Sir Paul McCartney: The rich one - Live at Crossed Wires

9:32Simon Jack:Yeah, but Paul, who was still in school at the time, sent his head teacher a letter saying he wouldn't be back because he booked a job in Germany. And he proudly pointed out that he'd be paid 15 quid a week, which was just above UK average wages at the time. So he's doing quite well for himself.

9:47Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, although Paul's brother said his mum would never have allowed him to quit school to do this. But Jim, the musician, of course, wanted his boys to follow their dreams. I think that is such a crucial moment. Can you imagine? I just, you know, if the parents, if Jim had said no way and the mother had still been alive, who knows where we'd be to.

10:04Simon Jack:Yeah, Paul McCartney, the doctor. Well, at this point, the Beatles were actually a five-piece. So there was John, Paul, George on guitar, John's friend Stuart Sutcliffe. there was also a new recruit on drums can anyone guess who that was

10:19Zing Tsjeng:i heard pete best over here yeah that's right absolutely right um pete best was in the beatles at that time now in hamburg it wasn't an easy life they live in pretty squalid conditions they were playing long sets in clubs in the red light district they started wearing tight leather outfits they were taking drugs to keep them awake they became quite a raucous act in a way yeah and

10:40Simon Jack:And, you know, importantly, playing all night, six nights a week, great practice. So it made them better musicians. It made them a better band. Hamburg was a bit like, I guess, finishing school for the Beatles. And Stuart quit there. So Paul reluctantly moved from guitar to bass.

10:57Zing Tsjeng:And the band went there back regularly. They earned up to£300 each for three months stints out there. And at this point, the Beatles is now becoming Paul's job. But he wasn't getting rich. He did have other jobs. He got occasional work. like he was a second man in a van to helping unload it.

11:12Simon Jack:Apparently he slept in the back of the van between stops because he'd be tired from gigging all night.

11:16Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and he was working on winding coils for electrical engineers, a job he said he was useless at.

11:22Simon Jack:But he also quit that job when the Beatles booked another important residency, the one that a lot of you mentioned, the Cavern Club in Liverpool.

11:30Zing Tsjeng:And there, the band earned£10 for evening shows, £5 for lunchtime performances, and the cavern is where prominent local entrepreneur business owner and key character in this story brian epstein first saw them he fell in love with the band especially with john actually and decided to manage them and by now the beatles had split with their original manager alan williams who threatened to sue them over an unpaid share of their salary for a hamburg residency that they booked themselves managers don't like you going off on your own doing that no brian set up a meeting

12:01Simon Jack:Paul often thought of as the most reliable Beatle and the most business-focused one actually failed to turn up completely because he was in the bath. And at the time, Brian was fuming. He said, he'll be very late.

12:12Zing Tsjeng:But very clean, joked George. And that was part of their charm, actually, at The Beatles. They were always wisecracking. And the Americans loved that. Anyway, they soon signed a deal, an important moment in the business story of Paul McCartney and the professionalisation of The Beatles, or at least it should have been.

12:27Simon Jack:Yes, because in January in 1962, John, Paul, George and Pete signed an agreement that would give Epstein 10 to 15 percent of their earnings for five years. But crucially, Epstein never signed it himself.

12:40Zing Tsjeng:And actually, it wouldn't have even been legal because if you were under 21 in the UK at that time, you needed a Guardian to sign a deal like this. John was the only Beatle at that time over 21. Nonetheless, Brian started work and quickly started getting some results.

12:54Simon Jack:He upped the Beatles' minimum fee. He got them more gigs outside Liverpool and Hamburg. He even started paying each member of the band a weekly wage of 20 quid from the company payroll.

13:03Zing Tsjeng:And although it had been a key part of their appeal to him personally, Brian also had them ditch their leather look and kitted them out in suits instead with their mop-top hair, the smart suits, the early Beatles look was now in place. Now the top priority was getting the Beatles a record deal.

13:20Simon Jack:So you might know the Beatles notoriously failed their audition for Decca Records, but Brian relentlessly searched for a label that would sign the band. And eventually he stumbled upon Parlophone Records, owned by the music giant EMI, which you might have heard of, run by a very well-spoken record producer by the name of George Martin. Martin auditioned the Beatles in the EMI studio on Abbey Road in London, and he was convinced by the band, utterly convinced, except for one detail, the drummer.

