Steven Spielberg Didn’t Want to Know What His Net Worth Was
Steven Spielberg has managed to make a fortune off of his contributions to cinema. But the acclaimed director felt he was better off not knowing how much money he accumulated over the years.
What Steven Spielberg wants to do with his money
Spielberg has become one of the richest figures in the entertainment industry, constantly topping lists like Forbes. According to Celebrity Net Worth, the director has a net worth of $8 billion and earns $150 million annually. Spielberg has spent his earnings on a few extravagant purchases. He’s owned expensive homes, including his massive Los Angeles compound equipped with its own vineyard.
Still, the filmmaker has always dedicated himself to investing his money in more altruistic endeavors. This included forming the Shoah Foundation, which aimed to further educate on the Holocaust through video footage from survivors, documents, and photographs. He’s also tried to help the world on a broader scale by addressing issues like famine and poverty among less fortunate communities.
“I see all that stuff, and it’s frustrating because I want to help everybody,” Spielberg once said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “To watch the African famine, to watch the apartheid in South Africa, to watch Lebanon reduced to rubble as thousands of innocent people lose their lives, or even something technical like all these planes falling out of the sky — a malfunction here or there — and there’s almost nothing that can be done. Yes, you try to raise money to help the starving. But what about the people starving in the hinterlands, the people that the press does not cover. I do my share. I cannot tell you who I make contributions to. But that’s all I essentially do: fight it with money. I have tremendous admiration for a guy like Bob Geldof, who stepped back from his career to do something for strangers.”
Because of this, Spielberg typically doesn’t want to know how much money he’s actually made over the years.
“I only look at what I have,” he once told Economic Times. “That always scares and intimidates me. I tell my business people, don’t tell me what I got. I don’t want to know. It doesn’t have any effect on my life. We are not in want of anything, but the thing I find most rewarding about having money is that I can give it away. So, in mine and my wife’s life, philanthropy plays a huge role.”
Steven Spielberg knows what it’s like to be a ‘dollar-chaser’
Spielberg knew what it was like to live very modestly. Before making it big, Spielberg reflected on the days he used to do film work for little play. He saw directing television shows like Night Gallery as a springboard to doing feature films in the future. Still, the financial challenges were hard to deal with.
“When I was doing television, I was living in a $130-a-month apartment, and I was looking to eat dinner at night, looking to go to restaurants,” he said. “It was hard dating because I did not have enough money to date. Even under contract as a director to Universal, my take-home pay was just a little over $100 a week. Not quite enough to live on. I did have a lot of close calls with shooting schlock to make a living. I had many chances to make sleazo, exploitation movies. That was all I was being offered then.”
Spielberg confided that what eventually helped him succeed was a lot of networking, which a lot of his contemporaries were doing.
“You know, you meet the producer, and you wind up buying him lunch,” he said. “I played that game for a long time. And at other tables there were other producers with other young neophyte directors buying those producers lunches. And we knew each other pretty well. We knew the game we were playing. Lucas got his break from Coppola first; Scorsese got his break from Roger Corman. We all knew we were gonna make it in Hollywood. We just didn’t know when. It was like waiting to get your pilot’s license. Marty [Scorsese] got his first with Mean Streeets, Lucas got his second with THX, I got mine third. De Palma got his before all of us ’cause he was making movies in New York City by raising money from doctors and lawyers.”
