The highest earning what now?

Rich Lists are awful, but I have a soft spot for this one.

Every year, for the last 25 years, Forbes has published its Dead Celebrities Rich List. You find your way onto it by 1. dying and 2. earning well over the last 12 months.

Yes, it puts a monetary value on a creative life—celebrity, at least here, is earned by creating—yes, it elevates estates that strike big posthumous licensing deals and wring a name or catalog dry, and, yes, Jimmy Buffet wouldn’t be there without restaurants, retirement villages, and parrot hats, and Arnold Palmer without lemonade and iced tea, but I can get past all that. I can't, though, get past what a stack rank of the living means and makes people do.

I can imagine a world in which the Forbes Rich List proper—the living list—should bear some responsibility for the state of a nation. OK, this one, I'm talking about this world and this nation. A narcissist, say, might look at a list like that and see a zero-sum, I-win-you-lose, do-whatever-it-takes, cook-the-books chance to look down on all the rest of you bozos. So motivated, such an individual, given a top job that packs a punch, would punch hard and down, grift higher up the list, and to hell with fair. Just a theory.

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The late writer Kurt Vonnegut, at a billionaire's party on Shelter Island, confided in his friend, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, made more money in a day than Heller would ever earn from Catch 22.

“Yes, but I have something he will never have," Heller replied. "Enough.”

The rich list is a long list so it's unfair to generalize, but there will be some on there that haven't learned the Heller lesson. The list implies that having enough is falling short.

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But still I look forward to the Dead Celebrities Rich List. It puts a value, crudely, on the ongoing relationship we can have with someone who meant something. There's nothing anyone on it can do rise higher, so it sits more comfortably. And it's fun to guess who's on it.

It’s based on earnings not assets, so if someone left a whopping stock portfolio or property empire behind, that doesn't count. And we’re not talking billions here; none of these would make the list proper, where creators don't cut it, where there are music moguls but no musicians, sports team owners but no athletes, and only lonely George Lucas.

I like to believe that none of the rich dead folks were in it for the money. Wealth was an outcome (and it may have become a goal in short order), but all were driven first to create. Their ‘why’ was to express themselves, and that’s what made them immortal. Some are imperfect characters (see #1), but this is an imagined world in which creators rank higher than hedge funders, asset strippers, and crypto fluffers.

Of the five biggest earners all-told over 25 years, three are writers (though not Vonnegut and Heller, fortunately, otherwise the case for "enough" might have collapsed). Some dropped out in 2025—Matthew Perry of Friends and Ric Ocasek of The Cars—making space for newcomers.

For the first time in a while, nine of the top ten are musicians and all are stylistically different. A writer born 121 years ago completes the ten, and he is best read aloud. I like that we can hear them all and that's where their worth sits. Their echoes take us back, bring us joy, and bring us together. That feels like a pure connection for an otherwise quite shabby concept.

No more spoilers. Have a guess who’s still ringing the registers.

Here’s the link.