13:47Zing Tsjeng:This is an interesting story because secretly John, Paul and George had already agreed among themselves that Pete wasn't up to the job. So they ditched him and in Pete's place, they poached their mate Ringo Starr. He was a drummer in a very hot Mersey beat band around at the time.

14:01Simon Jack:So we've got the fab four, John, Paul, George and Ringo finally together. And Brian even sorted out a contract that him, John and Ringo, so the oldest Beatles, actually signed along with George and Paul's dads because they were still under 21. So this is a band of varying ages. And Brian would now take 25 % of all their earnings, which does sound like a lot. But some music managers at the time took as much as 40%. And it doesn't really matter because Brian and the boys were about to hit the big time.

14:30Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, Love Me Do. The first single was released in October 1962. It charted at 17. And from then on, it was only One Direction. The follow-up single Please Please Me went to number two. From Me To You hit number one, as did She Loves You. I Want To Hold Your Hand, Can't Buy Me Love. of single after single after single in a record-breaking run that followed.

14:50Simon Jack:Thank you for not singing any of those.

14:51Zing Tsjeng:Yes, thank you.

14:53Simon Jack:Meanwhile, the Beatles' first album stayed at number one in the UK charts for 30 weeks, only to be replaced by their second album. The band played lucrative package tours, they appeared on TV, they were commanding fees of 300 quid a night, which is real money back in 1963.

15:08Zing Tsjeng:Plus, the Beatles were selling literally millions of records that year. This was the start of Beatlemania, and soon folks in the US started taking notice. So talk show Ed Sullivan, this is where we came in, invited the Beatles to appear on his show.

15:21Simon Jack:Brian headed to New York to ink the deal, got them a 10 grand fee, and by the time the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, Beatlemania had well and truly hit America. They drew an audience of 73 million. 73 million, I mean, that is massive. Huge, huge. And that was more than a third of the population of the whole country at the time, by the way. It set a record for television viewership. And within a year, the Beatles would play to 56 ,000 fans at Shea Stadium, the world's first ever stadium rock show.

15:50Zing Tsjeng:I should not know that was the first stadium rock show, I must say.

15:53Simon Jack:Well, it set a precedent for rock shows ever since.

15:55Zing Tsjeng:You've seen the footage of that, right? You can't actually really hear the music. All you can hear is the screaming. And the band would look like this tiny little band with a little drum kit and a couple of little amplifiers in this massive stadium with people screaming. It was a real phenomenon at the time.

16:10Simon Jack:So now Paul McCartney's one of the most famous people in the world, but is he actually a millionaire?

16:15Zing Tsjeng:You'd think so, wouldn't you? With all of that, you'd think he must be a millionaire. The fact is that in the UK, I've got my business editor hat on here, it was pretty hard to become a millionaire in the 1960s. Brian's lack of music industry experience wasn't helping them get rich. The original deal he'd stuck with EMI wasn't that great. EMI were paying the Beatles one P for every single sold. Now, back then, a seven-inch single cost six shillings and three pence, three pence in old money. And old money is pretty complicated. That's about six pounds today. So one pea was the equivalent of 19 pence a day.

16:49Zing Tsjeng:So they were getting around 3 % or one-thirtieth of the sale price of each record. And their contract stipulated that even that was only paid on 85 % of the records that were sold because 15 % was reserved for records damaged and what have you. So they're not making a very big slice of what is becoming a very big pie.

17:06Simon Jack:So this meant basically for every million singles the Beatles sold then, after Epstein took his 25 % and the remaining money was split between the four Beatles, Paul would end up getting just£663.

17:19Zing Tsjeng:Check that out. For every million singles sold, you got£663. Now, having said that, that was similar to the average annual UK salary at the time. But it meant they would have to sell over one and a half billion singles to make a million each. Plus, they had an even worse deal on their sales outside the UK. So from record sales, the Beatles were paid only about 400 ,000, that's between four of them, in total from 1962 to 1966. And given how famous they were, that seems incredible. So Paul didn't make Paul a millionaire, but he and the other Beatles did have some other sources of income.

