Jerry Seinfeld: The world’s richest comedian

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Welcome to Good, Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Every episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Zing Sing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And I'm Simon Jack and I'm the BBC's business editor.

And this episode, we've got someone whose name became the name of a TV show.

A hit TV show, in fact.

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

His name is Jerry Seinfeld.

Jerry Seinfeld is the richest comedian in the world.

According to Bloomberg, he became a billionaire in 2024.

And the vast bulk of that money came from, guess what?

Seinfeld, the sitcom, which ran for 180 episodes.

That is a lot of episodes.

Between 1989 to 1998.

They once joked that it was a show about nothing because Jerry played a fictionalized version of himself, a wisecracking New York comedian, hanging out with three friends in his apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan.

And when we say this was a rating smash, it was a rating smash unlike almost anything that had come before.

The final episode was watched by 76 million people in America alone.

That's astonishing.

And it's continued to make him millions through syndication, which we'll explain later, selling the show to other channels and a massive deal he cut with the streaming platform Netflix.

And after the show finished, he still does stand-up.

He performs about 70 times a year, so he's still making money on that.

Yeah, in fact, I went to one a few years ago and it was 19,000 people.

So he's still bringing in the crowds and bringing in the money.

He has spent some of that cash on some very expensive real estate, obviously, including a home in the Hamptons, which he bought for $32 million from the singer Billy Joel in 2000.

And an apartment on New York's Central Park West and a warehouse in California.

Which he uses to store his extremely valuable collection of vintage cars.

And he even turned that passion for cars into a comedy format.

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, originally a YouTube show in which he drives around with other comics chatting and occasionally stopping for coffee.

He sold that show to Netflix for a reported $100 million.

So here's Jerry talking to BBC Radio 2's Chris Taron in 2011 about the success of Seinfeld.

Did you think when it started it would be as big as it became?

Oh my goodness, no.

No, I figured a year, two, three tops we would survive and it would be one of those little cult shows that just some people liked.

And I was really surprised that we even survived on a mainstream television network because I thought it was a little bit of an arcane sense of humor.

Yeah, so uh, I never expected it to get big in the States, let alone other places.

So, there's the man himself talking about the incredible success of the show that bore his name and made him those riches.

But we're not here to tell jokes, we're here to talk,

which is probably just as well.

We're here to figure out how they got so rich, and we're going to start from how you get from zero to a million.

So in many ways Jerome Alan Seinfeld is the kind of quintessential New Yorker.

Yeah, born in April 1954, he turned 70 this year, he was raised in Massapequa, Long Island.

So he has grandparents on both sides who were among the many millions of people who moved and emigrated to America by boat at the start of the 20th century, entering at Ellis Island, New York.

You don't get more American dream than that.

No, his paternal grandfather was from Austria, Austria, his mother's family from Syria.

And both of his parents grew up as orphans, which made them quite unusual.

They actually didn't even marry until they were in their 40s.

And his relationship with his parents, as he puts it, said, you do what you've got to do, I'll do what I got to do, and I'm just living here until I can figure something else out.

It's a very kind of

attitude to life, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

Which is kind of a very Seinfeldian kind of state of mind, I think.

It really is.

Yeah.

He said, my father never hugged me, he never told me he loved me, never threw me a ball, but he says, That was no problem.

I'm good.

But his dad was definitely an influence on Jerry.

So he collected jokes, he wrote them down in cards that he kept in a box to tell at the dinner table.

That must have gotten quite annoying for young Jerry Seinfeld.

But that inculcated, I think, a love of comedy, almost an obsessive love of comedy, and a study of it.

He said, I had no normal social experience, but I didn't think I was missing anything.

So when his parents bought a new TV and he got the old one in his room, he said, I never came out of the room again.

And he was was just always watching comedy shows on TV or else he was listening to comedy records.

And while that might seem crazy nowadays, there was a time where you could actually buy comedy on tape and play it.

In high school, he read a book about stand-up comedy called The Last Laugh that he apparently still adores.

And he's got a really interesting attitude to comedy.

So he'll compare classic comedy routines to amazingly constructed, intricate pieces of architecture.

