Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. I was rewatching like
Speaker 1: the one where Elaine goes to this party and is
Speaker 1: dancing and then everyone who is at the party loses
Speaker 1: respect for her because she like dances. She has no rhythm.
Speaker 1: It's like completely just abject horrible dancing.
Speaker 2: No, that ain't dancing, Sally, I dance fine, you sneak.
Speaker 2: My colleague Annie Massa has always had a soft spot
Speaker 2: for Seinfeld. I had to tell her my favorite George moment.
Speaker 2: I love when he works for the Yankees and he
Speaker 2: just doesn't know what he's supposed to do. His boss
Speaker 2: like tells him like, there's only one thing you.
Speaker 1: Have to do. Well, I was wondering, I mean, you
Speaker 1: happen been to payroll and he like, botcha that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah payroll.
Speaker 1: No, No, I haven't done that. What's the problem? Now,
Speaker 1: come on, George.
Speaker 2: Annie has been catching up on old Seinfeld clips recently
Speaker 2: for work. Because the show isn't just iconic TV, it's
Speaker 2: also been extremely lucrative for its co creator and namesake,
Speaker 2: Jerry Seinfeld. Today on the show how a Show About
Speaker 2: Nothing made Seinfeld a billionaire and why Seinfeld's success with
Speaker 2: syndication and streaming could be so hard to replicate. This
Speaker 2: is the big take from Bloomberg News.
Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Holder, I'm Annie Massa, and I'm a reporter
Speaker 1: on the Wealth team at Bloomberg News.
Speaker 2: So you cover wealth and wealthy people for Bloomberg. Today,
Speaker 2: we're here to talk about a new addition to Bloomberg's
Speaker 2: list of billionaires who made his money not from finance
Speaker 2: or from tech, but from comedy, Jerry Seinfeld. Why did
Speaker 2: you start looking into Seinfeld's net worth?
Speaker 1: So it's been known for a while that he's very,
Speaker 1: very wealthy. Of course, Seinfeld was a huge hit all
Speaker 1: through the nineties, and it's no own that Seinfeld has
Speaker 1: some pretty expensive real estate, this huge collection of vintage cars,
Speaker 1: and he is just such a well known figure that
Speaker 1: we figured it might be time to take a look
Speaker 1: at how much wealth he's accumulated over these years of
Speaker 1: megasyndication deals and streaming deals and touring and just tally
Speaker 1: up his wealth and his net worth. And as we
Speaker 1: did that, the calculation that we did proved he was
Speaker 1: a billionaire.
Speaker 2: And how much of a billionaire is he? How much
Speaker 2: money does he have?
Speaker 1: We're comfortable saying that he's above the one billion dollar threshold.
Speaker 1: There are pieces of his net worth that we weren't
Speaker 1: able to value, like those vintage cars. But because the
Speaker 1: bulk of it is coming from syndication, from streaming deals,
Speaker 1: touring revenue, he's cleared the billion dollar threshold.
Speaker 2: So you talked about that Tally, Can you say more
Speaker 2: about how you came to the figure.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, so, as we looked at the different pieces of
Speaker 1: Signinfeld's net worth, there were a few discrete chunks that
Speaker 1: were the most important. Syndication deals for Seinfeld are a
Speaker 1: huge piece of his net worth, and those deals played
Speaker 1: a significant role in his net worth. By our account,
Speaker 1: he'd earned more than four hundred million dollars from syndication
Speaker 1: deals alone. Then there are other streaming deals. So something
Speaker 1: that's interesting about Seinfeld is that he was really able
Speaker 1: to navigate from this huge hip show and a really
Speaker 1: different era of American TV into a completely different model,
Speaker 1: which is a streaming model. But he has the fortune
Speaker 1: that Seinfeld is such an enduring hit. Really that all
Speaker 1: the mega streaming companies like Netflix really were in a
Speaker 1: race to get the global streaming rights. So Netflix paid
Speaker 1: more than five hundred million dollars for the global streaming
Speaker 1: rights to Seinfeld several years ago, and Seinfeld was able
Speaker 1: to get around one hundred million dollars just from streaming,
Speaker 1: and then on top of that, he also does live
Speaker 1: to So we went into some data that tracks touring
Speaker 1: revenue for all kinds of different entertainers, and we found
Speaker 1: that he had in the realm of about one hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars of touring revenue, and we used an index
Speaker 1: to track returns as though he'd invested in a somewhat
Speaker 1: conservative way over that span of time since around nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety and that gets you to the threshold of over
Speaker 1: a billion dollars, even setting aside the vintage cars.