17:55Simon Jack:So to start with, they would be paid more than one pence a copy for album sales. plus Lennon and McCartney got an additional royalty on all record sales because they wrote the songs. But even though they set up their own publishing company called Northern Songs in 1962, the deal they'd actually struck wasn't actually that great. And we will come back to that because that is an important part of the story.

18:16Zing Tsjeng:Really important part of the story. Another income stream was Beatles merchandise, merch. Brian had struck a disastrous US merch deal, giving away 90 % of the profits.

18:25Simon Jack:But important to note, The Beatles were making good money from all those stadium and live shows. That Shea Stadium show, 1965, netted each Beatle 40 grand alone. And when they returned to the same venue in 1966, they were paid even more, despite 11 ,000 tickets going unsold.

18:42Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. But one of the biggest factors holding the Beatles back in terms of getting rich, which is what we're here to talk about, was the tax, was the UK tax system. George famously wrote a song called The Taxman, Don't Hum It, complaining about all the tax they paid in the 1960s. It was like 19 for you and one for me, I seem to remember.

19:01Simon Jack:And UK top tax rates in the 60s were huge. So 90%, over 90 % actually, on anything above two grand. So even if Paul McCartney did earn a million, he'd keep less than 100 grand. So the system was essentially designed to stop people from becoming millionaires, let alone billionaires.

19:19Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, I mean, it's got a super tax. Quite a lot of people who were rich left the UK at that time because they've just, you know, they complained about the tax system. The thing is, the Beatles were making an incredible amount of money in the 1960s.

19:32Simon Jack:Yeah, I mean, they released 13 albums, 22 singles, sold hundreds of millions of records. Before they quit performing live, they played over 1 ,400 gigs. They also made five movies if anybody's watched them, you know, including things like A Hard Day's Night, Help, all of these were box office hits.

19:49Zing Tsjeng:All of this activity would have comfortably made Paul a millionaire by the mid-60s. In fact, as early as 1964, Time magazine reported that each beetle had become, in fact, a pound millionaire. The Daily Mail estimated the beetles had earned$56 million in that same year. But even using the formula of deducting Brian's 25%, splitting the rest between the four beetles, taking 90 % off for tax, it still makes each beetle just about a millionaire in UK pounds.

20:16Simon Jack:So minus all these expenses, we can still say that they were comfortably dollar millionaires. So in 1964, let's say, Paul McCartney, you're officially a millionaire.

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22:10Zing Tsjeng:OK, well done. First staging post on the way to a billion. So how did he go from a million to a billion Zing?

22:17Simon Jack:So to start with, by 1964, the Beatles accountants were already managing to find legal ways of shielding the band's earnings from tax. And this is an interesting little bit of trivia. They actually filmed scenes from the movie Help in the Bahamas, specifically to make it easy for them to set up offshore accounts there to avoid UK tax. But Brian thought having offshore accounts was actually a very bad look for the Beatles in the Fab Four. so he had them shut down.

22:44Zing Tsjeng:Yeah and much more sensitive than people are about billionaires these days with their offshore accounts. Anyway one thing that wasn't taxed though was property so Paul and the rest of the Beatles could invest without anything going to the exchequer. In 1965 Paul bought a big house in St John's Wood conveniently right around the corner from the Abbey Road recording studios in one of London's poshest neighbourhoods. Cost Paul 40 grand back then he spent another 20 ,000 giving it a bit of a makeover but recent valuations suggest that house is now worth 17 million pounds, 23 million dollars. And it's thought to still be his main residence, still lives there.

23:16Simon Jack:Well, Paul also bought an estate on the Mull of Kintyre in remote southwest Scotland for 35 grand. It later inspired a hit song and is now worth something like 4 million pounds. So well done, Paul.

23:27Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and very early on, the Beatles set up companies to manage their money and try and shield them from taxation. So in 1963, accountants told them there was 2 million pounds they could either use to set up a company or give straight to the inland revenue. So they set up Beatles Limited. And when that morphed into Beatles & Co. in 1967, a new company structure meant the Beatles paid corporation tax rather than what they were paying on income tax.

23:51Simon Jack:So they also improved their deal with EMI in 1966. But that really wasn't as good a deal as it could have been. So in general, you can safely say the Beatles business deals throughout the 60s were pretty murky. And the truth is, is that Brian Epstein lacked a lot of music industry knowledge, it showed. And the Beatles themselves only really got a sense of the mess that Brian had got them in after his sudden death from an accidental overdose in 1967.

