Jerry Seinfeld: The world’s richest comedian

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1:53Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Every episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money. Then we judge them. Are they good, bad or just another billionaire? I'm Zing Zing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster. And I'm Simon Jack and I'm the BBC's business editor. And this episode, we've got someone whose name became the name of a TV show, a hit TV show, in fact. Ding, ding, ding, ding. His name is Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld is the richest comedian in the world. according to Bloomberg, he became a billionaire in 2024. And the vast bulk of that money came from, guess what?

2:31Seinfeld, the sitcom, which ran for 180 episodes. That's a lot of episodes between 1989 to 1998. They once joked that it was a show about nothing because Jerry played a fictionalised version of himself, a wisecracking New York comedian hanging out with three friends in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And when we say this was a rating smash, it was a rating smash unlike almost anything that had come before. The final episode was watched by 76 million people in America alone. That's astonishing. And it's continued to make him millions through syndication, which we'll explain later, selling the show to other channels and a massive deal he cut with a streaming platform, Netflix.

3:11And after the show finished, he still does stand up. He performs about 70 times a year. So he's still making money on that. Yeah, in fact, I went to one a few years ago and it was 19 ,000 people. So he's still bringing in the crowds and bringing in the money. He has spent some of that cash on some very expensive real estate, obviously, including a home in the Hamptons, which he bought for$32 million from the singer Billy Joe in 2000. And an apartment on New York's Central Park West and a warehouse in California. Which he uses to store his extremely valuable collection of vintage cars. And he even turned that passion for cars into a comedy format.

3:47Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, originally a YouTube show in which he drives around with other comics, chatting and occasionally stopping for coffee. He sold that show to Netflix for a reported$100 million. So here's Gerry talking to BBC Radio 2's Chris Tarrant in 2011 about the success of Seinfeld. Did you think when it started it would be as big as it became? Oh my goodness, no. No, I figured a year, two, three tops we would survive and it would be one of those little cult shows that just some people liked. And I was really surprised that we even survived on a mainstream television network because I thought it was a little bit of a arcane sense of humor.

4:29Yeah. So I never expected it to get big in the States, let alone other places. So there's the man himself talking about the incredible success of the show that bore his name and made him those riches. But we're not here to tell jokes. We're here to tell, which is probably just as well. We're here to figure out how they got so rich. And we're going to start from how you get from zero to a million.

4:54So in many ways, Jerome Allen Seinfeld is the kind of quintessential New Yorker. Yeah, born in April 1954. He turned 70 this year. He was raised in Massapequa, Long Island. So he has grandparents on both sides who were among the many millions of people who moved and emigrated to America by boat at the start of the 20th century, entering at Ellis Island, New York. You don't get more American dream than that. No, his paternal grandfather was from Austria, his mother's family from Syria. And both of his parents grew up as orphans, which made them quite unusual. They actually didn't even marry until they were in their 40s.

5:29And his relationship with his parents, as he puts it, says, you do what you got to do. I'll do what I got to do. And I'm just living here until I can figure something else out. It's a very kind of, eh, kind of attitude to life, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Which is kind of a very Seinfeldian kind of state of mind, I think. It really is. Yeah. He said, my father never hugged me. He never told me he loved me, never threw me a ball. But he says, that was no problem. I'm good. But his dad was definitely an influence on Gerry. So he collected jokes. He wrote them down in cards that he kept in a box to tell at the dinner table.

6:03That must have gotten quite annoying for a young Jerry Seinfeld. But that inculcated, I think, a love of comedy, almost an obsessive love of comedy and a study of it. He said, I had no normal social experience, but I didn't think I was missing anything. So his parents bought a new TV and he got the old one in his room. He said, I never came out of the room again. And he was just always watching comedy shows on TV or else he was listening to comedy records. And while that might seem crazy nowadays, there was a time where you could actually buy comedy on tape and play it. In high school, he read a book about stand-up comedy called The Last Laugh that he apparently still adores.

