In both The Beatles and his solo career, George Harrison raked in more money than most people can imagine making. He didn’t initially think this would be the case, though. In the early years of The Beatles, just as Beatlemania was kicking off in earnest, Harrison predicted that the band wouldn’t be able to become millionaires. Here’s why.
George Harrison didn’t think The Beatles would be able to make much money
In 1964, The Beatles were beginning to see immense success. They were popular enough that one interviewer asked Harrison if he was a millionaire. He quickly denied this.
“It’s so hard to become a millionaire,” he said in a 1964 interview with the BBC, per American Songwriter. “Maybe if we were just a solo act, then whoever it was, you’d probably be a millionaire. But with four, you know, it’s hard.”
He hoped they’d be able to make this much money, but he didn’t think it was likely.
“If we’ll ever be millionaires, we’d probably be all right,” he said. “But I can’t see us being millionaires and not paying tax as well.”
George Harrison was very conscious of money while in the band
The Beatles, of course, went on to become millionaires many times over. At the time of his death, Harrison was worth an estimated $400 million. He said he never made music for the money, though.
“It’s not for the money that I do what I do; it was never for the money really,” he told Rolling Stone in 1979. “We hoped we’d make a living out of it when we [the Beatles] were teenagers, we hoped we’d get by [smiling], but we weren’t doing it for the money. In fact, the moment we realized we were doing it for the money was just before we stopped touring, because we were getting no pleasure out of it.”
According to his mother, though, Harrison was always very aware of his finances.
“He was always very serious about his music, and the money,” his mother, Louise, said in the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “He always wanted to know how much they were getting.”
Harrison later said the band should have made more
According to Harrison, The Beatles’ break up meant the group lost out on money. They endured a lawsuit — Paul McCartney sued the rest of the band — and, he believed, employees at Apple Corps were taking more than they were owed.
“Dreadful. I mean, all the money that we ever made from Beatles records and from Beatle films or any source, it all came into this company, Apple, which had been pilfered by all these famous gangsters,” he said, per Far Out Magazine. “It was a mess, and Paul was suing us three because we had this guy managing us, and it was just a mess.”