24:15Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, at the time, everyone was devastated by Brian's death. But John Lennon later on reflection said he thought that Brian had ripped them all off.

24:23Simon Jack:Post-Brian, the band tried to manage their own affairs for a while. They set up Apple Corps, which they envisaged as a kind of multimedia conglomerate with a kind of hippie peace and love vibe. You know, they were all wearing tunics at the time with long hair. Nice idea. And of the Beatles, Paul actually showed the most amount of business acumen when it came to running it.

24:41Zing Tsjeng:But by 1968, this company, Apple, was hemorrhaging money. John even went public to declare the Beatles were in a cash crisis. This didn't go down well with Paul. He'd been working behind the scenes to try and sort things out.

24:54Simon Jack:And eventually, Rolling Stones' manager, Alan Klein, became the Beatles' business manager. And he did manage to improve some of their deals. They even started releasing Beatles records on their own Apple label in the United States.

25:05Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. In other ways, Klein was a disastrous hire and in some ways was seen as a catalyst for the Beatles' breakup. Paul says he felt forced into hiring him and later said that the event was the first irreconcilable difference the band ever had.

25:18Simon Jack:Paul actually wanted experienced entertainment lawyers Lee and John Eastman to take over. They also just so happened to be the father and the brother of his brand new American girlfriend Linda.

25:29Zing Tsjeng:So by the time Paul McCartley publicly announced he was leaving the Beatles in 1970, he admitted to being tired of arguing with his bandmates about money. So was it Yoko? Was it whatever? The money differences were a big factor in this. Worst of all, he'd lost the rights to all the hit songs he and John had written. Now, songwriting royalties, as we were saying, are an important piece of intellectual property. They can make a songwriter a lot of money, especially a songwriter who's written as many hits as Paul McCartney. To give a brief explanation, musicians get sort of performance royalty. So even when a recording of a song they played on is played on the radio or used in a film, they get a payment.

26:08Zing Tsjeng:Songwriters also get a payment, and they get whoever plays their songs, so even it's a cover. And don't forget, Beatles songs have been covered by hundreds of other artists. and the value of those songwriting royalties can be massive and they last 70 years beyond the lifetime of the songwriter and we've talked about all this before on good bad billionaire for example

26:26Simon Jack:the taylor swift example taylor swift went to war over intellectual property and she triumphed from the end which is just goes to show that songwriting royalties and intellectual property i mean this

26:36Zing Tsjeng:stuff is worth a literal fortune i mean amazing exactly and if you want to listen to that check

26:41Simon Jack:out that check it out it's a good one now early on john and paul made this very important decision to have equal co-writing credit on all of the Beatles songs. It meant that Lennon and McCartney basically split those royalties equally, even though John and Paul actually stopped writing together quite early on.

26:57Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, you can definitely tell a McCartney song from a Lennon song, I think.

27:01Simon Jack:And this is a really important decision, right? Because whether it made or cost Paul money is actually quite hard to say, because Paul was arguably responsible for what are the most commercially successful songs, right? Hey Jude, Biggest Seller. yesterday is thought to be the most covered song in pop culture history with over 2 ,300 versions recorded so you know Paul actually maybe lost out a bit yeah maybe but more important is a deal

27:26Zing Tsjeng:that Paul and John signed in 1962 that Brian had set up with a guy called Dick James who became their publisher and as we mentioned earlier they set up a company to manage their publishing rights and called it Northern Songs now this deal gave 50 % to the publisher Dick James which was a standard a split in those days. John and Paul had 20 % each. Brian Epstein took around 9%, which definitely isn't normal. George and Ringo had a share of about 1 % each. So bear in mind, these are important numbers. John and Paul only have 20 % of the company that published their songs.

27:59Simon Jack:And a bad, bad deal for George and Ringo, I have to say. Now, at the time, the Beatles said they would literally sign anything that Brian put in front of them. So that deal was really bad. But then things got much worse.

28:10Zing Tsjeng:Yes. And this is because in 1965, Northern Songs had what they call an IPO, initial public offering, selling shares to the public. And that was another move to try and ease John and Paul's tax burden. There was some tax efficiencies there. And at the time, it gave each of them what seemed like a big windfall, around£95 ,000 tax-free. By the way, this is in the days before capital gains tax. But it reduced their ownership of their own catalogue down to 15 % each, these important numbers.