Speaker 2: And what iss Seinfeld's team said about your reporting.
Speaker 1: The Seinfeld team, we reached out to give them an
Speaker 1: overview of our analysis, what went into it, what we
Speaker 1: had calculated. They said that it was inaccurate, but they
Speaker 1: didn't comment any further, and we completely acknowledged that when
Speaker 1: you're doing these valuations, of course, you know, surprise like
Speaker 1: this doesn't come from Jerry Seinfeld showing me his bank statements.
Speaker 1: So that's what you're working with, and that's what they
Speaker 1: had to say.
Speaker 2: So let's get into the history of Seinfeld. Was Seinfeld
Speaker 2: an immediate success.
Speaker 1: No, it took a while for it to heat up.
Speaker 1: There's this classic line about it, how it's a show
Speaker 1: about nothing. I think that in subsequent interviews, Seinfeld has said, Okay,
Speaker 1: that might have run away a little bit. It wasn't
Speaker 1: supposed to be entirely about nothing, but it's kind of
Speaker 1: based on this brand of observational comedy that he honed
Speaker 1: and just the idea that you can find a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of humor in very everyday things. As it built
Speaker 1: over the years, it just completely topped the Nielsen ratings.
Speaker 1: It became one of the most famous, most beloved sitcoms ever,
Speaker 1: and he famously kind of walked away while it was
Speaker 1: at the top as well, instead of letting it overstay.
Speaker 1: Its welcome on TV, even though the finale is very polarizing.
Speaker 1: But it went out definitely when it was still on top.
Speaker 1: But now it's in this zone I would say, where
Speaker 1: you know, Netflix paid top dollar for these streaming rights
Speaker 1: because it's almost the comfort of television where if you're
Speaker 1: a Seinfeld fan and your homesick eating soup on your
Speaker 1: couch or something, it might feel really good to just
Speaker 1: throw on an old Seinfeld episode that you already know,
Speaker 1: go back to something that you already know you're gonna
Speaker 1: find hilarious. And there are a couple of shows like this,
Speaker 1: I think Friends follows in that category. More recent shows
Speaker 1: like The Office can fall into that category for people,
Speaker 1: but there's just a handful of them. So Seinfeld occupies
Speaker 1: that place for people now.
Speaker 2: So you seem like the perfect person to tell us
Speaker 2: about what made Seinfeld so popular in its heyday, and
Speaker 2: you spoke to a lot of people who tried to
Speaker 2: understand how the show about nothing was so resonant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as I was working on this story, I wanted
Speaker 1: to get at that question because it's such a given
Speaker 1: now that Seinfeld is so well known, and so I
Speaker 1: was trying to answer the question of how and why
Speaker 1: did it get so popular to begin with. So one
Speaker 1: person I asked about that was Jennifer Kishen Armstrong, who
Speaker 1: wrote a whole book on Seinfeld and the fan and
Speaker 1: that it inspired, called Seinfeldia, And something that she said
Speaker 1: that really resonated with me that Seinfeld's breakthrough was to
Speaker 1: come up with this kind of comedy that was so sticky,
Speaker 1: Because you often even today, even in a very different
Speaker 1: era can feel like you're in a Seinfeld episode. The
Speaker 1: meat of the jokes is just so every day, so
Speaker 1: incredibly banal. So this idea that you feel like you're
Speaker 1: in a Seinfeld episode, she said, has really made it stick.
Speaker 2: Cultural influence doesn't always translate into billionaire level wealth. How
Speaker 2: Seinfeld parleyed his comedy into big money, and whether anyone
Speaker 2: else could follow that path. After the break, we're back.
Speaker 2: I've been speaking with my colleague Annie Massa about the
Speaker 2: enduring appeal of Seinfeld and how it helped its creator
Speaker 2: get on the Bloomberg billionaire's index. What made the series
Speaker 2: so financially lucrative was Jerry actually making a lot of
Speaker 2: money during the show as it was coming out every week.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not before it was such a hit, but as
Speaker 1: it was gaining momentum throughout the nineties, he was able
Speaker 1: to negotiate better and better pay packages for himself, and
Speaker 1: even at the time, actually studio executives sort of were
Speaker 1: starting to realize this could be the last of an era.
Speaker 1: But the syndication is really where the much more extreme
Speaker 1: wealth comes in, right.
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit more about that syndication.
