When it comes to artists and artwork, how do you determine who's number one? By its very nature, art is subjective. It can't be definitively quantified. It's not like you can award a Picasso a 9, a Dali an 8, and a Van Gogh a 7.
One man's masterpiece is another man's abomination; beauty is, was, and will forever be in the eye of the beholder. Advertisement But there is one metric that does govern art: cold, hard cash. You might not be able to quantify which artists had the prettiest brushstrokes or painted the "best" pictures, but you can certainly see which painting sold for the most money.
If money's your metric, then Howard Stern is the most successful radio personality in American media history. If you consider radio a creative art, then he's the world's wealthiest artist. He's been compensated more money than anyone else in his medium — and by a VERY wide margin.
He makes $130 million annually from Sirius and has a net worth of $900 million. He owns a pair of apartment buildings in New York, 32 villas and properties in Minnesota, Texas, and Virginia, 16 mansions in Florida and California, and over 5,000 acres of real estate. His enormous mega-mansion in Palm Beach, Fla.
, is estimated to be worth $300 million. (A nearby property in Palm Beach — Mar-a-Lago — was appraised by New York Attorney General Leita James to be worth just $75 million.) Stern has made more than Rush Limbaugh.
More than Hannity, Beck, Imus, and Schlessinger combined. No radio talent has ever matched his checkbook. For a time, he was so omnipresent in popular culture, that an article like this would never see the light of day.
First of all, the premise alone would be preposterous — how the hell is Howard Stern irrelevant?! He's everywhere! And second, journalists were terrified of Stern. If he turned his spotlight on you, it was brutal: His insanely loyal fans would terrorize you in public. Go ask Kathie Lee Gifford how fun it was to be caught in Stern's.
.. Scott Pinsker.