And he said that hearing things like that as a child made him, quote, very excited that you could do things like that with words and ideas and attitudes.

His dream at that time was to work at a big ad agency in Manhattan and write funny ads.

He loved advertising.

He thought that Manhattan was like the Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz.

He thought that stand-up comedians on talk shows were some like genius alien people and he could never be one of them.

And it's still, you know, incredibly rare and difficult to make that much money in entertainment alone.

You know, we've had previous entertainment people on the show like George Lucas, but you know, if you're what you might call a content creator or just a straight-up comedian, it's quite hard to make that amount of money.

Yeah, and it certainly wouldn't have happened were it not for the modern methods of delivering content, which are, you know, syndicating TV shows where you sell it to other channels and indeed cut deals with the big streamers, the Netflix of the world.

And we'll get into that in a bit.

So Jerry Seinfeld is in high school in America.

He's going through a bad time.

He's got acne.

He's unpopular with girls.

You know, it's kind of like this archetypal story of the nerd who makes good.

Yeah, so he quit six months early, but despite dropping out of high school, he somehow managed to get into college.

He enrolled at Oswego State University of New York in 1972.

And it was there he was introduced to something that might be familiar if you're into reading about Scholbert's people.

He got introduced to transcendental meditation, which is also advocated by people like David Lynch, who came up with Twin Peaks.

I'm never quite sure exactly what it is.

It's a sort of silent meditation, which, you know, everyone was doing in the end of the hippie era.

The Beatles, the Beach Boys were big fans of this.

Yeah, Jerry tried it out and says it cleared up his acne.

I'm not endorsing this as a method for doing that if you're listening, but he says it gave him a great energy and focus, and he does it to this day.

It's so funny, because that, to me, is like, sounds like a Seinfeld storyline, the one where Jerry tries out transcendental meditation.

Right.

So after college, he says he's going to try and become a comedian.

He didn't think he'd be any good, but at the time, he said, it seemed much more important to me to do what you wanted to do than to succeed at it.

And in the mid-1970s, he did his first stand-up set at a venue called the Golden Lion Pub in Manhattan.

Really, it was more of a restaurant.

So they took away a table, they took away a lampshade to light the comedian on stage, but it went down really well.

Yeah, and in his Netflix show, Jerry Before Seinfeld, he explains his first real joke, which already shows his recognizable comic voice.

It goes, so I'm left-handed.

Left-handed people do not like the word left.

It's so often often associated with negative things.

Left feet, left-handed compliment.

What are we having for dinner?

Leftovers.

You go to a party, there's nobody there.

Where did everyone go?

They left.

Was that the official, your official Jerry Seinfeld aggression?

I was slipping into New York.

I tell you what it is.

It's there's a real unmistakable rhythm to the way Seinfeld talks.

It's in everything he does.

And actually, he did say, you know, the rhythm is 90% of that joke.

And I think you, you know, you got it.

You had it.

Well, they were very kind.

I'm not so sure.

Jerry said about his own sense of humour.

He says, I don't like comedy that's the big, obvious things that we all see.

Show me something small that I never noticed and blow it way out of proportion.

Then I'm laughing.

And that is the formula for Seinfeld.

Yeah, that's very true.

So his jokes are basically apolitical, right?

So he talks about these kind of universal experiences, the things that get on everyone's nerves.

And also, he doesn't swear.

So he has obvious mainstream crossover potential.

So he's talking about things that everyone would notice in their everyday lives.

You know, there's nothing here here to offend anyone.

You've got the formula there for very broad appeal.

So just three weeks into his stand-up career, he'd only been doing it for not even a month, this legendary American comedian called Jackie Mason turned up in the audience.

There was only about 15 people there.

And Mason told Seinfeld that he had it and that it, quote unquote, made him sick how successful Seinfeld would be.

So that kept him going and he was going to do this for the rest of his life.

For the next few years, Jerry's honing his craft.

He loves comedy.

He loves talking about comedy, loves hanging out with other comedians.

So, you know, in the late 70s, there's no real sort of comedy circuit.

He's doing lots of shows, sometimes on paid, he's probably working a little bit on the side, slowly building a reputation.

