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Forbes is a magazine whose sole purpose (at least as I can tell) is putting together lists to make you feel even worse than you already do about how much money you have. Each year, they treat us to rankings of the world’s richest people, from the billionaires pulling the strings behind the curtain of capitalism to the people who bought Bitcoin at $5 to the rappers who can actually back up all of the boasts they make in their songs.
In their most recent attempt to bruise egos around the world, Forbes just released their annual list of the highest-paid celebrities over the course of the past year. They used a variety of factors to come up with the totals and explained their methodology, saying:
The Celebrity 100 list ranks front-of-camera stars around the globe using their pretax earnings from June 1, 2017 through June 1, 2018, before deducting fees for managers, lawyers and agents. Estimates are based on numbers from Nielsen, Pollstar, IMDB, SoundScan, NPD BookScan and ComScore, as well as interviews with industry experts and many of the stars themselves.
You can head over to their website to take a look at the Top 100 but if that’s too much work, here are the Top 10, which features a bunch of names that shouldn’t surprise you— with one notable exception.
- Floyd Mayweather
- George Clooney
- Kylie Jenner
- Judge Judy
- Dwayne Johnson
- U2
- Coldplay
- Lionel Messi
- Ed Sheeran
- Cristiano Ronaldo
While I have no idea how many harvested organs Coldplay must have sold on the black market to get into the Top 10, their ranking is nowhere near as absurd as that of Judge Judy, who somehow managed to rake in $400 million over the past 365 days. I’m sure that Dwayne Johnson is glad to know all of his hard work still can’t match sitting on the bench in a fake courtroom.