How we estimate

Every figure on this site is an estimate. Nobody publishes their balance sheet, and no filing requires them to, so the honest thing is to show our working rather than assert a number.

What we do

We add up the components that are actually observable — reported salaries, disclosed property transactions, company valuations from comparable deals, published royalty and endorsement arrangements — and publish the result as a range rather than a single figure.

Confidence

Each profile carries a confidence tier. It is calculated, not assigned by hand: we count how many of the nine core biographical fields are known rather than blank or “unknown”. Eight or nine is High, five to seven is Medium, fewer is Low. The count is shown on every page next to the tier, so you can see the basis for it.

The band around each figure

Almost none of our sources give a range — they give a single round number, and nine figures in ten end in five or more zeros. A number like that is an estimate wearing the clothes of a measurement, and printing it alone would borrow a precision nobody has.

So every figure is published inside a band: ±10% at High confidence, ±20% at Medium, ±35% at Low. Where a source did give a real range we use that instead and label it reported.

Be clear about what the band is. It is not a claim about the person’s finances — it adds no new fact to the one we are already asserting. It is a statement about us: how much we know, and therefore how much room the figure needs. The widths are deliberately coarse, because a band calculated to the nearest million would be its own kind of false precision.

What we will not do

We do not publish a percentage breakdown of anyone’s income. No public breakdown exists, and a pie chart saying “46% film, 28% endorsements” would be an invented claim about a real person’s finances — the kind of thing that gets screenshotted and repeated as fact long after any disclaimer falls off it. We list sources of wealth in the order our references give them and mark the first as primary.

We do not show movement we have not measured. The ticker on the homepage reports a change only where our own published estimate actually changed since the previous review; if nothing moved, it shows figures alone rather than decorative arrows.

Where two people’s bands overlap, our comparison pages refuse to name a richer one. Given how wide the bands are, that happens often — which is the honest outcome, because most of these figures genuinely cannot be told apart.

Corrections

If you are the subject of a profile, or you have a source we have missed, tell us. We would rather be corrected than confident.