How much is Larry David worth?
| Net Worth: | $400 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional Comedian |
| Date of Birth: | July 2, 1947 (age 75) |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | 5 ft 10 in (1.8 m) |
About Larry David
Starting out as a writer on Saturday Night Live and going on to create two hugely popular and award winning TV shows for himself, Larry David is a writer, comedian, and actor who has been praised by many of his peers as a genius. The writer is best known for co-creating Seinfeld with Jerry Seinfeld, which has been branded “a show about nothing”, and then going on to create the equally successful Curb Your Enthusiasm for HBO. Outside of TV, David has scored the leading role in a Woody Allen movie and is a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.
Larry David first got started in the business as a sketch writer on Saturday Night Live, though he didn’t enjoy it and has referred to the process of pitching a sketch against co-workers as a ruthless sales job. However, it didn’t take him long to get his own sitcom in which he had the final say, along with Jerry Seinfeld.
Creating a semi-fictionalized version of the stand-up comedian, the show was not only a hit, but still twenty years after it ended it is making billions of dollars in syndication sales and on streaming services. David even cameo’d in a few episodes, usually as strange characters with no lines of dialogue, such as a man wearing a cape in “The Chinese Woman”, and as characters who can only be heard and not seen, such as George’s boss, George Steinbrenner.
Seinfeld became so overwhelmingly successful that it was the first show to ever demand more than one million dollars per minute of advertising time. But a few seasons in to the show, though he remained an executive producer, David took a break from writing. However, when it came around to producing the very final episode, as the cash cow came to an end with season nine, David returned to helm the plot once more.
The final episode, simply called “The Finale”, broke records as an insane 75 million households tuned in to see how the show would end, and that was 58% of all viewers that night. It is the fourth most watched finale of all time, behind M*A*S*H, Cheers, and The Fugitive.
Just two years after the end of Seinfeld, David signed a deal to develop a show with HBO, a network that gave creators much more freedom and aren’t restrained when it comes to nudity, violence, and vulgarity, which is what Curb Your Enthusiasm, greatly took advantage of.
Similar to how Jerry did in Seinfeld, David played a semi-fictionalized version of himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm, with a general episode following the comedian simply going about his daily life with his sleazy manager, Jeff. And though the show took a six year hiatus between 2011 and 2017, it is now 10 seasons and 100 episodes in.
David is on record as saying that the biggest way Seinfeld changed his life is by making him money that he never dreamed he would earn. Since Seinfeld ended in 1998, the show has made an incredible estimated $4 billion from syndication deals and reruns alone, which comes to around $17 million per episode.
Though it’s not possible to know how much David’s slice of the pie is, if his 7.5% of backend equity show points is anything to go by, he could have made an estimated $300 million. Not only that, but he also makes money of DVD sales and merchandise, which can earn David an extra $80 million per year.
However, the biggest financial success David has seen was when Seinfeld was bought by Columbia Tristar for syndication purposes, which earned the writer a bewildering estimated $650 million in one day. Before that day, David only had an estimated $30 million to his name.
Every couple of years when it comes to renewing the syndication deals, David cuts a handsome pay check like this, as in 2015, Hulu paid $180 million for streaming rights, and just recently Netflix paid $500 million for the rights, which began in 2021.
Curb Your Enthusiasm has such a huge and loyal fan base, and as soon as each season ends, they are ravenous for more. Though this may be due to David’s inconsistent work ethic, as fans don’t know if the following season will come in one year or five years, but it’s mostly due to the way David constructs the show, which is unlike any other.
Not only does the actor play a semi-fictionalized version of himself, but he writes his friends in to the show too. Some of the regular guests include Ted Danson, who plays an exaggerated egotistical version of himself, Richard Lewis, who amplifies how pretentious he is, and Ben Stiller, who gets upset when he isn’t the center of attention. Other notable guest features include Martin Scorsese, Bryan Cranston, and Ricky Gervais, but the list is endless.
David also incorporates real life situations in to his shows. For example, David famously stood up from his desk at SNL in the late 80s and announced that he was quitting, then stormed out, but in fearing that he made a huge mistake, he returned on Monday pretending it never happened, and he even got away with it. This was the plot of an episode of Seinfeld. And when he got divorced in real life, he got divorced from his TV wife, Cheryl, in Curb. David’s friends have said that they are scared to engage in conversation with him in fear of the dialogue being used on an episode of Curb.
Above all else, it’s David’s personality that audiences fall in love with, and people find his grumpy old man outlook on life endearing, as his observational comedy is often nihilistic to say the least. David is blunt and he isn’t afraid to say what’s on his mind even if it costs him dearly in the long run. The show is loved for its rich improvisation, especially when David often gets in to arguments that resort to screaming names at each other, as there hasn’t been a single script written for any of the episodes, only rough outlines for the actors.
Summing-Up
Possessing second to none improv skills and surrounding himself with equally talented comedians who have decades worth of chemistry, David has been able to create one of the most unique television shows of all time, which is still strong 20 years in. And thanks to Seinfeld, which essentially kickstarted the sitcom genre as we know it today, Larry David has an estimated net worth of $400 million, and some sources even claim it could be close to a billion!
