What is Mariah Carey's net worth?
Mariah Carey is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, entrepreneur, and actress who has a net worth of $350 million. Mariah Carey is one of the 15 best-selling musical artists in history. To date, she has sold over 200 million albums worldwide. Mariah is the second best-selling female artist of all time, behind Madonna. She has more #1 songs than any other female writer/producer in US chart history. As of this writing, she has won five Grammys, 10 AMAs, and 15 Billboard Music Awards.
After struggling throughout the 80s to get anyone to listen to the demo she recorded while working multiple jobs in New York, she finally caught the attention of Brenda K. Starr, who introduced her to the "right" people. At the urging of Ms. Starr, Mariah Carey handed her demo to Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola during a party. He spent two weeks tracking her down and signed her immediately. She dominated the charts throughout the 90s, with her debut album remaining at #1 for eleven weeks. Her second album, rushed through production and released just a year later, was less successful, though the recording of her "MTV Unplugged" appearance went triple-platinum. She went on to release three more massively successful albums, and she recorded "One Sweet Day" with Boyz II Men. "One Sweet Day" remained at #1 for sixteen weeks, the longest period a song has remained at the top of the charts ever. She also married Tommy Mottola.
Then things started to go downhill. Her next two albums, while successful, were not the pop juggernauts of her early career. She wanted more creative control. The label did not want to give it to her. They were less willing to promote her work, and sales began to slow. As her relationship with Columbia began to fall apart, so did her relationship with her husband, and she separated from both in the early 2000s. She signed with Virgin Records in 2001, and things went from bad to worse. Under Virgin, she basically fell apart, was hospitalized, and disappeared for an extended period of time, and her only project under the label, "Glitter," a film and soundtrack, was panned by critics and largely ignored by the public. She signed with Island/Def Jam a few years later, and over the course of 2003 and 2004, the label carefully shepherded her through a career comeback. Her tenth album, "The Emancipation of Mimi," proved that their strategy had worked. It became the top-selling album by a female in 2005 and sold nearly 8 million copies worldwide. Since then, she has continued to remain musically relevant and popular.
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Early Life
Mariah Carey was born on March 27, 1969 in Huntington, New York. She is of African American, Afro-Venezuelan, and Irish descent. Her father's father adopted the last name "Carey" upon moving to New York, changing it from Nunez. Her mother was a one-time Opera singer and vocal coach. The parents separated when Mariah was three years old.
Always interested in the arts and music in particular, Mariah started writing poems and early songs while at Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, New York. She graduated from high school in 1987. At Harborfields, Mariah befriended Gavin Christopher and Ben Margulies, with whom she soon began composing full songs with lyrics and music. After graduating while living in New York City, Mariah, Gavin, and Ben continued working together to create a full-length demo.
The demo eventually made its way to pop singer Brenda K. Starr. Brenda continued to pass the demo around town while bringing Mariah to various industry galas. At one such gala, the demo tape was handed off to Tommy Mottola, the head of Columbia Records. He listened to the tape in the car on the way home. After hearing the first two songs he was convinced Mariah Carey would become a star.
It took two weeks to track her down, but when he did, Tommy instantly signed Mariah to a record deal and assembled a team to plot her commercial debut. In Tommy's eyes, Mariah would be Columbia's answer to Arista Records' Whitney Houston.
Success
Mariah's self-titled debut album was released on June 12, 1990. Columbia reportedly spent $1 million promoting the record. Sales were slow at first, but eventually, the album would eventually be certified 9X platinum in the US alone, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide. The album reached number one on the Billboard charts and earned her a Grammy for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Mariah's next album, 1991's "Emotions," was also an enormous success, but it was her third album, 1993's "Music Box," that took her career to stratospheric levels. Music Box spent 128 weeks on the Billboard chart and eventually sold an astonishing 28 million copies worldwide. It is one of the best-selling albums of all time.
Her success was not short-lived at all. Her next album "Merry Christmas" was also a monster, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide. Her next three albums would sell 20 million, 10 million, and 8 million copies worldwide, respectively.