And then he gets a role in a successful sitcom called Benson, that, like most sitcoms, was shot in Los Angeles.

So he kind of plays a wannabe stand-up comedian, and he kind of latches onto this thinking, this is going to be it, this is my big break.

And then it flops.

Yeah, well, Benson was quite a big show, but he calls his experience of it a total failure.

He got sacked after just three episodes.

The producer didn't even bother to tell him he'd been sacked.

I know.

I mean, I feel quite bad for him at this point.

Apparently, he turned up at the rehearsal and found out that there was no script for him at the run-through.

Yeah, only when he asked for, where's my script, he was told he'd been written out, and that made him very angry.

It did, however, teach him a valuable lesson.

He realised that the reason why it didn't work was because he didn't write the material.

So he basically says, I have to write my own material or I stink.

But he does at this time get two important breaks in LA.

In 1980, he's seen at the LA comedy store by a guy called George Shapiro, a Hollywood talent manager, who already manages the comedian Andy Kaufman.

Have you ever seen the film The Man in the Moon?

Anyway, he was big in the day.

He played Latka in a big TV show called Taxi around that time.

So Shapiro signs Jerry up and Seinfeld said about this relationship.

The bond between George and I was, we thought showbiz was the greatest thing invented by man and we couldn't get enough.

Yeah, so now he's got a top agent.

He's ready for his second LA break.

He's seen at an improv show in 1981 by someone from the tonight show with Johnny Carson, which is huge.

He was booked for a first appearance on the show.

I mean, this sounds like such a high-pressure gig because it's basically...

the dream for any comedian in America.

You know, you're on TV, there's a huge network audience watching.

It's a late-night chat show, which was a massive medium at the time with the most iconic host in history.

So it could make or break you.

And apparently, the way that you knew whether you'd made it would be if Johnny gave you the okay hand signal at the end of a set and that meant you got his seal of approval.

I remember the Johnny Carlson show dimly from when I was a kid, but this whole thing about the okay, I have heard from other people that you know, whether it be singers or anyone, that this is like being anointed.

It's some kind of rite of passage.

If you get the okay, it means you somehow

this is a break in itself.

Oh my god, it's a bit like a Roman emperor kind kind of giving the hand gesture to throw you to the lions.

Yeah, and Jerry had performed on this what he calls his tight five.

That's what comedians call five minutes of their most carefully honed material.

And apparently he did a hundred times before he did it on the show.

God, I mean...

It's interesting that, isn't it?

Because...

When you hear it, it always feels like it's off the calf and da-da.

He was nervous at the performance, though, not just because of the massive TV audience, but because he'd never performed to a crowd as big as the 500 people in the studio audience.

But he got the okay sign from Johnny, and he says, says it's still the greatest moment of my life.

So the tonight show is a huge hit and it takes Jerry from just being a working comedian who does the stand-up circuit to being famous with a capital F.

Yeah, he's on the tonight show as we've just mentioned.

He's also on late night with David Letterman.

He's probably making a decent living but he's still quite a way off from being a millionaire.

But then in 1985 there's a turning point.

So Jerry's dad, Cowleman, who, you know, the guy who collects jokes in a box, passes away.

Yeah, he never saw his son's sitcom success, but you can actually see a tribute to Calman.

In the backdrop of some Seinfeld episodes, there is a sign for a company called Cal Signs, which is apparently a nod to his dad.

And his dad's death was really a kind of critical moment in Seinfeld's career.

So Jerry said after he passed away, someone said, now your career is really going to take off.

In some way, maybe the child will sometimes hold back so as to not surpass the father while he's alive.

Maybe it's a mortality thing.

I just started driving a little harder, working a little harder.

That's fascinating, no?

You know, we've talked on this show before about that kind of midlife moment where some people start approaching 40 or they have a kind of death in the family and then they realize like capital letters, this is it.

This is the moment where I either make it or I don't.

Yeah, no.

Whether his analysis of the situation is true or not, he certainly starts having more success and he gets his first HBO, that's home box office, stand-up special in 1987.

And after a lot of lobbying from his agent, George Shapiro, this US TV network called NBC finally asks Jerry to make a sitcom pilot.

