In the summer of 1985, Paul McCartney watched the songs he had written with John Lennon go to a friend he had once helped. Michael Jackson paid $47.5 million for ATV Music, and with it came more than 250 Beatles songs that McCartney had hoped to buy back himself.
Now the ending has changed. Forbes reported on Monday, November 9, that Paul McCartney is a billionaire, with a fortune it puts at about $1.4 billion. That makes the 84-year-old the third-richest musician in the world, behind only Jay-Z at $2.8 billion and Taylor Swift at $2 billion, according to Forbes as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle and Billboard. The surprise is how little of it came from the songs he lost.
How Did Paul McCartney Lose The Beatles Songs In The First Place?
The trouble started before the Beatles had even split. Lennon and McCartney’s songs sat in a publishing company called Northern Songs, and in 1969 control of it passed to Lew Grade’s ATV while the band was falling apart. By the time ATV went up for sale in the mid-1980s, McCartney wanted it back, and so did a young man he had recorded “Say Say Say” with.
McCartney has told the story with a rueful laugh more than once. “He was talking to me and asking me about business advice, and one of the things I said to him was, ‘Think about getting into music publishing,'” he recalled on The Howard Stern Show in 2001, as reported by ABC News and American Songwriter. Jackson took the advice a little too well. He outbid McCartney in 1985, and the friendship never recovered. “He won’t even answer my letters, so we haven’t talked and we don’t have that great a relationship,” McCartney said that same year.
Jackson later folded the songs into Sony/ATV, a joint venture with Sony. But McCartney had already learned a lesson that would turn out to be worth far more, and it came from his father-in-law.
What Did Buddy Holly Have To Do With Paul McCartney’s Fortune?
Linda McCartney’s father, the New York lawyer Lee Eastman, steered his son-in-law toward buying songs rather than just writing them. “If you are going to invest, do it in something you know,” Eastman said in 1973, according to Billboard. McCartney knew Buddy Holly better than almost anything. The Beatles’ very name was a nod to Holly’s Crickets, and McCartney’s company, MPL Communications, which he founded in 1969, went on to buy most of Holly’s song catalogue in the 1970s.
He did more than collect the royalties. On September 7, 1976, which would have been Holly’s 40th birthday, McCartney launched the first Buddy Holly Week in London, and he kept celebrating Holly for years afterward.
MPL kept shopping. Over the decades it picked up Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes,” the holiday favorite “Blue Christmas” and the score to Grease, as Billboard noted. Forbes, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle and Variety, values those purchases of other people’s songs at roughly $250 million on their own. The rest of the fortune took longer to build, and it was built on the road.
How Much Did Wings And All Those Tours Add Up To?
McCartney formed Wings in 1971, not long after the breakup he once said felt like being “sacked,” a story we told here last month. The touring habit he picked up with Wings never left him. By 2022 his career concert grosses had passed $1 billion, according to Billboard Boxscore figures, which put him among just 11 artists to reach that mark at the time.
This is not even the first time McCartney has been called a billionaire. In May 2024 the Sunday Times Rich List named him Britain’s first billionaire musician, valuing him at about £1 billion, though that figure counted him together with his wife, Nancy Shevell, as ITV News and the Associated Press reported. Forbes’ count is about McCartney’s own fortune, and it gets there partly by doing something the 1985 headlines never imagined.
Did Paul McCartney Ever Get The Beatles Songs Back?
In January 2017, McCartney sued Sony/ATV in New York to reclaim his share of the Beatles songs under a U.S. copyright law that lets songwriters take back their work after 56 years, starting with “Love Me Do” in 2018. By June 2017 the two sides had settled, and the terms were kept confidential. Forbes now values McCartney’s share of the Beatles songwriting copyrights at no less than $200 million, earning him at least $10 million a year, according to Variety and the San Francisco Chronicle.
On top of that, Apple Corps, the Beatles’ own company, brings in more than $50 million a year from streaming, records and merchandise, and McCartney, Ringo Starr and the estates of John Lennon and George Harrison each take a quarter of it. The songs he watched slip away in 1969 and again in 1985 are paying him once more, more than half a century after he wrote them.
The other half of that Apple Corps split is about to share a stage with him again. On January 29, 2027, McCartney and Starr, now 86, will play Joe Walsh’s VetsAid benefit at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Consequence and the San Francisco Chronicle reported. It will be the first time they have performed together since Starr surprised the crowd at McCartney’s O2 Arena show in London in December 2024. Starr has already said what it would take for the Beatles to truly reunite, as we reported in September, and this spring the two old friends finally cut their first duet, “Home to Us,” for McCartney’s album The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Walsh called them “my musical heroes” when he announced the show. Forty-one years after losing a bidding war, the boy from Liverpool can buy just about anything he likes, and the thing he seems to want most is another night onstage with his drummer.
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