Speaker 1: Sure, I mean, the idea behind syndication is the whole
Speaker 1: idea of reruns, right, It's what underpins when you're watching
Speaker 1: something that's already aired on another channel for the first time.
Speaker 1: Syndication rights are all about, Okay, who can air this
Speaker 1: show and what these episodes of this show and when
Speaker 1: and who's it going to reach? And Seinfeld reaches a
Speaker 1: maximum audience and therefore the syndication was very lucrative for
Speaker 1: everyone who worked on Seinfeld.
Speaker 2: How has streaming changed that profit model for sitcoms?
Speaker 1: Streaming has changed a lot. This is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons that in the writer's strike last year there was
Speaker 1: a lot of backlash against the new model of streaming because,
Speaker 1: for example, global rights are usually negotiated. You know what
Speaker 1: the writers and actors were arguing is they get kind
Speaker 1: of a raw deal that way. The Seinfeld or Friends model,
Speaker 1: where you used to be able to create a huge
Speaker 1: hit and then have the syndication around that kind of
Speaker 1: rewarding you is harder and harder. It's not even really
Speaker 1: possible anymore when you're dealing with streaming platforms that have
Speaker 1: so much control over the terms, that already have the
Speaker 1: global rights negotiated, that have mini writers' rooms instead of
Speaker 1: a full team that's fully compensated working for them.
Speaker 2: Does this mean that Jerry seinfeldt is sort of the
Speaker 2: last in a dying breed of TV billionaires.
Speaker 1: I would say he's the last and a dying breed.
Speaker 1: I mean, just because of the way that streaming has
Speaker 1: also fragmented what people watch. A phenomenon like Seinfeld is
Speaker 1: harder to come by these days. Even when you have
Speaker 1: something that's wildly popular, certainly the economic model around it
Speaker 1: on the back end is completely changed.
Speaker 2: And I mean Seinfeld co created the show, he starred
Speaker 2: in the.
Speaker 1: Show's got his last name on It, got his last.
Speaker 2: Name on It. I mean, how did he fare compared
Speaker 2: to some of his other co stars or co creators.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he and Larry David, who co created it, certainly
Speaker 1: made out the best of the group. But I'm sure
Speaker 1: that Jason Alexander and Julia Louis Dreyfuss are doing just
Speaker 1: fine as well.
Speaker 2: That's true, they have there's some other stuff going on
Speaker 2: as well. What else was Jerry Seinfeld doing that was
Speaker 2: building his wealth?
Speaker 1: I mean he's been able to tour quite successfully. So
Speaker 1: with the popularity of Seinfeld, whenever he's gone on tour.
Speaker 1: You know, he's been able to get fans out in
Speaker 1: person and drive those ticket sales. So he's stayed in
Speaker 1: the stand up game big time. And the success of
Speaker 1: Seinfeld has almost certainly helped him become one of the
Speaker 1: most well known stand up comedy acts. So there's that,
Speaker 1: and then he's gone other routes as well. So I
Speaker 1: mentioned that he loves cars. He had this whole series,
Speaker 1: Comedians and Cars getting Coffee, so he created a whole
Speaker 1: new kind of talk show around that. He has a
Speaker 1: feature length film he directed called Unfrosted, and it's all
Speaker 1: about the invention of pop tarts, and that's coming out
Speaker 1: pretty soon this year. So he keeps the new projects rolling.
Speaker 2: What else did you find in your reporting that speaks
Speaker 2: to seinfeld enduring cultural relevance.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the more interesting people I came across
Speaker 1: in reporting this story was a psychiatry professor at Rutgers
Speaker 1: University who uses Seinfeld to teach medical students about personality disorders.
Speaker 1: And so they will take Jerry, Elaine Kramer, and George
Speaker 1: their behaviors and almost kind of diagnose the signs of
Speaker 1: personality disorders that they see in their behavior in the episodes.
Speaker 1: There's so much to talk about, with George in particular.
Speaker 1: I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate. I got it all
Speaker 1: so complex that he created an offshoot class or like
Speaker 1: an offshoot just about George. Wow.
Speaker 2: Wow, that says a lot. This is The Big Take
Speaker 2: from Bloomberg News. This episode was produced by Jessica Beck.
Speaker 2: It was edited by Naomi Shaven. It was mixed by
Speaker 2: Alex Ugia. It was fact checked by Naomi and Nicole
Speaker 2: Beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head
Speaker 2: of podcasts. Thanks for tuning in. Please follow and review
Speaker 2: The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps
Speaker 2: new listeners find the show. We'll be back next week.