28:36Simon Jack:And by 1969, Paul had come to understand the true value of copyright. He wanted to buy back his own catalogue of songs. And with the help of the Eastmans, he set up his own company, MPL, to try and facilitate this. But the publisher, Dick James, instead sold his shares to another company, ATV, and they became majority owners and forced essentially a hostile takeover, making John and Paul sell them their share of their own work, which must have, I think, really stung to know that your own songs are being taken.

29:04Zing Tsjeng:I mean, watching your creative genius disappear into some corporate kind of labyrinthine maze. And he talks about this to this day, about how big an emotional impact or what that was. And it's something you've created like that you have a very emotional connection to. And watching it get frustrated by a bunch of business deals must have been absolutely terrible.

29:22Simon Jack:Yeah.

29:23Zing Tsjeng:And by the time they split up in 1970, Paul actually owned no part of his own Beatles songs. and his contract meant even rights to future works would also go to ATV. Furthermore, he was contracted to Apple Corps for future record releases, even solo ones. So he's basically in a bit of a cul-de-sac here.

29:41Simon Jack:Yeah. So in 1971, he takes the dramatic move of taking John, George, Ringo and Apple to the high court to legally escape and break free from the Beatles, his own band, something he did eventually manage to do. And the ATV deal was a lot harder to escape, though. ATV instigated a million dollar US lawsuit against McCartney when he started issuing solo music.

30:04Zing Tsjeng:And he ended up making a bit of a deal with them. He agreed a new seven year contract that would also give him back rights to a few of his Beatles songs. And this is the start of Paul's lifelong attempts to get control back of his songs.

30:16Simon Jack:And of the very many courtroom battles, too many for us to actually go through to ensure he got what he owed for his time in the Beatles.

30:23Zing Tsjeng:Back in 1970, of course, remember the Beatles had split up. this was kind of the biggest news in the world. And he was being blamed for the breakup. And he sunk into a pretty deep depression and into by his own omission, hit the bottle started drinking really heavily.

30:35Simon Jack:But he did have a new wife, that woman, Linda, she married her the previous year, and the couple had two young girls to look after. Mary born in 1969 and Heather, Linda's seven year daughter who Paul later adopted. So the family basically retreated to that biggest state in remote southwest Scotland. And Paul set about rebuilding himself, you know, his life, his career he started working on new music with linda he recorded an album that then began a new band called wings and that became a significant touring hit making enterprise in the 70s you're a fan of

31:06Zing Tsjeng:wings band on the run was a pretty good song the rest i can take or leave anyone else anyone any wings fans in the audience yes okay well i'll talk to you later you can make the case for wings um but and linda of course was widely mocked for her musical contributions to this band wasn't she exactly um yeah well he pulled started and in fact he started co-crediting linda on the song simply because she wasn't this is important she wasn't under contract at atv so they would keep some of the rights because she was not part of that atv contract but i mean clearly she was very crucial to the rebuilding of his you know his post beetles life though yeah and the couple

31:44Simon Jack:actually stayed together until her early death in 1998 by then she'd inherited a significant fortune junior from her father. She'd founded her incredibly successful vegetarian food company, Linda McCartney Food. Paul famously remains vegetarian.

31:58Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and it had been Linda's entertainment lawyer father and brother who'd really explained music copyright to Paul, and it made him determine that even if he could make money from his own back catalogue, he would make money from someone else's. So he used MPL, the company he'd set up, to buy the rights for some of the rock and roll classics of his youth, people like Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, and gradually MPL actually became one of the world's largest privately owned music publishers.

32:24Simon Jack:But Paul's enthusiasm for music copyright backfired quite dramatically when he explained the value of songwriting IP to a young musician called Michael Jackson in 1982. Three years later, Jackson ended up buying out ATV's catalogue, including most of the Beatles songs. Paul was furious. His friendship with Jackson came to a very abrupt end.

