14 Financial Quotes From Celebrities Who Amassed or Squandered a Fortune
Imagine trying to lowball Hugo Weaving by saying “It’s just a voice job.”
Willie Nelson
He owed the government $16 million in back-taxes, leading to his album The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories? He said the IRS was a surprisingly chill collaborator: “They didn’t bother me, they didn’t come out and confiscate anything other than that first day, and they didn’t show up at every gig and demand money. I appreciated that. And we teamed up and put out a record.”
Hugo Weaving
After Marvel tried to downplay his potential contribution to some garbage movie or other, he learned that you have to know when to walk away: “They said, ‘It’s just a voice job, it’s not a big deal.’ I actually found negotiating with them through my agent impossible. And I didn’t really wanna do it that much.”
Christy Carlson Romano
The Disney star said she lost a huge chunk of her money (much of it to a predatory psychic) because she was shielded from her own bank account: “I was never told how much money I was making. Money didn’t have a purpose for me; I didn’t really know what it was. I just knew that I had it and didn’t care about it.”
Michelle Williams
She found out that Mark Wahlberg was getting paid 1,500 times more than her on All the Money in the World, and later spoke on Capitol Hill about pay disparity: “I’d been paid less than $1,000 compared to the $1.5 million that my male counterpart had received for the exact same amount of work. And guess what? No one cared. This came as no surprise to me, it simply reinforced my life-learned belief that equality is not an inalienable right and that women would always be working just as hard for less money while shouldering more responsibility at home.”
Alicia Silverstone
She wrote — in a book — that was presumably read by at least one human being prior to publishing — that all new mothers have the means to take time off of work to hang around with their newborns: “I assure you that it’s not something that only the super-privileged and trust-fund endowed can afford.”
Ellen Pompeo
The Grey’s Anatomy star says you need to know your worth, and don’t be afraid to ask for a raise: “When your face and your voice have been part of something that's generated $3 billion for one of the biggest corporations in the world, you start to feel like, ‘Okay, maybe I do deserve a piece of this.’”
Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt
They were making about $2 million per year at their peak, but vastly overestimated their cultural cache: “We were keeping up with the Joneses, but we were going against Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. We should have stayed in our reality TV lane.”
Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt (Again)
What inspired them to spend all that cash? The impending end of the world: “The thing is, we heard that the planet was going to end in 2012. We thought, ‘We have got to spend this money before the asteroid hits.’”
Toni Braxton
She’s filed for bankruptcy twice, blaming it partly on a predatory music industry (she made just over $1,000 for her first album) and on indulging in “girly things”: “I love dishes and house things, so I kind of lost it a little bit on the houseware.”
T-Pain
The rapper made, then burned, then re-made a fortune. He’d piled up $40 million, but lost it on bad real estate investments, and had to claw his way back to fame and fortune. But he regrets the way he lived when he was making bank the first time: “I was hustling, I needed to be on everybody’s record and every record gotta go number one, I gotta do this work. And at that time, I didn’t know my family at all.”
Larry King
He grilled Danny Pudi on what “luxuries” he buys now that he’s a celebrity, and didn’t like his answer: “Coffee and socks are not a luxury.” He suggested Pudi should be indulging in private planes, which elicited this all-timer: “Larry, I’m on DuckTales. There’s no private planes for me.”
50 Cent
After wriggling out of a $36 million debt, he said bankruptcy can sometimes be your best investment: “Businesspeople will do (bankruptcy) in a heartbeat before losing money. Because it means they have the ability to be secure and invest again.”
Mariah Carey
When an interviewer mentioned he needed to pay a bill, she said, “Pay Bill? Bill who?” When he explained he was referring to an electricity bill, she said, “Oh, you have to pay for that? In America, we get it free.”
Lindsay Lohan’s Mom
Dina Lohan said it’s the Lohans against the world: “It just shows how we get treated so much worse than regular people.” How were her people tread upon? Carvel wouldn’t let her use her daughter’s Carvel Black Card, so she called the cops.