And a pilot, for those of you who don't know, is actually really a kind of taster first episode of what would hopefully become an ongoing show.

And he makes perhaps one of the most important decisions of his life.

He decides to approach another comedian, Larry David, to work on it with him.

You may know Larry David because he has now become quite an iconic comedian in his own right.

He is the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Yeah, at the time, Jerry and Larry were not even that good friends, but Jerry said that whenever they would talk, it was never about anything important.

It was completely obsessive and hilarious and insane.

And that's what we wanted the show to sound like.

So they come up with an idea for a show called The Seinfeld Chronicles.

As you might tell, this name does not stick around for very long.

Yeah, Jerry played, as we said, a version of himself, comedian in New York, whose best friend is called George.

George was played by Jason Alexander, and the character is based on Larry David himself.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know.

I mean, now you say it, I can kind of see it, but I didn't know at the time.

Yes, George Costanza, one of the great comic creations of all time, and he had a neighbour called Kramer, who was played by Michael Richards, because Larry David actually had a neighbour called Kramer who he based that character on.

So they've got these three characters, but unfortunately...

test audiences didn't like the pilot because it had no drama and they were not impressed by the cast.

And it might have ended there, but for one guy, interesting when we do these stories, there's these little moments that kind of make all the difference, which just

could have died there.

But for this one person,

sometimes these people come along.

And this one was a TV executive called Rick Ludwin.

Ludwin thought the show had potential and after he cancelled some other shows he had a bit of money left over to take a relatively small risk and he commissioned four more episodes making season one of Seinfeld one of the shortest seasons of any sitcom in US TV history.

And you know US TV networks are actually quite cutthroat and ruthless when it comes to cancelling stuff.

American streamers like Netflix Netflix have now become notorious for just cancelling shows mid-season or after a cliffhanger season.

But, you know, they've got form because in America, networks used to just cancel things left, right, and center if they weren't doing well.

So two very important tweaks to this show.

They changed his name to just Seinfeld to avoid confusion with another short-lived show called The Marshall Chronicles.

And very important tweak, it added another main character who's Jerry's ex-girlfriend in the show.

It's Elaine, played by Julia Louis Dreyfus.

You might recognise Dreyfus from another comedy show, Veep, where she plays the US vice president.

Yeah, incredibly talented comic actress.

Anyway, the new episodes aired at 9.30 p.m.

on Thursdays in spring 1990 after reruns of Cheers, which is very interesting because that was the biggest show of that age.

So you probably got quite a lot of people.

You're piggybacking off the back of that.

And that is a well-known TV tactic to put a new show right after one that you already know is popular.

Yeah, because in those days, you just kept watching the TV.

There's nothing else to do.

It's just on.

It's just on.

Seinfeld then became a minor hit, enough anyway to get it recommissioned.

And let's delve into the money side of this here.

Because

Jerry was paid $20,000 an episode for the first season, but he managed to negotiate double that for seasons two and three.

So he would have got about $100,000 for the first five episodes of season one, just under half a million for the 12 episodes of season two, and over $900,000 for the 23 episodes of season three.

Now, of course, this being Hollywood, he would have had to pay a cut of that to his agent and tax and other expenses.

Yada, yada, yada.

But added to, you know, all the previous money that he made, it seems fair to say that at this point of Seinfeld, Jerry is a millionaire.

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Okay, a millionaire, there he is, but it's a long way from a million to a billion, as we have found throughout this series.

So how did Jerry go from being a millionaire to a billionaire?

Really, it's all down to the continuing success of Seinfeld.

So it went from being a kind of reasonably successful sitcom to being in the top 50 shows on U.S.

network TV in seasons two and three.

And then, by season six, it was the number one show on tele.

And as that success grows, the advertising revenue grows that you can associate it with it, so he can command a bigger fee.

So he gets $100,000 an episode for seasons four, five, and six, half a million an episode for the season after it became the number one show, and a million an episode for the ninth and final season.

So that's pretty good.

That's pretty good going for a show about nothing.

A million an episode.

For a show about nothing, a million an episode is pretty good.

But it's I suppose we should try and figure out why Seinfeld was such a big hit.