6:39And he's got a really interesting attitude to comedy. So he'll compare classic comedy routines to amazingly constructed, intricate pieces of architecture. and he said that hearing things like that as a child made him quote very excited that you could do things like that with words and ideas and attitudes. His dream at that time was to work at a big ad agency in Manhattan and write funny ads. He loved advertising. He thought that Manhattan was like the Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz. He thought that stand-up comedians on talk shows were some like genius alien people and he could never be one of them.

7:12And it's still you know incredibly rare and difficult to make that much money in entertainment alone. You know, we've had previous entertainment people on the show like George Lucas. But, you know, if you're what you might call a content creator or just a straight up comedian, it's quite hard to make that amount of money. Yeah. And it certainly wouldn't have happened were it not for the modern methods of delivering content, which are, you know, syndicating TV shows where you sell to other channels and indeed cut deals with the big streamers, the Netflix of the world. And we'll get into that in a bit.

7:43So Jerry Seinfeld is in high school in America. He's going through a bad time. He's got acne. He's unpopular with gals. You know, it's kind of like this archetypal story of the nerd who makes good. Yeah. So he quit six months early. But despite dropping out of high school, he somehow managed to get into college. He enrolled at Oswego State University of New York in 1972. And it was there he was introduced to something that might be familiar if you're into reading about showbiz people. He got introduced to transcendental meditation, which is also advocated by people like David Lynch who came up with Twin Peaks.

8:17I'm never quite sure exactly what it is. It's a sort of silent meditation which everyone was doing in the end of the hippie era. The Beatles, the Beach Boys were big fans of this. Yeah, Gerry tried it out and says it cleared up his acne. I'm not endorsing this as a matter for doing that if you're listening. But he says it gave him a great energy and focus and he does it to this day. It's so funny because that to me is like sounds like a Seinfeld storyline. The one where Jerry tries out transcendental meditation. Right. So after college, he says he's going to try and become a comedian. He didn't think he'd be any good.

8:49But at the time, he said, it seemed much more important to me to do what you wanted to do than to succeed at it. And in the mid 1970s, he did his first stand up set at a venue called the Golden Lion Pub in Manhattan. Really, it was more of a restaurant. So they took away a table. They took away a lampshade to light the comedian on stage. But it went down really well. Yeah, and in his Netflix show, Jerry Before Seinfeld, he explains his first real joke, which already shows his recognisable comic voice. It goes, so I'm left-handed. Left-handed people do not like the word left is so often associated with negative things.

9:22Left feet, left-handed compliment. What are we having for dinner? Leftovers. You go to a party, there's nobody there. Where'd everyone go? They left. Was that the official, your official Jerry Seinfeld impression? It was slipping into New York. I tell you what it is. There's a real unmistakable rhythm to the way Seinfeld talks. It's in everything he does. And actually, he did say, you know, the rhythm is 90 % of that joke. And I think, you know, you got it. You had it. Well, he was very kind. I'm not so sure. Gerry said about his own sense of humour, he says, I don't like comedy that's the big, obvious things that we all see.

9:56Show me something small that I never noticed and blow it way out of proportion. Then I'm laughing. And that is the formula for Seinfeld. Yeah, that's very true. True. So his jokes are basically apolitical, right? So he talks about these kind of universal experiences, the things that get on everyone's nerves. And also he doesn't sweat. So he has obvious mainstream crossover potential. So he's talking about things that everyone would notice in their everyday lives. You know, there's nothing here to offend anyone. You've got the formula there for very broad appeal. So just three weeks into his stand-up career, he'd only been doing it for not even a month, this legendary American comedian called Jackie Mason turned up in the audience.

10:33There was only about 15 people there. And Mason told Seinfeld that he had it and that it, quote unquote, made him sick how successful Seinfeld would be. So that kept him going and he was going to do this for the rest of his life. For the next few years, Jerry's honing his craft. He loves comedy. He loves talking about comedy. He loves hanging out with other comedians. So, you know, in the late 70s, there's no real sort of comedy circuit. He's doing lots of shows, sometimes unpaid. He's probably working a little bit on the side, slowly building a reputation. And then he gets a role in a successful sitcom called Benson that, like most sitcoms, was shot in Los Angeles.

