Inside the Rolling Stones’ Billionaire Lifestyle

It has been 55 years since the Rolling Stones made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964. Mick Jagger’s gyrating hips and the band’s bad-boy attitude shocked the CBS audience. Thousands of angry viewers called in to express their disgust with the newest act from Britain, leading Sullivan to declare the following morning that he would never have the Stones back on his show. They were back on Sullivan’s show less than a year later.

Since that appearance, the Stones have become the most iconic rock ‘n’ roll band in history. They’re notorious for their antics and revered for their talents. And along their half-century of rocking and rolling, the Stones have made oodles of money. 

Come check out some of the Stones’ more scandalous moments and take a peek behind their bank account to see just how successful this mega-successful band has been.

Three-hundred and two years. That’s the collective age of the Rolling Stones’ four core members, with the average age of a Stone being 75-and-a-half. Old, sure, but time is still on the Stones’ side. Their three-year “No Filter” tour, which spanned Europe and the United States, sold 2,290,871 tickets and grossed $415.6 million. Near the end of the tour, on April 30, 2019, Mick Jagger needed to replace a valve in his heart, halting the tour. By late June, he was up on stage gyrating his hips.

The “No Filter” tour became the eighth highest-grossing tour of all time.

People who purchased a “No Filter” ticket paid a minimum of $131 and upwards of $600 for some shows, and sometimes even more on the secondary market. Yet people have been complaining about Stones ticket prices since 1969, when shows cost between $5.50 and $8.50 — about $38.50 and $60 today.

“Can the Rolling Stones actually need all that money?” A critic from the San Francisco Chronicle asked. “Paying five, six and seven dollars for a Stones concert at the Oakland Coliseum for, say, an hour of the Stones seen a quarter of a mile away because the artists demand such outrageous fees that they can only be obtained under these circumstances, says a very bad thing to me about the artists’ attitude towards the public. It says they despise their own audience.”

After the Stones wrapped up their 2015 “Zip Code” tour, TMZ obtained some of the band’s demands. The guys asked for tinted windows, extra butlers, after-hours dry cleaning, continual access to alcohol and enough Marlboro Reds and Marlboro Lights cigarettes to satsify the immortal Richards (although he now uses a smokeless ash tray so as not to annoy Jagger). Additionally, the band requests instructions on how to work all the room’s electronics. Because even though the septuagenarians can still work the stage, electronics are an entirely different beast.

In fact, the Stones have cleaned up their act since the late-’80s and early-’90s. Instead of mountains of booze, their dressing room was stocked with Evian, fresh juice and tea. Video games, a pool table and a cappuccino machine have been substituted for hard drugs, according to a 1990 New York Times article.

In 1967, 18 police officers descended on Richards’ West Sussex countryside estate in a raid. Keith Richards, Jagger and several other people were recuperating from acid trips and whatever else. When the cops knocked, Richards looked out the window and thought a group of dwarves, all wearing the same clothes, had come to the house.

“Wonderful attire! Am I expecting you?” is how he greeted them, he recalled in his autobiography, “Life.” The police came in and searched the place but found barely anything — some roaches, a bit of legally purchased amphetamines, and heroin, which belonged to the Stones’ art dealer friend, Robert Fraser.

According to Richards, Richards’ chauffeur had sold the Stones out to the now-defunct paper The News of the World, which in turn colluded with the cops. Or maybe it was Jagger’s dealer. Yet despite the cops’ meager findings, the courts wanted to punish the Stones’ most notorious members as harshly as possible.