With an estimated net worth of $5.5 billion, Star Wars creator and Lucasfilm founder George Lucas is reportedly the richest celebrity in 2024, according to a new list from Forbes.
Disney acquired Lucasfilm and the rights to Star Wars back on October 30, 2012, for the tidy sum of $4.05 billion in the form of cash and stock. And it seems those stock options are what's leading to Lucas' position atop the list.
With the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, George Lucas has mainly retired from the film industry, apart from a small indie film project, here and there.
Lucas also continues to get union-regulated residuals from every film and television series that came out before Disney's acquisition of the Star Wars saga.
On the decision to sell his company and partially retire, Lucas previously stated, "In 2012 I was 69. So the question was am I going to keep doing this for the rest of my life? Do I want to go through this again? Finally, I decided I’d rather raise my daughter and enjoy life for a while… I’m one of those micromanager guys, and I can’t help it. So I figured I would forgo that, enjoy what I had, and I was looking forward to raising my daughter."
While Lucas is certainly obscenely wealthy, given all the billion-dollar box office films, television shows, toys, and theme park expansions Disney has made with the IP since 2012, do you think the $4 billion purchase price was a steal?
However, to put Forbes' list in further context, he only ranks #309 on Bloomberg's billionaire index (where Forbes' rival estimates that Lucas' net worth is actually just a little north of $8 billion).
LVMH founder and CEO Bernard Arnault tops that list at $228 billion, followed by Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg.
1. George Lucas ($5.5B)
2. Steven Spielberg ($4.8B)
3. Michael Jordan ($3.2B)
4. Oprah Winfrey ($2.8B)
5. Jay-Z ($2.5B)
6. Kim Kardashian ($1.7B)
7. Peter Jackson ($1.5B)
8. Rihanna and Tyler Perry ($1.4B)
9. Tiger Woods ($1.3B)
10. LeBron James, Magic Johnson and Dick Wolf ($1.2B)
11. Taylor Swift ($1.1B)