Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. I was rewatching like the one where Elaine goes to this party and is dancing and then everyone who is at the party loses respect for her because she like dances. She has no rhythm. It's like completely just abject horrible dancing.
No, that ain't dancing, Sally, I dance fine, you sneak. My colleague Annie Massa has always had a soft spot for Seinfeld. I had to tell her my favorite George moment. I love when he works for the Yankees and he just doesn't know what he's supposed to do. His boss like tells him like, there's only one thing you.
Have to do. Well, I was wondering, I mean, you happen been to payroll and he like, botcha that?
Yeah, yeah payroll.
No, No, I haven't done that. What's the problem? Now, come on, George.
Annie has been catching up on old Seinfeld clips recently for work. Because the show isn't just iconic TV, it's also been extremely lucrative for its co creator and namesake, Jerry Seinfeld. Today on the show how a Show About Nothing made Seinfeld a billionaire and why Seinfeld's success with syndication and streaming could be so hard to replicate. This is the big take from Bloomberg News.
I'm Sarah Holder, I'm Annie Massa, and I'm a reporter on the Wealth team at Bloomberg News.
So you cover wealth and wealthy people for Bloomberg. Today, we're here to talk about a new addition to Bloomberg's list of billionaires who made his money not from finance or from tech, but from comedy, Jerry Seinfeld. Why did you start looking into Seinfeld's net worth?
So it's been known for a while that he's very, very wealthy. Of course, Seinfeld was a huge hit all through the nineties, and it's no own that Seinfeld has some pretty expensive real estate, this huge collection of vintage cars, and he is just such a well known figure that we figured it might be time to take a look at how much wealth he's accumulated over these years of megasyndication deals and streaming deals and touring and just tally
up his wealth and his net worth. And as we did that, the calculation that we did proved he was a billionaire.
And how much of a billionaire is he? How much money does he have?
We're comfortable saying that he's above the one billion dollar threshold. There are pieces of his net worth that we weren't able to value, like those vintage cars. But because the bulk of it is coming from syndication, from streaming deals, touring revenue, he's cleared the billion dollar threshold.
So you talked about that Tally, Can you say more about how you came to the figure.
Absolutely, so, as we looked at the different pieces of Signinfeld's net worth, there were a few discrete chunks that were the most important. Syndication deals for Seinfeld are a huge piece of his net worth, and those deals played a significant role in his net worth. By our account, he'd earned more than four hundred million dollars from syndication
deals alone. Then there are other streaming deals. So something that's interesting about Seinfeld is that he was really able to navigate from this huge hip show and a really different era of American TV into a completely different model, which is a streaming model. But he has the fortune that Seinfeld is such an enduring hit. Really that all the mega streaming companies like Netflix really were in a
race to get the global streaming rights. So Netflix paid more than five hundred million dollars for the global streaming rights to Seinfeld several years ago, and Seinfeld was able to get around one hundred million dollars just from streaming, and then on top of that, he also does live to So we went into some data that tracks touring revenue for all kinds of different entertainers, and we found that he had in the realm of about one hundred million dollars of touring revenue, and we used an index
to track returns as though he'd invested in a somewhat conservative way over that span of time since around nineteen ninety and that gets you to the threshold of over a billion dollars, even setting aside the vintage cars.
And what iss Seinfeld's team said about your reporting.
The Seinfeld team, we reached out to give them an overview of our analysis, what went into it, what we had calculated. They said that it was inaccurate, but they didn't comment any further, and we completely acknowledged that when you're doing these valuations, of course, you know, surprise like this doesn't come from Jerry Seinfeld showing me his bank statements. So that's what you're working with, and that's what they had to say.
So let's get into the history of Seinfeld. Was Seinfeld an immediate success.
No, it took a while for it to heat up. There's this classic line about it, how it's a show about nothing. I think that in subsequent interviews, Seinfeld has said, Okay, that might have run away a little bit. It wasn't supposed to be entirely about nothing, but it's kind of based on this brand of observational comedy that he honed and just the idea that you can find a tremendous amount of humor in very everyday things. As it built over the years, it just completely topped the Nielsen ratings.
It became one of the most famous, most beloved sitcoms ever, and he famously kind of walked away while it was at the top as well, instead of letting it overstay. Its welcome on TV, even though the finale is very polarizing. But it went out definitely when it was still on top.
But now it's in this zone I would say, where you know, Netflix paid top dollar for these streaming rights because it's almost the comfort of television where if you're a Seinfeld fan and your homesick eating soup on your couch or something, it might feel really good to just throw on an old Seinfeld episode that you already know, go back to something that you already know you're gonna find hilarious. And there are a couple of shows like this,
I think Friends follows in that category. More recent shows like The Office can fall into that category for people, but there's just a handful of them. So Seinfeld occupies that place for people now.