11:09So he kind of plays a wannabe stand-up comedian and he kind of latches onto this thinking, this is going to be it. This is my big break. And then it flops. Yeah, well, Benson was quite a big show, but he calls his experience of it a total failure. He got sacked after just three episodes. The producer didn't even bother to tell him he'd been sacked. I know. I mean, I feel quite bad for him at this point. Apparently he turned up at the rehearsal and found out that there was no script for him at the run through. Yeah, only when he asked for where's my script, he was told he'd been written out and that made him very angry.

11:37It did, however, teach him a valuable lesson. He realised that the reason why it didn't work was because he didn't write the material. So he basically says, I have to write my own material or I stink. But he does at this time get two important breaks in L.A. In 1980, he's seen at the L.A. Comedy Store by a guy called George Shapiro, a Hollywood talent manager, who already manages the comedian Andy Kaufman. Have you ever seen the film The Man in the Moon? Anyway, he was big in the day. He played Latka in a big TV show called Taxi around that time. So Shapiro signs Gerry up and Seinfeld said about this relationship, the bond between George and I was we thought showbiz was the greatest thing invented by man and we couldn't get enough.

12:20Yeah. So now he's got a top agent. He's ready for his second L.A. break. He's seen at an improv show in 1981 by someone from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which is huge. He was booked for a first appearance on the show. I mean, this sounds like such a high-pressure gig because it's basically the dream for any comedian in America. You know, you're on TV, there's a huge network audience watching. It's a late-night chat show, which was a massive medium at the time with the most iconic host in history. So it could make or break you. And apparently, the way that you knew whether you'd made it would be if Johnny gave you the OK hand signal at the end of a set.

13:00And that meant you got his seal of approval. I remember the Johnny Carson show dimly when I was a kid. But this whole thing about the OK, I have heard from other people, whether it be singers or anyone, that this is like being anointed. It's some kind of rite of passage. If you get the OK, it means somehow this is a break in itself. Oh, my God. It's a bit like a Roman emperor kind of giving the hand gesture to throw you to the lions. Yeah. And Gerry had performed on this what he called his tight five. That's what comedians call five minutes of their most carefully honed material. and apparently he did it 100 times before he did it on the show.

13:34God, I mean... It's interesting that, isn't it? Because when you hear it, it always feels like it's off the cuff and blah, blah. He was nervous at the performance, though, not just because of the massive TV audience, but because he'd never performed to a crowd as big as the 500 people in the studio audience. But he got the OK sign from Johnny and he says, it's still the greatest moment of my life. So The Tonight Show is a huge hit and it takes Gerry from just being a working comedian who does the stand-up circuit to being famous with a capital F. Yeah, he's on The Tonight Show, as we've just mentioned.

14:06He's also on Late Night with David Letterman. He's probably making a decent living, but he's still quite a way off from being a millionaire. But then in 1985, there's a turning point. So Jerry's dad, Kalman, who, you know, the guy who collects jokes in a box, passes away. Yeah, he never saw his son's sitcom success, but you can actually see a tribute to Kalman in the backdrop of some Seinfeld episodes. there was a sign for a company called Cal Signs, which is apparently a nod to his dad. And his dad's death was really a kind of critical moment in Seinfeld's career. So Gerry said after he passed away, someone said, now your career is really going to take off.

14:41In some way, maybe the child will sometimes hold back so as to not surpass the father while he's alive. Maybe it's a mortality thing. I just started driving a little harder, working a little harder. That's fascinating, no? You know, we've talked on this show before about that kind of midlife moment where some people start approaching 40 or they have a kind of death in the family and then they realise like capital letters this is it this is the moment where I either make it or I don't. Yeah no whether his analysis of the situation is true or not he certainly starts having more success and he gets his first HBO that's home box office stand-up special in 1987.