Jerry says it's because he and Larry David focused on just one thing.

Larry was the showrunner.

What does that mean?

So basically that means he's the guy in charge behind the scenes.

Okay, and Jerry was the star.

And they said that instead of dealing with all the other things it takes to make a show, like have we got the right balance of cast and da-da-da-da and all this kind of stuff, and what time should this be on?

The pair would just lock the door and spend 99% of their time working on making it funny.

That was the only important thing to them.

And this is really interesting to me as someone who watches quite a lot of TV and really enjoys like those long episode arcs where people go on journeys.

Jerry and Larry had one rue, which is no hugging and no learning.

That's brilliant.

So none of the characters ever get bogged down in character development or learning stuff about themselves.

They're only just funny.

Yeah, they kind of are the same person throughout from beginning to end.

There's no journey that they're on.

That's who they are.

Which is so funny because if you go to a screenwriting class, the first thing you learn is you have to ha develop the character.

They have to go on a journey.

But over the course of however many seasons, nobody in Seinfeld learns anything about themselves.

Yeah, and it's often said, and we've said it already, that Seinfeld was a show about nothing.

But it was really a very intricately kind of plotted show about the minutiae of modern life, little things that irritate them, little things that you notice, and they would amplify those.

In a way, if you take any kind of tiny little thing and blow it up to abstraction, it develops a different nature, doesn't it?

And in this case, it becomes funny.

What do you think is your favorite example of that?

There's one where Elaine has a boyfriend called Puddy.

Is that his name?

Anyway, they get in a plane, and she gets in the plane, so she gets out her headphones and is doing the little video thing and opening a little bag of all the kind of bits and bobs and stuff you get on a plane and her boyfriend just sits there just and motionless staring at the back of the seat in front of me he says what are you doing he said do you want to watch a movie no i'm fine he says would you like something to drink i'm fine he said well you can't just sit there

which which it would unnerve me if someone just sat there completely motionless without fiddling with or doing anything that's actually so funny because recently there was a viral twitter thread about someone who experienced this exact same thing on a real-life flight next to someone who just sat down and stared into space.

Totally unnerving, irritating, maddening in a way.

And yet also perfect distillation of something people do about real life being turned into a comedy story.

But you know, as we heard in the clip from Jerry Seinfeld earlier, he never thought this would be a massive hit.

Because it's sort of in a way finding niche things and amplifying them, he actually really

ever thought the show could achieve a sort of cultish niche success.

But then luckily for Jerry, it turns out the stuff that he found funny, everyone else finds funny.

So much so that the show sold outside the States.

It found fans in places like Israel, France, Belgium, Canada, across Latin America.

Although in countries like the UK, it was probably more of the cult hit he thought it would be.

So he's got a hit show, he's doing well.

And then at the end of series seven, Larry David actually leaves the show.

Jerry's salary had doubled that point to $1 million an episode, and he had taken over as showrunner, so Larry leaves.

And Jerry Seinfeld is more than ready to to bring the curtain down after two seasons as the showrunner and the star, because understandably it's quite a lot of work.

Yeah, but NBC was, you know, got a smash hit.

They're desperate for him to stay.

They offer Jerry $5 million an episode for another season.

And you think this sounds like silly amounts of money for a comedy show, but Seinfeld had become a massive cash cow for NBC.

Apparently, over nine years, it earned more than a billion dollars in advertising revenue.

The last two seasons alone accounted for $200 million a year in profit profit for the network, so it's worth paying Jerry the big bucks.

But Jerry Seinfeld turned the money down.

He wanted to go out with people wanting more.

And so Seinfeld ended in 1998 as the number one show on TV.

Larry David returned for the extended finale, which drew over, as we've said already, 70 million viewers.

That's astonishing in a country of 280 million people.

So the show went out on a high, although the ending itself, which features, spoiler alert, Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer in jail was widely panned and Larry David actually makes several jokes about this on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

So what next?

For a few months after the show, Jerry apparently plays pool every afternoon at a billiards hall on the upper west side and then he decides to go back to being a stand-up comic.

That very same summer he does a limited run on Broadway to retire all the old material in a show called I'm Telling You for the Last Time.

