – £16bn
- Guy, George, Alannah and Galen Weston and family – £14.5bn
- Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho – £13.1bn
- Kirsten and Jorn Rausing – £12bn
- Michael Platt – £11.5bn
- The Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family – £9.9bn
- Marit, Lisbet, Sigrid and Hans Rausing – £9.3bn
- Andy Currie – £9.2bn
- John Reece – £9.1bn
- Alex Gerko – £9.1bn
- Denise, John and Peter Coates and family – £8.8bn
- Anders Holch Povlsen £8.5bn
- Barnaby and Merlin Swire and family – £8.4bn
- John Fredriksen and family – £8.3bn
- Mikhail Fridman – £8.2bn
