How Elton John Amassed a $500 Million Net Worth

Sky Arte / Facebook
Elton John is one of the most famous performers in the world, selling over 300 million records and creating numerous classic hits that can be heard on the radio every day, all across the world. He started with nothing, but John now has a net worth of $500 million.
As he embarks on his last ever shows in North America, The story of how John made it in his career — and how he amassed such an incredibly high net worth — is truly inspiring. This is how the “Rocket Man” became one of the most revered (and richest) musicians in history.
He Grew Up in Public Housing

Elton John was born on March 25, 1947, in Pinner, Middlesex, England. His birth name was Reginald Kenneth Dwight, and he grew up in public housing.
“It was the kind of council house that had sprung up all over Britain in the twenties and thirties: three bedrooms, semi-detached, red brick on the ground floor and white-painted render on the top floor,” John wrote in his 2019 autobiography, “Me.”
His father was a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force and met his mother during wartime England, when she was delivering milk from a horse and cart.
His Childhood Wasn’t a Happy One

John’s parents were unhappy together, and it made for some difficult times. The singer writes that his mother “was always looking for a reason not to be happy” or “in search of a fight,” and believed in a “spare the rod, spoil the child” approach to parenting.
“I found out years later that when I was 2, she’d toilet-trained me by hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty,” he writes. His loving grandmother threw a fit when she found this out.
“I was f***ing terrified of her. I loved her — she was my mum — but I spent my childhood in a state of high alert. … If she was happy, I was happy, albeit temporarily.”
As for his mother and father, “They just didn’t get on. They were both stubborn and short-tempered, two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit.”
His father was often off at work, and a disciplinarian when he came home.
He Was Surrounded by Records

John’s childhood also was marked with a lot of music. His mother would buy and bring home a new record every Friday after work and bring home music from the likes of Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, Nat King Cole and Guy Mitchell.
And then there was Elvis.
Elvis Left an Impression

He recognized the name immediately.
That previous weekend, he had been looking at magazines at a barbershop. He spotted a photo that “transfixed” him: “I came across a photo of the most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the way he was standing. Compared to the people you could see outside the barbershop window in the northwest London suburb of Pinner, he might as well have been bright green with antennae sticking out of his forehead,” John writes.
When he heard Elvis’ music, he knew he had found something special.
“I’d never experienced anything like this in my life. As ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ played, it felt like something had changed, that nothing could really be the same again. As it turned out, something had, and nothing was.”