Yeah, and one night he invites Jessica Sklar, a woman he'd met at the gym, to that show.

The character he played in Seinfeld was always dating different women and so was Jerry in real life.

But, you know, post-Seinfeld, post-all that success, Jerry is maybe ready to settle down, and Jessica is what he calls a neighborhood girl, a Jewish girl from Long Island, just like he was.

But there was a problem when they met.

Jessica just married a son of a prominent New York theatre family.

But that marriage soon ended, and her relationship with Jerry blossomed and eventually became public, which caused some controversy.

But the couple managed to weather it, and they married on Christmas Day in 1999.

And they're still together and have three children, all now adults.

Meanwhile, Jerry, to this day, is primarily a stand-up comedian.

He plays massive sold-out arena shows around the world.

Was he good when you saw him?

He was good.

When you have that success, I think it gives you an amazing amount of authority on stage.

I think that's part of the skill of doing these stand-up things, being able to, you know, feel that you've got the audience in the palm of your hand.

And worth noting as well that, you know, if he's selling out stadium shows like that as a stand-up comic, there's very few overheads.

There's no pyrotechnics, there's no backing dancers, you're not putting on a Beyoncé or Taylor Swift-style extravaganza.

Exactly, so a man standing there with a microphone, and that's it.

A way of making money.

There's only one of you, you don't have to split the money with anyone.

And because of that, the shows make a lot of money.

You know, Bloomberg, the US financial news outlet, conservatively estimates he's earned $100 million from all of his live shows.

Other than the live shows, he's also had a real mixed bag of work that he's done post-Seinfeld.

So he wrote, produced, and starred in this animated film B-Movie in 2007.

It's a very strange movie.

He plays a talking bee.

Very odd.

He's also created a reality TV show format called The Marriage Ref, which ran for two seasons and was sold around the world.

And he also indulges creative love of advertising, appearing in campaigns for the likes of American Express and Microsoft.

I'm not sure how much that has to do with love of advertising other than love of money.

But, you know, he actually made his directorial debut this year with a film about the invention of Pop-Tarts called Unfrosted, which he also stars in.

All of these ventures would have made him a rich man, but none of them made him a billionaire.

That was down to something called syndication.

Which is the process of selling a TV show to another network for it to be repeated, sometimes ad nauseum, on air.

Yeah, and as soon as Seinfeld came off air, another TV network called Turner Broadcasting, Ted Turner's outfit, who had just merged with Time Warner, had cash to spend.

They paid $1 million per episode to air reruns of all 180 episodes of the sitcom.

And simple maths, 180 times 1 million is 180 million right there.

Oh, it's a lot of money.

And Jerry had a significant stake in that because he was the creator, the writer, the star, the showrunner for a bit of it.

So he was earning a major cut of that.

Bloomberg reckon he has 15% of that and that he's made $465 million from various syndication deals for the show up to 2024.

And then came the arrival of the streaming era, which was just another place to sell Seinfeld to.

Yeah, in 2015, Hulu paid $180 million to stream the shows.

A few years later, they were outbid by Netflix, who paid $500 million.

Netflix also invested in new stand-up shows from Jerry and his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee format.

But it's the long-term popularity of Seinfeld that they really wanted.

Older sitcoms, which have big episode catalogues and huge international popularity,

which people over the world happily re-watch again, have become crucial weapons in the streaming wars.

For example, things like the classic example that would be Friends.

Yeah.

And also shows like, you know, The Office, you know, these are shows that people revisit willingly time and time again as kind of comfort watching or background noise.

It's harder to sell people on a new show than it is for an old show that they already love.

So by 2024, despite his own denials, Bloomberg estimate that Seinfeld has become a billionaire.

Now we've come to the point of the show where we judge our billionaires.

Are they good, bad, or just another rich person?

So on wealth, now this is all about billionaires.

There are two and a half thousand of them.

He's just over a billion, so he's kind of like entry-level billionaire.

So I think we'd have to give him a one.

Oh, we've never given someone a zero, right?

Maybe we could give him a zero?

I think Jerry Seinford would enjoy being a zero.

I think he'd love that.

Yeah, I think he'll be delighted when he hears this.

