I found this to be an extremely interesting list for a few reasons. First, it’s Forbes, so you assume it has more legitimacy than what you’d find peppered all over your feed on Facebook. Obviously, there is some accuracy to these figures, not that they’re entirely accurate or rather, not that they tell you the whole story. Second, the title states this list contains “The World’s Highest-Paid Celebrities.” While I can really break that down and talk about what they might mean by both the world’s and highest-paid, the most intriguing part is the word, “celebrity.”
I’ve always been confused by that word. Webster defines it as ‘a famous person,’ but this list clearly does not contain the highest-paid famous people in the world. At a quick glance, it contains very few, if any, billionaires. Bill Gates is certainly a celebrity by that definition and he definitely qualifies by the monetary standard, but they don’t seem to be including anyone in that specific industry. In fact, I decided to break this down to figure out who is on the list.