How Harvey Weinstein Achieved a Net Worth of $50 Million
Those who have been paying attention to the news should recognize the name of Harvey Weinstein. After all, he is the former film producer who The New York Times reported in October of 2017 of having sexually abused more than a dozen women, which prompted dozens and dozens of other women to come forward with similar stories within a matter of weeks. The whole sequence of events caused Alyssa Milano to use the Me Too hashtag in support of her friend Rose McGowan, thus propelling said movemvent to a position of prominence in the public eye. Something that has had a significant impact on the entertainment industries and beyond.
Regardless, Weinstein is set to stand trial. As a result, there are bound to be people who are curious about his current net worth. In this as in other cases, there are no perfect figures that the members of the public can consult. However, that hasn’t stopped various parties from coming up with various estimates of his current net worth, with examples ranging from $50 million to $150 million
How Did Harvey Weinstein Reach His Current Net Worth?
For those who are curious, Weinstein and his brother have been involved with the entertainment industries for a very long time. In fact, the two started out working with a man named Corky Burger at Harvey & Corky Productions, which was a concert promotion business that specialized in rock concerts. This continued for much of the 1970s, during which time the Weinstein brothers accumulated a great deal of capital that could be used for something even more ambitious.
The result was a film distributor called Miramax, which was named for the Weinstein brothers’ parents Miriam and Max. Said business started out with concert movies. However, it wasn’t too long before the Weinstein brothers started raising their profile by releasing arthouse movies that managed to achieve critical success on top of a modest measure of commercial success. In particular, it is worth mentioning how Miramax picked up the rights for a couple of British movies made for Amnesty International, which played an important role in raising said non-profit’s profile in the United States once the edited versions had been released in said market. Besides this, it is also interesting to note that Miramax is the reason that the MPAA has a NC-17 film rating, which was created following Weinstein’s unsuccessful lawsuit when two of his arthouse movies received X-ratings that put huge obstacles in their paths to success. In other words, even in those times, Weinstein had become successful enough to be noticed.
By the 1990s, Miramax had built up enough credibility that the success of The Crying Game was enough to convince Disney to pay $80 million for its ownership. The Weinstein brothers agreed to the sale in exchange for said sum. Moreover, the Weinstein brothers managed to convince Disney leadership to let them stay at the head of their film distributor business, thus letting them continue to run its revenue-earning operations with minimal interruption. In this period, Miramax went on to see further successes, with excellent examples including The English Patient, Good Will Hunting, and Shakespeare in Love.
Eventually, the Weinstein brothers made a choice to found their own production company, which winded up being called the Weinstein Company. This is where Weinstein was working when the sexual abuse allegations came out, which unsurprisingly, had a huge impact on the company. In short, three out of the nine members for the Board of Directors resigned from their positions the day after the news came out, which was followed by a fourth resignation the day after that. Soon enough, it was announced that Weinstein had been fired from his position while the remaining leadership scrambled for a way to put the company back on solid footing. Something that wasn’t helped by a fifth resignation from the Board of Directors.
In the end, the efforts to put the Weinstein Company back on solid footing failed. There was a point when it seemed as though the company would be bought out by an investor group, but when that proposal fell through, the company was forced to declare bankruptcy. Said investor group then came close to agreeing to a proposal to snap up the company’s assets in exchange for $500 millions, but that second proposal fell through as well when it turned out that the company had been misleading in regards to its financial situation, so much so that there was apparently another $55 to $65 million in liabilities that hadn’t been revealed. As such, it is no wonder that the second proposal fell through as well, thus forcing the Weinstein Company to follow through with its Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Nowadays, the Weinstein Company has a successor in the form of Lantern Entertainment that was created when Lantern Capital Partners snapped up its assets in exchange for $289 million at the bankruptcy auction.
Further Considerations
As for Weinstein, well, suffice to say that his financial prospects aren’t looking too good at the moment. It remains to be seen what will happen at his trial. However, the sheer number of women who have come forward suggests that there will be a lot of evidence presented at his trial, which in turn, suggests that at least some of his current charges will stick to him. As a result, Weinstein will presumably not be able to make money through his previous means for the foreseeable future. Something that is particularly true because his name is pretty much guaranteed to be poison for years and years to come, so much so that it is hard to imagine any company with revenue-earning operations that are even slightly reliant on reputation wanting to work with him. With that said, Weinstein will still presumably be receiving an income from passive sources, with investment income being an excellent example.
Some people might also wonder whether Weinstein’s current net worth will be seeing any significant changes thanks to civil lawsuits, particularly since civil cases don’t need to meet the same standard of proof as criminal cases. If so, they should know that there have been reports of a $44 million settlement deal having reached tentative agreement a while back, though there were also indications that some of the plaintiffs were unsatisfied at the time.