Wealth zero, yeah.

He's only just, as I say, entry-level billionaire.

We have a category called Rags to Riches.

How far have they come from, you know, remember we did Oprah Winfree and she was dirt poor and she ended up being worth five billion.

On this one,

pretty middle class.

Yeah, I mean, he's a self-made man.

He didn't have any showbiz connections.

I mean, they didn't have much money.

Middle class in an American sense, probably.

So, and like you say, I think he didn't have any connections.

Do you know what I mean?

That's an important thing.

He wasn't born into any kind of industry.

So, I'd give him a five.

Yeah, I think I would give him a five as well, just straight down the middle, because, you know, it's impressive to make it in showbiz without any connections.

The one thing he is born into is the situation which makes him famous, which is being a comedian in New York.

He's sort of playing himself.

So he hasn't had, it's not much of a reach.

He hasn't come from Hicksville, USA, has he?

No, he definitely hasn't.

So I would still go five out of ten.

Okay, fine.

We have a category called villainy.

What have they done to get where they are?

Have they done people over?

Have they screwed people over?

Have they made some ruthless moves?

Tricky one in comedy.

I'm sure it's very competitive and can be kind of ruthless.

He's actually recently caused quite a bit of controversy by claiming at a New Yorker event that quote-unquote woke cancer culture was stopping comedians saying funny things.

It is interesting that, isn't it?

Because comedy is a real melting pot for culture wars now, isn't it?

It's sort of

used to be able to get a kind of free pass.

Comedy would give you some kind of license to say stuff.

It seems to me that license, in a way, anyway, I'm probably going to get cancelled myself for saying this.

But it seems to say that license is slightly revoked these days.

I do think that it's worth mentioning that when he was questioned about this, if he'd ever been stopped saying anything, he said no.

But I do think the whole kind of comedian saying you can't say anything these days is like something from a Seinfeld gag, right?

It's like, like, I don't know, it's like George being like, they say you can't say anything these days.

When's the last time someone said you couldn't say anything?

Never.

That's not the point though.

That's a good one.

Excellent.

There was a moment in 2006 when the Kramer actor Michael Richards went on a racist rant on stage.

Jerry defended him saying he's a dear, sweet guy, but he just got too angry.

I mean, that's sticking up for an old friend, maybe going too far.

He also gets occasionally criticised for a relationship he had during the peak of Seinfeld's popularity.

So when Jerry was 39, he met a girl called Shoshana Lonstein, who was 17 at the time.

Now Jerry says that she was 18 when they started dating, although he has also said that he had no idea she was so young and they went on to date for four years.

So that's something that he also gets called out for online quite a bit.

Okay.

On the radar of villainy, I think those are kind of like at the periphery of my vision anyway.

So did he do anyone over?

Did he nick jokes?

I think him and Larry David created something out of nothing.

So I'm going to say on villainy and going to give him a two.

Yeah, and it's worth noting as well that, you know, on the villainy stakes, previously we've judged people like drug traffickers and warlords.

So Jerry Seinfeld for in that metric, even though I'm sure another funny storyline would be Jerry Seinfeld comparing himself against El Chappell.

Yes.

And doesn't score very highly.

So I think for me, he's a three out of ten.

Okay, two for me, three for you.

Philanthropy, how much what have they done with their money for good causes?

What do we know?

So like many comedians, Jerry sets aside a certain number of shows a year to do as-a-benefit kind of concert.

And his wife, Jessica, has also set up the organisation Good Plus in 2001 to stop family poverty.

And they created the Seinfeld Family Foundation to improve children's education.

That Seinfeld Family Foundation, we think, has apparently given $2 million to its causes over the year.

Not much for a billionaire.

I mean, when you think about how much money a single episode of Seinfeld was making him towards the end.

Yeah, he was offered $5 million an episode for the season that never happened.

He's given $2 million over the lifetime of this Seinfeld Family Foundation.

So I think that's pretty poor.

Again, quite like a Seinfeld storyline.

Exactly.

You can imagine saying, how much can I give George?

Exactly.

But

he does do those benefit shows and they probably make quite a lot of money.