32:45Zing Tsjeng:Because I remember they did that Say, Say, Say song. I imagine what he wanted to say was pretty unrepeatable after that. Unpublishable. Anyway, Jackson eventually sold the rights to Sony. Paul kept trying to regain control. In 2018, he took Sony to court in the US to reclaim ownership of some songs. Under American law, songwriter copyright eventually returns to the writer. So Sony settled and Paul has finally regained rights to his own songs. There's a 56-year rule. So he's got rights to his own songs, in the US at least, but not everywhere.

33:16Simon Jack:Songwriting and royalties alone, however, are not what made Paul McCartney a billionaire. Because, you know, after the business failures of the Beatles, he kind of has meticulously managed his solo career. If you think of Hamburg as the Beatles finishing school, then the Beatles was basically McCartney's own business school.

33:32Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and since the Beatles, he's carefully protected his copyright in some unexpected ways. One notable windfall came when he and the other Beatles sued the other Apple, Steve Jobs' Apple, for infringement of their copyrighted name. He actually sued Apple multiple times over a 30-year period. And the feud came to an end after Jobs launched Apple Music and ended up buying out the Beatles' Apple trademark for$500 million. So that's a nice chunk, isn't it? And I remember this because basically the agreement was when Apple set up, they said, we've got no problem with Apple using the Apple name as long as you're not in the music business.

34:06Zing Tsjeng:But then, of course, the iPod comes along. Then Apple is in the music business. And this is when they basically put$500 million payoff. And that deal paved the way for Beatles songs to start streaming. Because back in the old days, you know, you buy an album, you buy a T-shirt.

34:21Simon Jack:That was it.

34:22Zing Tsjeng:Your financial relationship with that act is over. but now with streaming your financial relationship with the band goes on and on it's like a never ending trickle in some cases you know flood of money in other cases which goes on in perpetuity

34:38Simon Jack:so it's really changed things especially if you're the beatles and people are streaming your music all the time but you know in 2008 paul divorced his second wife heather mills at court records at the time showed he was worth 400 million pounds which was the equivalent of 800 million at the time. So the eventual£25 million divorce settlement didn't actually have that much impact on Paul's overall wealth. It's pretty acrimonious though, if you remember the scenes from the court.

35:04Zing Tsjeng:I don't think either Heather Mills or Paul McCartney came out of that one particularly well, did they?

35:10Simon Jack:Well, I mean, Mills did pour a jug of water over McCartney's lawyer's head at the end of the divorce case.

35:15Zing Tsjeng:And the tabloids really went for Heather Mills as well at the time, I remember that. But anyway, since then, Mac has released a prodigious amount of music. This is an interesting 27 albums since the Beatles. If you could name more than five of those, you're doing well, I reckon. He's also continued to play huge live shows. Touring's become increasingly lucrative. You remember seeing Glastonbury. That was an amazing set, wasn't it? I think you were there. Yeah, I was there.

35:36Simon Jack:I actually shed a tear. It's also estimated, by the way, that McCartney's performances have grossed over a billion dollars in total. So Paul takes home about 60 million of that every time he tours.

35:47Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. Meanwhile, every aspect of the Beatles' back catalogue has been rinsed, curated, monetized from the anthology albums of the 90s to the Beatles 1 compilation of 2000. He's made money from recent documentaries, the Peter Jackson documentary, which I thought was fascinating. So lots of other financial streams here.

36:04Simon Jack:Yeah, and you know, he's remained also culturally relevant to new generations, I think. You know, he's got collaboration with Rihanna and Kanye. That's actually his most streamed composition. And streaming platforms like Spotify, as we've mentioned, are now major income streams to people like Paul McCartney.

36:19Zing Tsjeng:Some of the big artists have complained. Smaller acts are getting very little from these streaming platforms. But as an artist with billions of streams, he's clearly doing very well out of it. Thank you very much.

36:30Simon Jack:So all in all, it's hardly surprising that in 2024, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated that Paul McCartney, Macca's wealth, had grown to a billion pounds or about 1.25 billion US dollars.

36:43Zing Tsjeng:So he's made it. Paul McCartney is officially a billionaire.

36:59Zing Tsjeng:But let's go beyond a billion.

37:01Simon Jack:This year, the final episode of a show that you might watch that succeeded The Ed Sullivan Show aired on US television. The late show with Stephen Colbert needed the most famous guest they could possibly for this special event. So who did they choose? Obviously, Macca.