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"All I Want for Christmas" Royalties
Mariah's Christmas album is probably most notable for featuring the song "All I Want for Christmas Is You" which would eventually become one of the best-selling and most-profitable singles of all time with global sales of 16 million and counting. The song is featured in dozens of Christmas movies and has a massive hit around the holidays on streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora. The song, which reportedly only took 15 minutes to write, generates an estimated $600,000 per year in royalties for Mariah and producer Walter Afanasieff. The song has generated more than $60 million in gross royalties to date.
Virgin Contract
In April 2001, Mariah left Columbia Records and signed what was then a record-setting $100 million, five-album contract with Virgin Music. That's the same as $150 million after adjusting for inflation. It was the biggest contract in the history of music at the time.
Mariah's first album with Virgin, "Glitter", was released on August 18, 2001. The album was actually a soundtrack to a movie of the same name, which was a semi-biographical fictionalized version of Mariah. Both the album and film, which was unfortunately released on September 21, 2001 – 10 days after the 9/11 terror attacks, were panned by critics and audiences. The movie is famously one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time.
Even before the movie's release, Mariah had to be hospitalized for extreme exhaustion. She reportedly experienced a physical and emotional breakdown.
Over time, the album sold 3 million copies. That would have been respectable for any other artist. Unfortunately, it was a disaster for Mariah and Virgin's newly minted $100 million contract.
Virgin was so desperate to free themselves from Mariah that they paid her $28 million to end the contract early. When it was all said and done, Mariah was paid nearly $50 million to produce one album for Virgin.
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Return to Success
After being dumped by Virgin, Mariah signed a $24 million, five-album deal with Island Records. Her Island albums sold moderately well, with her biggest hit being 2005's "The Emancipation of Mimi," which sold 10 million copies worldwide.
Mariah released one album under Def Jam and then was signed by Epic Records in 2015, where she remains today.
In 2012 she earned $18 million to appear on one season of American Idol.
In 2015, she signed a $30 million contract to undertake a two-year Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace. This helped her become one of the highest-earning women in music for the year, with $27 million in total earnings.
Personal Life
In 1993, Mariah married music manager/producer Tommy Mottola. They divorced in 1998. She was married to actor Nick Cannon from 2008 to 2016. They have two children together, twins – a boy and a girl – who were born in April 2011. She was briefly engaged to Australian billionaire James Packer in 2016 and dated singer Luis Miguel between 1998 and 2001.
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Real Estate
For much of the recent decades, Mariah has split her time between a home she rents in Beverly Hills and a triplex apartment in New York City's Tribeca neighborhood.
In the mid-1990s, when she was married to Tommy Mottola, the couple lived in Westchester County, New York, on a 51-acre property that featured a 33,000-square-foot mansion. They sold this home in 1998 after breaking up with financier Nelson Peltz (father of Nicola Peltz and father-in-law of Brooklyn Beckham). The home was destroyed in a fire just a year later.
Mariah owns a vacation property in the Bahamas.
In November 2021, Mariah Carey paid $5.65 million for a 4.2-acre property with a 16,000-square-foot Colonial mansion in the Sandy Springs suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. She listed the home for sale in September 2022 for $6.5 million. She ultimately accepted $4.3 million, a $1.35 million loss, in May 2023. Here's a video tour of the property:
Mariah Carey is NOT Worth $500+ Million
Despite what many sites report (including, as of this writing, Wikipedia), Mariah Carey is not worth $520 million. In fact, as part of their 2015 divorce proceedings, we learned from her own legal filings that when Mariah entered the marriage in 2008, she had a net worth of $150 million. In 2008, Nick was worth less than $500,000. Furthermore, the filings showed that Mariah earned a total of $6.3 million in 2014, while Nick earned $2.7 million. As part of their eventual settlement, which was undisclosed, Nick was given title to a 2012 Ferrari and forced to pay $5,000 per month to a trust for their twins.
If Mariah was worth $150 million in 2008, in order for her to be worth $520 million today, her gross earnings over the ensuing decade+ would need to be north of $1 billion, which is not the case.