But I'm still only going to give him a two for philanthropy.

Yeah, I mean, sorry, Jerry, it's a two.

Fine.

Okay, we have a category called Power.

How can they influence the rest of the world?

For example, someone like a Rupert Murdoch, we gave a very, very high score to because he could ring up heads of state, influence elections, such a very powerful person.

I think he would be horrified if we gave him a high number for this.

So funnily enough, comedians in cars getting coffee, as the name suggests, is only really about comedians hanging out with Jerry Seinfeld.

But during the U.S.

presidential race, Barack Obama actually appeared on the show.

So while Seinfeld probably couldn't call up Obama, Obama's team actually came calling.

There you go.

So he might not be able to call heads of state, but heads of state call him in order to become a head of state.

I still think power, I'm going to give him zero.

That's so harsh.

All right, one.

I would give him, because, you know, if Jerry Seinfeld calls up an agent and says, I've seen this hot new comedian, I think they're going to be massive.

Get me on the line to NBC.

I found the Nick Seinfeld.

He could get it done.

That's true.

That's true.

That's true.

I think, okay, fine.

I've completely revised my opinion.

Within his comedy circles and TV circles, if he said, for example, if he said, I've got a great idea for a new show,

it would get made, right?

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Yeah, okay, all right, five.

I've gone from zero to five.

Oh, well, I was going to be slightly more modest and give him a three, but you know, we'll disagree on that.

Okay, three for you, three for you, five for me.

Legacy, this is another category.

What have they done to influence those who've come after a lot, I would say?

Oh, yeah, I think so.

I mean, and I say this having only not watched a lot of Seinfeld, but, you know, looking at the way that Seinfeld has influenced modern comedy, it's just everywhere.

And actually, there's this thing that I found out called the Seinfeld effect, where people watch old episodes of Seinfeld and they go, uh, whatever.

It's not that funny.

It's no arrested development or it's no kind of

peep show or it's always sunny in Philadelphia.

Those are all shows that are so clearly influenced by Seinfeld, right?

Because the whole anti-hero, people doing bad things and never learning from them.

That is such a classic trop in comedy now.

I think that people never learning anything is a brilliant way of putting it.

These characters never learn about anything they do.

They make the same mistakes day in, episode in and episode out, and to hilarious effect.

The thing that I also didn't really realize about Seinfeld is how it really plays with the structure of what a comedy show should look like.

So, you know, in cheers and older comedy shows, there's a very obvious main storyline and everything else feeds into that.

And Seinfeld actually just has multiple different storylines that kind of cascade and collide with each other.

And apparently that was really new at the time.

Yeah, it cast a long shadow in a good way over comedy since it was made.

So I'm going to give that an eight.

Yeah, I'm going to give it, I'm going to give it a seven out of ten just because, you know,

it had a huge influence in comedy.

Did it influence everything else in the rest of the world?

Probably not.

Okay, fair enough.

I'm going to put legacy in the comedy world.

I'm going to give it an eight, but you're right.

You know, again, they'd be horrified if they thought that they had influenced the rest of the world too much um so we have to make a decision is he good bad or just another billionaire

oh this is tough because i feel like i can't really judge it having not watched all of seinfeld so for me he's just another billionaire he's a funny guy yeah i think i think making people laugh is got to be better than selling arms or dealing drugs like some of the other people we've done or uh ousting uh world leaders so i don't think you can say that anyone anyone who's made that many people laugh for that long could be anything other than a good billionaire.

Well, Jerry Seinfeld, I hope you're happy with that assessment.

Well done, Jerry.

Yada, yada, yada.

So who do we have next episode?

The man who broke the Bank of England.

It's the super investor himself.

He can make finance ministers of countries tremble in their boots.

And also the subject of more conspiracy theories than probably any other billionaire we've ever talked about.

It is George Soros, billionaire financier, speculator, and philanthropist.

Good, Bad Billionaire is a podcast from the BBC World Service produced by Mark Ward.

James Cook is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins, and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minnell.

If you enjoyed this podcast, then please rate and review us, and why not tell people about your favorite episode on social media?

It helps us to keep telling you these incredible stories.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

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We demand to be seen.

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We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.