15:17And after a lot of lobbying from his agent George Shapiro this US TV network called NBC finally asks Jerry to make a sitcom pilot And a pilot, for those of you who don't know, is actually really a kind of taster first episode of what would hopefully become an ongoing show. And he makes perhaps one of the most important decisions of his life. He decides to approach another comedian, Larry David, to work on it with him. You may know Larry David because he has now become quite an iconic comedian in his own right. He is the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yeah, at the time, Gerry and Larry were not even that good friends.

15:52But Gerry said that whenever they would talk, it was never about anything important. It was completely obsessive and hilarious and insane. And that's what we wanted the show to sound like. So they come up with an idea for a show called The Seinfeld Chronicles. As you might tell, this name does not stick around for very long. Yeah, Gerry played, as we said, a version of himself, comedian in New York, whose best friend is called George. George was played by Jason Alexander and the character is based on Larry David himself. I didn't know that. I didn't know. I mean, now you say it, I can kind of see it, but I didn't know at the time.

16:23Yes, George Costanza, one of the great comic creations of all time. And he had a neighbour called Kramer, who was played by Michael Richards, because Larry David actually had a neighbour called Kramer, who he based that character on. So they've got these three characters, but unfortunately, test audiences didn't like the pilot because it had no drama and they were not impressed by the cast. And it might have ended there, but for one guy, it's interesting when we do these stories, there's these little moments that kind of make all the difference, which, you know, just could have died there. But for this one person, sometimes these people come along, and this one was a TV executive called Rick Ludwin.

16:58Ludwin thought the show had potential, and after he cancelled some other shows, he had a bit of money left over to take a relatively small risk, and he commissioned four more episodes, making season one of Seinfeld one of the shortest seasons of any sitcom in US TV history. And, you know, US TV networks are actually quite cutthroat and ruthless when it comes to cancelling stuff. American streamers like Netflix have now become notorious for just cancelling shows mid-season or after a cliffhanger season. But, you know, they've got form because in America, networks used to just cancel things left, right and centre if they weren't doing well.

17:32So two very important tweaks to this show. They changed its name to just Seinfeld to avoid confusion with another short-lived show called The Marshall Chronicles. And a very important tweak, it added another main character, who's Jerry's ex-girlfriend of the show. It's Elaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. You might recognise Dreyfus from another comedy show, Veep, where she plays the US Vice President. Yeah, incredibly talented comic actress. Anyway, the new episodes aired at 9.30pm on Thursdays in spring 1990, after reruns of Cheers, which is very interesting, because that was the biggest show of that age.

18:05So you've probably got quite a lot of people. you're piggybacking off the back of that and that is a well-known tv tactic to put a new show right after one that you already know is popular yeah because in those days you just kept watching the tv there's nothing else to switch to it's just on um seinfeld then became a minor hit enough anyway to get it recommissioned and let's delve into the money side of this here because jerry was paid 20 000 an episode for the first season but he managed to negotiate double that for seasons two and three. So he would have got about$100 ,000 for the first five episodes of season one, just under half a million for the 12 episodes of season two, and over 900 ,000 for the 23 episodes of season three.

18:50Now, of course, this being Hollywood, he would have had to pay a cut of that to his agent and tax and other expenses, yada, yada, yada. But added to, you know, all the previous money that he made, it seems fair to say that at this point of Seinfeld, Jerry is a millionaire.

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22:51okay a millionaire there he is but it's a long way from a million to a billion as we have found throughout this series so how did jerry go from being a millionaire to a billionaire really it's all down to the continuing success of seinfeld so it went from being a kind of reasonably successful sitcom to being in the top 50 shows on US network TV in seasons two and three. And then by season six, it was the number one show on telly. And as that success grows, the advertising revenue grows that you can associate it with it so he can command a bigger fee. So he gets 100 ,000 an episode for seasons four, five and six, half a million an episode for the season after it became the number one show, and a million an episode for the ninth and final season.