Author: Megan Burrows

The way the Murdoch marriage ended has an almost cinematic quality. The years preceding it were more important than the attorneys or the courtroom, which were surprisingly short. A handwritten note that was never used as evidence in court. The story quietly came to light on a cattle ranch in Carmel. And a woman who, in Rupert Murdoch’s own words, had spent fourteen years changing from “a nice Chinese lady” to one of the most influential people in the world of media. When the Wendi Deng divorce settlement was reached in November 2013, it was almost clinically efficient. When the…

There is a certain kind of celebrity that results from coming close to victory. Leah Totton took the briefcase on The Apprentice in 2013, but Luisa Zissman left the boardroom with something perhaps more valuable: a public persona that would cut through television schedules for the ensuing ten years. It’s more difficult to determine whether that profile translated into significant personal wealth than her Instagram feed may indicate. It has always been necessary to examine the figures surrounding Luisa Zissman’s net worth. She stated that the combined value of her three businesses—a cupcake shop, a baking website, and an eBay…

Raynor Winn’s financial tale has an almost cinematic quality—not the sanitized Hollywood version, but the kind with sharp edges. A fifty-year-old woman, who is said to have been sleeping in a tent on the South West Coast Path with £115 in her pocket while her husband was given a terminal diagnosis, goes on to sell over two million books, see herself portrayed on screen by Gillian Anderson, and amass a net worth estimated by several sources to be between one and five million dollars. It’s a powerful arc. Since the middle of 2025, people have been wondering how much of…

There is a version of Maya Rudolph’s story that follows a straight career path, starting with SNL, moving on to movies and prestige television before amassing a net worth that is currently estimated to be $20 million. That’s the correct version. The majority of what makes her financial trajectory noteworthy is also absent. In 2000, Rudolph made his debut on Saturday Night Live as a featured player for the last three episodes of the season, which is about as low-key an entrance as the program permits. She spent seven years there. She wasn’t the cast member with the loudest cultural…

A certain type of wealth does not come from starting a business or experiencing a single breakthrough. It builds up more subtly through knowledge, being in a position to take advantage of changes in the industry, and patient institutional climbing that doesn’t make headlines until it does. That type of executive is Giordano Albertazzi, referred to by coworkers as Gio. The $56 million to $107 million fortune of the Italian engineer from Milan, who currently leads one of America’s most significant infrastructure companies, was built almost entirely on Vertiv stock and a compensation structure that rewards performance in a business…

Holger Friedrich’s statement that anyone with public responsibility should stay away from journalists in an interview with the Financial Times seems almost contradictory. Sitting in the old Alexanderplatz offices of the Berliner Zeitung, the newspaper he owns, he stated it clearly. It was either a genuine conviction, a provocation, or a combination of the two. It’s often hard to tell with Friedrich. The way he earned his money is a little more obvious. Born in September 1966 in East Berlin, Friedrich co-founded SPM Technologies GmbH, an IT architecture company that SAP-SI, SAP’s Dresden subsidiary, purchased in 2004. The sale set…

Ironically, one of the most popular videos from Chris Kempczinski’s time as CEO of McDonald’s featured a thirteen-second clip and a cautious bite that went viral. Kempczinski uploaded a video advertising the new Big Arch burger in March 2026. The small, cautious, almost clinical bite caught audiences’ attention right away, and within hours, they started making fun of it. The president of Burger King picked up a Whopper and chomped on some sauce. The president of Wendy came next. Three executives in the fast-food industry, each with a very distinct relationship to their own product. Nevertheless, Kempczinski prevailed in some…

Chamath Palihapitiya has an almost perverse fitting quality. Growing up in an Ottawa home where his mother worked as a housekeeper and his father battled alcoholism, the man is now at the center of some of Silicon Valley’s most important discussions. He co-hosts a podcast that frequently influences how the tech industry views money, power, and the future. His estimated net worth, which has changed over time and is still up for debate, is about $1.2 billion, but it seems almost insignificant in comparison to the enormous cultural impact he has left behind. Palihapitiya was raised in Canada after being…

The fact that one of the most searched-for names on the internet created her true wealth after the event that made her famous seems almost ironic. According to reports, Mia Khalifa only made $12,000 while working in adult films. She has reiterated this amount in interview after interview, not so much as a grievance but rather as a way to dispel preconceived notions about her. Depending on your point of view, the discrepancy between what the internet thought she earned and what she actually took home could be interpreted as either a warning about exploitation or the prelude to one…

The fact that Bernie Sanders, a senator who has spent forty years arguing that billionaires shouldn’t exist, became a millionaire through book royalties is subtly revealing. Although it doesn’t completely undermine his message, it does add a layer of irony that he has addressed with his usual candor and that his detractors have never allowed him to forget. He said, “I wrote a best-selling book,” to The New York Times in 2019. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” By Senate standards, Sanders’s estimated net worth is between $2.5 million and $3 million, which is…