In 2016 pop diva Taylor Swift sung her way to $170 million in earnings to take the top spot on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list. The year before that, Uber UBER, +1.44% boss Dara Khosrowshahi took home $94.6 million when he was serving as the chief executive at Expedia EXPE, +0.88% .
As you can see from this chart — and as you already knew — there are plenty of people making plenty of money in show business and Corporate America.
Disney’s DIS, +1.30% Bob Iger made $44.9 million, Oracle’s ORCL, -0.09% Mark Hurd pocketed $53 million... Howard Stern, Kevin Hart, Lionel Messi, Adele, Rush Limbaugh, etc. Lots and lots of money. All of them.
So what do hedge-fund managers have to say about it?
“Hold my beer,” according to a tweet from Cambria Investment Management’s Meb Faber, who highlighted the two charts, including the one below, for perspective on how much the powerbrokers of Wall Street actually make.
Citadel’s Ken Griffin and Renaissance Technologies’s James Simons brought in $1.7 billion each in 2016, combining with the rest of the top 25 earners across the hedge-fund industry to make about $13 billion that year. In the latest roundup, Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio took first place with $2 billion, leaving Simons in second.
How do these guys make so much cash? Well, they typically earn 2% off assets under management and 20% off performance fees — or in Simons’s case, a whopping 5% and 44%. Nice work, if you can get it.