Bruce Springsteen was already a certified rock god.
Well, now he’s a certified billionaire too.
New Jersey’s resident working-class hero has made the big Boss move with Forbes “conservatively estimating” him to be worth $1.1 billion.
Now how’s that for going from E Street to Easy Street?
No doubt — he’s certainly come a long way from the same guy who used to tend bar at the Stone Pony club in Asbury Park, New Jersey, that he would make famous. “I wasn’t much of a bartender, but I’d serve up the beers and just have fun with the fans, and just enjoy myself,” Springsteen says in the new book “I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony.”
“[My signature] was beer. With a Jack Daniel’s on the side, maybe.”
Clearly, the artist who was once starving for success, until the release of his album “Born To Run” in 1975, can afford to buy the entire state of New Jersey beers and shots of Jack Daniel’s now.
But even after the cash started to flow, Springsteen was never the type to go Hollywood, staying humble and grounded to home — and the “Backstreets” that shaped him.
“I was solvent, which would make me unique in my little neighborhood,” Springsteen said in “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” Warren Zanes’ 2023 book about 1982 LP “Nebraska.”
“So I was dealing with that, with all my very conflicted feelings about being so separate from the people that I’d grown up around and that I wrote about.”
After 20 Grammys, an Oscar, a Kennedy Center Honor, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and induction into both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, his billionaire status is the latest laurel for the 74-year-old living legend.
Certainly, Springsteen’s bank account got a major cash infusion when he sold his music catalog — featuring hits such as “Dancing in the Dark,” “Brilliant Disguise” and “Streets of Philadelphia” — to Sony in 2021, raking in a lump sum of $500 million.
“Everybody is getting what is in their interest,” his longtime manager, Jon Landau, told Forbes in 2022.
And in 2023, Springsteen’s world tour brought in more big bucks: $380 million, according to Pollstar.
He’s also become a rock star in real estate, with two lavish properties in Wellington, Florida and a residence in Beverly Hills he bought in 2010, which is now estimated at $15 million.
In 2017, he sold his 6,000 square-feet Rumson, New Jersey, home for $3.2 million. The Georgian-style house, which he bought in 1983, included an outdoor pool and separate guest house.
He purchased his current 368-acre ranch in 1994 and uses it as his primary residence.
His real estate portfolio is a striking difference from his upbringing. Per the Asbury Park Press, his two-family childhood home where he lived from 1955 to 1962 was sold for $255,000 in 2018.
Despite having dough for days, Springsteen is still very much a man of the people. In 2019, he was spotted on the treadmill in Marlboro, New Jersey, at the gym Jersey Strong — at a frugal cost that was then just $9.99. Another fan caught him getting his sweat on at WorkOut World in Tinton Falls, New Jersey — a far cry from Equinox.
And last year the Boss was seen chowing down on the cheap at Roberto’s Freehold Grill, a diner in Freehold, New Jersey. As further proof of the bond of the “Jersey strong,” Springsteen was even rescued by his fellow Jersey bikers when his motorcycle broke down in 2016.
No matter how fancy his digs or fat his pockets have become, for Springsteen it’s all about staying true to his roots as the scruffy Jersey boy who first greeted us from Asbury Park on his debut album in 1973.
“I just still like it here,” he told Variety in 2017. “I think Jersey Shore is a great place to live … I’m still a beach bum so I’ll swim until November. It’s just still a place that we love, man.”
Forty years after he released his biggest album, “Born in the USA,” in June 1984, Springsteen’s career has been on fire again.
While he’s in the midst of a world tour with the E Street Band — where he’s still giving fans all of their money’s worth with three-hour shows — this week his “Sandpaper” duet with Zach Bryan marks the first time that Springsteen has ever landed on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. It’s also his first appearance on the overall Hot 100 tally since 2009.
Plus, Jeremy Allen White — the Emmy-winning star of the hit FX series “The Bear” — has been tapped to play the “Born to Run” rocker in an upcoming biopic.
So it’s safe to say that — following his recovery from peptic ulcer disease, which sidelined him from last September until March — Springsteen’s glory days are far from over.