So you seem like the perfect person to tell us about what made Seinfeld so popular in its heyday, and you spoke to a lot of people who tried to understand how the show about nothing was so resonant.
Yeah, as I was working on this story, I wanted to get at that question because it's such a given now that Seinfeld is so well known, and so I was trying to answer the question of how and why
did it get so popular to begin with. So one person I asked about that was Jennifer Kishen Armstrong, who wrote a whole book on Seinfeld and the fan and that it inspired, called Seinfeldia, And something that she said that really resonated with me that Seinfeld's breakthrough was to come up with this kind of comedy that was so sticky, Because you often even today, even in a very different era can feel like you're in a Seinfeld episode. The meat of the jokes is just so every day, so
incredibly banal. So this idea that you feel like you're in a Seinfeld episode, she said, has really made it stick.
Cultural influence doesn't always translate into billionaire level wealth. How Seinfeld parleyed his comedy into big money, and whether anyone else could follow that path. After the break, we're back. I've been speaking with my colleague Annie Massa about the enduring appeal of Seinfeld and how it helped its creator get on the Bloomberg billionaire's index. What made the series so financially lucrative was Jerry actually making a lot of money during the show as it was coming out every week.
Absolutely not before it was such a hit, but as it was gaining momentum throughout the nineties, he was able to negotiate better and better pay packages for himself, and even at the time, actually studio executives sort of were starting to realize this could be the last of an era. But the syndication is really where the much more extreme wealth comes in, right.
So let's talk a little bit more about that syndication.
Sure, I mean, the idea behind syndication is the whole idea of reruns, right, It's what underpins when you're watching something that's already aired on another channel for the first time. Syndication rights are all about, Okay, who can air this show and what these episodes of this show and when and who's it going to reach? And Seinfeld reaches a maximum audience and therefore the syndication was very lucrative for everyone who worked on Seinfeld.
How has streaming changed that profit model for sitcoms?
Streaming has changed a lot. This is one of the reasons that in the writer's strike last year there was a lot of backlash against the new model of streaming because, for example, global rights are usually negotiated. You know what the writers and actors were arguing is they get kind of a raw deal that way. The Seinfeld or Friends model, where you used to be able to create a huge hit and then have the syndication around that kind of
rewarding you is harder and harder. It's not even really possible anymore when you're dealing with streaming platforms that have so much control over the terms, that already have the global rights negotiated, that have mini writers' rooms instead of a full team that's fully compensated working for them.
Does this mean that Jerry seinfeldt is sort of the last in a dying breed of TV billionaires.
I would say he's the last and a dying breed. I mean, just because of the way that streaming has also fragmented what people watch. A phenomenon like Seinfeld is harder to come by these days. Even when you have something that's wildly popular, certainly the economic model around it on the back end is completely changed.
And I mean Seinfeld co created the show, he starred in the.
Show's got his last name on It, got his last.
Name on It. I mean, how did he fare compared to some of his other co stars or co creators.
Yeah, he and Larry David, who co created it, certainly made out the best of the group. But I'm sure that Jason Alexander and Julia Louis Dreyfuss are doing just fine as well.
That's true, they have there's some other stuff going on as well. What else was Jerry Seinfeld doing that was building his wealth?
I mean he's been able to tour quite successfully. So with the popularity of Seinfeld, whenever he's gone on tour. You know, he's been able to get fans out in person and drive those ticket sales. So he's stayed in the stand up game big time. And the success of Seinfeld has almost certainly helped him become one of the most well known stand up comedy acts. So there's that, and then he's gone other routes as well. So I
mentioned that he loves cars. He had this whole series, Comedians and Cars getting Coffee, so he created a whole new kind of talk show around that. He has a feature length film he directed called Unfrosted, and it's all about the invention of pop tarts, and that's coming out pretty soon this year. So he keeps the new projects rolling.
What else did you find in your reporting that speaks to seinfeld enduring cultural relevance.
Yeah. One of the more interesting people I came across in reporting this story was a psychiatry professor at Rutgers University who uses Seinfeld to teach medical students about personality disorders. And so they will take Jerry, Elaine Kramer, and George their behaviors and almost kind of diagnose the signs of personality disorders that they see in their behavior in the episodes. There's so much to talk about, with George in particular.
I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate. I got it all so complex that he created an offshoot class or like an offshoot just about George. Wow.
Wow, that says a lot. This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. This episode was produced by Jessica Beck. It was edited by Naomi Shaven. It was mixed by Alex Ugia. It was fact checked by Naomi and Nicole Beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Thanks for tuning in. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll be back next week.