37:15Zing Tsjeng:So he, in a wonderful circularity, returned to the same studio where he'd once been watched by 73 million people. Back then, he'd understood that he'd never not be famous again. He knew something big had happened. Now he's aged 84. He reminisced about girls screaming in the balcony, knowing he's still perhaps the most famous person alive and also in an exclusive club of the very richest.

37:38Simon Jack:That is Paul McCartney's story. Now we are going to rate Paul out of 10 on some of our billionaire categories. Wealth, controversy, power and legacy. But before we do that, we're going to ask the audience here, this is your chance to vote on whether you think Paul McCartney is good, bad, or just another billionaire.

37:56Zing Tsjeng:It's a bit of fun. It's a virtual show of hands. Please get involved.

37:59Simon Jack:We'll do our own categories first.

38:01Zing Tsjeng:OK, so we'll start with wealth. Now, in our world, he's entry level, bottom of the pile. He's only just scraped over the billion dollar, the billion pound level. But we do look at somehow how far they've come. Yeah.

38:14Simon Jack:And Paul McCartney, you know, you've got to give it to him. He came from a genuinely working class background and he became a real rock star.

38:22Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. He's got an impressive property portfolio. He's got homes in London, Scotland, Farming, Sussex, estate in the Hamptons in Long Island, New York, a ranch in Arizona. His property alone is probably worth$75 million.

38:34Simon Jack:Yeah. I think also when we talk about his wealth, it's important to acknowledge he's also been very generous with his money. He gives to a range of charities, most notably animal rights charities. He co-founded the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, if anyone's familiar with that group.

38:49Zing Tsjeng:But he does have the obligatory must-have. He's got a$40 million private jet. Of course he does.

38:55Simon Jack:Wouldn't expect anything less from Macca.

38:57Zing Tsjeng:Okay, so wealth in the rarefied world of billionaires is nowhere near the top of the tree. Nevertheless, there's not that many people that we've done who make this kind of money from

39:08Simon Jack:playing music exactly taylor swift beyonce beyonce rihanna actually there's more and more of them

39:13Zing Tsjeng:now they're getting much better at this than they used to be so um i think if there's any justice in the world paul mccartney will be richer than taylor swift but there isn't any justice that's

39:22Simon Jack:controversial oh come on gonna come and get you for that on the swifties yeah marks out of 10

39:26Zing Tsjeng:marks out of 10 okay i'm gonna middle of the pack five because he's come from a working class background you know he was in a council house so i'm gonna give him five i think five out of 10 is

39:36Simon Jack:pretty fair if you disagree with this put your hand up and we'll call on you later on okay all

39:40Zing Tsjeng:right so that's five out of ten from each of us controversy um drugs i mean there was there was

39:46Simon Jack:quite a lot of drugs swinging around the beetles at the time he was arrested for for smuggling weed into japan in 1980 actually spent around i think nine days in jail escaped a possible seven-year sentence yeah um you know so he was a fan of the wacky backy airport um yeah but listen they're not he's not Keith Richards though is he no that's true you don't look at Paul McCartney and think

40:07Zing Tsjeng:god how is he still alive no that's true obviously there was the LSD use Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds he's been to court a lot I mean I think in a way the controversy is more about the court dealings Apple Records you know finding out Brian had made a mess of it going to court against his own band mates and Apple that sounds grueling actually you know that kind of sounds really demoralizing when you have to do that.

40:30Simon Jack:I think, but I think ultimately, you know, that's not particularly controversial. So I would just give him maybe a one out of 10.

40:36Zing Tsjeng:I think that, you know, Macca, again, one out of 10 for controversy.

40:40Simon Jack:What about power? So I think Paul McCartney's got an enormous amount of cultural clout, come on.

40:46Zing Tsjeng:I think in terms of cultural capital, I think that, you know, is that there's never been a band bigger than the Beatles. Whenever they always say, oh, it's like Beatlemania. No, it's not really.

40:54Simon Jack:I think our usual gauge of this is, would you be able to call up the president of any country, especially the United States, and he'd take the call. Come on, Donald Trump would love to speak to Macca. I don't know if Macca would like to speak to Donald Trump, though.

41:07Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, okay.

41:07Simon Jack:I'm going to give him eight out of ten for this.

41:09Zing Tsjeng:Okay, I'm going to give him seven. And then, because it's a bit different. We have this other category called legacy, and on this, I'm going to give him 11.

41:18Simon Jack:11 out of 10. We've never given 11 before. Turn it up to 11.

41:21Zing Tsjeng:Turn it up to 11, said Spidal Tap. Yes, exactly. Is there a band with a bigger legacy than the Beatles? There can't be. I mean, just it's not the Rolling Stones.

41:30Simon Jack:Sorry to any Stones fans.

41:31Zing Tsjeng:No, the thing is, is that, you know, writing like 10 or 20 hit songs, they wrote hundreds. I mean, you just keep going on and on and on. And, you know, hundreds of amazing songs as well.

41:41Simon Jack:I think I think I'm going to give them 10 out of 10 because I don't want to mess up the metric we've got. If you start giving 11, everything's crazy.

41:49Zing Tsjeng:That way chaos lies. OK, fine. 10 out of 10 for both of us. So is Paul McCartney good, bad or just another billionaire?

41:56Simon Jack:Yeah, before we look at the results of the poll, we're going to send the mics around. We've got someone there right by the pillar.

42:01Zing Tsjeng:Tell us your name as well. Hi, I'm Beth. Hi, Beth. I generally agree with you down the middle because there's a lot more evil billionaires out there. But I think there's a missing point that he's a bit of a hypocrite. A lot of the sympathy of his law kind of lies in that he wasn't able to own his intellectual property. But when he had enough resources to do so, he bought the intellectual property of artists that went before him. Right. So basically he was doing the same thing with Bobby Holly. Yeah, if he could, he would, and he did. And so when there was a big reaction to Michael Jackson buying their intellectual property, I thought, hmm.

42:34But he would do the same, and he has been.

42:36Zing Tsjeng:Well, maybe stung by the experience, he became a bit more cynical. There was another one over here. Can I have your name, sir? Hello, I'm Eric. Paul is obviously a very good billionaire by billionaire standards. He was an ordinary lad who loved his music. He found the system was out to exploit him, so he learned how to fight the system. He took them on. He's done very well. So more power to him. Okay, so good billionaire there.

43:00Simon Jack:A good billionaire. Okay. Let's have, I think, the gentleman by the pillow. You had your hand up. Hi, I'm Michael. I suppose, you know, the view that Paul McCartney may still be at the lower threshold at the moment of being a billionaire probably doesn't matter really, does it? because if there's a world where Paul McCartney doesn't exist in the future, he will still continue to earn, as proven by Elvis, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, et cetera. So the ability to continue to earn after death.

43:40Zing Tsjeng:It's interesting because basically the estate gets the performing rights or the publishing rights for 70 years after the death of the person who wrote them. and also I think with the streaming thing as well I think that's been such a structural change in the music business which is that the Spotify playlists and Apple and Amazon and whatever will continue to pay the estate of that person for decades to come and it just depends on how famous and popular your music which is why by the way these this revenue stream which goes for a long time which is why David Bowie was one of the first people to securitize his future songwriting royalties because basically it's just like a bond you've got income coming in for a long time you can give that a current value and he sold his something at 50 60 million dollars years ago and now a lot of the big acts neil young bob dylan are selling their back catalog and it's

44:25Simon Jack:also why private equity is also getting massively involved in the music business but let us go to

44:30Zing Tsjeng:the vote i hope you've all voted here in sheffield it is time for the results and you have voted that

44:36Simon Jack:paul mccarnie is drum roll a good billionaire what a surprise now i'd like to thank everyone

44:44Zing Tsjeng:for turning up today. The next episode, we'll be back in the studio discussing the Chinese chili oil billionaire, Tao Huabi, who I'd never heard of. And then I realised my kids have got this stuff and they put it on everything.

44:55Simon Jack:Yeah. If you have Lao Gan Ma chili sauce, you've made her a billionaire.

44:59Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. Thank you all so much. And I hope you enjoyed it. So thank you so much.

45:03Simon Jack:Good Bad Billionaires, a BBC Studios production for the BBC World Service.

45:07Zing Tsjeng:It's produced by Mark Ward. Paul Smith is the editor.

45:09Simon Jack:For the BBC World Service, the senior commissioning producer is Sarah Green and the commissioning editor is John Manel.