Ringo Starr Lives An Unbelievably Lavish Life

The story of Ringo Starr begins with Richard Starkey, a local of Liverpool, England, who grew up economically disadvantaged and with numerous long-term illnesses. He grew up, adopted the name Ringo Starr because of his affinity for hand jewelry, and became an excellent rock drummer who played in a few different early rock 'n' roll bands before he joined the Beatles. When he became a member of that band, and as the decade wore on, Starr became one of the most beloved, popular, successful, and wealthy musicians of all time. "Beatlemania," as well as an acclaimed musical output, permanently entrenched Starr into the wealthy celebrity firmament. On a more base level, he was a Beatle, receiving and enjoying all of the benefits that status entailed, and he remained a superstar into the 1970s.

He's since moved into an elder statesman of rock 'n' roll, while also trying out a number of other artistic pursuits and business deals. The result is that Starr is quite rich, and he enjoys that money to the fullest. Here's a look at the almost impossible lifestyle and the rare and fancy spoils of being Ringo Starr, a humble drummer with a glitzy and luxurious existence.

The whole reason Ringo Starr is able to live a fabulous life of wealth and luxury starts with the Beatles. Starr was the band's drummer and occasional singer, and together the Fab Four sold more than 207 million records in the U.S. alone, the most of any band in history. He also sold multiple millions of copies of his solo work – primarily his solo albums — and both performance and songwriting royalties provided Starr with tens of millions of dollars over the decades. Starr received another enormous sum when he sold off his rights to his solo works from the 1970s and beyond (including solo smashes like "It Don't Come Easy" and "Photograph"), and the music he wrote and recorded with the Beatles back in the 1960s (such as "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden"). In 2018, Starr ceded the rights to more than 150 songs to the global music publisher Bertelsmann Music Group.

The amount BMG paid to Starr wasn't disclosed, but by the early 2020s, Starr's net worth was estimated to be in the range of $350 million. That makes the singer and drummer — who hasn't scored a Top 40 hit since 1981 — one of the wealthiest rock musicians in the world.

Ringo Starr has plenty of money to live in very nice homes, and he's done so for most of his adult life. In 1999, he and his wife, Barbara Bach, moved into a home about two hours outside of London in the English county of Surrey. A Jacobean estate dating back to the 17th century, Starr spent a small fortune on outfitting the mansion with modern conveniences and systems. Among the amenities kept up to code: a separate cottage, a home theater, a music room, and a helipad to allow Starr to easily commute by air into London when necessary. The six-bedroom home, which also included six party and gathering rooms, sat on 200 acres amongst small ponds and well-maintained gardens. Purchased for £2 million, Starr sold it 15 years later for an estimated £20 million.

After that, Starr moved into an equally palatial mansion, making his home in Beverly Hills his primary residence through the 2020s. The five-bedroom, six-bathroom house also includes a private gym, a yoga studio, meditation spaces, and a home theater. The whopping 5,515 square footage doesn't even include the outdoor bonuses, such as gardens, lawns, and wooded areas. The entire property is estimated to be worth about $14 million.

After first visiting Monaco, the tiny, wealthy city-state situated on the southern Coast of France, in the 1960s, Ringo Starr became a part-time resident of the exclusive principality in 1975. Seeking to establish roots there, since the small country doesn't levy taxes on income or capital gains, Starr first took residence in the Roccabella, a well-appointed apartment building on a street with some of the highest real estate prices in the area. After marrying Barbara Bach in the early 1980s, Starr and the actor moved up and into a modest, modernist home situated right on the beach. "Monaco's got everything: the sun, the sea, the peace," Starr told Monaco Voice.

While Starr and Bach quietly moved out of Monaco some time after, preferring to spend the majority of their time in Los Angeles and the U.K., he was a man about town. Locals could find Starr hanging out in spots like the Café de Paris, gawking at the many expensive yachts in the harbor, and attending the Monaco Grand Prix auto race.

Memorabilia relating to the Beatles is so old and rare now as to increase its value. Ringo Starr himself controls a lot of relics of the Fab Four and the Beatlemania period, and has them on display throughout his home in Beverly Hills. Starr keeps his home life rather private, but those who have visited report that the residence is something akin to a Beatles museum; the interior design concept of much of the home is the music of the Beatles and Starr's subsequent solo career. The mansion includes multiple guest rooms, and each is decorated with items that relate to a particular period of Starr's professional life.

The Beatle used to be in possession of even more remarkable Beatles stuff, except that he lost a lot of it to a disaster in 1979, when his Hollywood residence at the time sustained a house fire. While there was no loss of life, the property was significantly affected, and many one-of-a-kind pieces of personal Beatles miscellany were destroyed beyond repair. 

Another portion of Starr's Beatles collection was sold off in 2015. Starr auctioned off a number of his treasures, including a Rickenbacker guitar presented as a gift by John Lennon, the first pressed copy of "The White Album," and the drum kit used on "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Sales generated $9.2 million for Starr's charitable organization, The Lotus Foundation.

Even before Ringo Starr joined the Beatles and became an international superstar, the musician often spared no expense when acquiring fast, rare, and interesting sports and luxury cars. Starr was the first Beatle to own a car, although he bought the vehicle — a now classic and valuable 1959 Standard Vanguard — before he became the group's drummer in 1962. 

Starr also owned a succession of classic, high-end Mercedes models. Starr has possessed a 1960 190 SL worth about £200,000 ($264,000), a 450 SEL made in 1981, and an S600 made in 1968. The first Mercedes in his collection was the one Starr drove for years, until he crashed the 1969 edition in London in 1980. He paid to have it compressed into a cube and used it as a table in one of his homes.

Some of the Batmobiles through the years were designed by George Barris for the 1960s "Batman" TV show, and that's who Starr commissioned to customize his 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, outfitting it with leather insides and an exterior flame paint job. In addition to a Mini Cooper specially made to transport his drum kit, Starr owned one of only 182 Vega models. Built between 1962 and 1964, and one of the speediest cars of the decade, Starr's sold in 2013 for £350,000. All told, the drummer's car collection is worth somewhere in the area of £800,000, or about $1.1 million.

There are two kinds of people with lots of money. The rich may possess assets or accounts totaling a few million dollars. And there are the super-rich, those with tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in net worth spread across multiple accounts. The super-rich have so much money that they can and often will do what they can to protect it from taxation. Ringo Starr is among the latter class of wealthy folks, enjoying an estate worth far north of $300 million. And in 2021, he and his business managers were among the celebrities whose alleged creative accounting methods were exposed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The organization's exposé, code-named the "Pandora Papers," revealed the existence of tax shelters. Rich celebrities had reportedly created largely phony corporations in places where income tax rates are very low or don't exist, such as Anguilla, Switzerland, and the British Virgin Islands. Then those very rich people, Starr among them, ran their wealth through accounts associated with those offshore companies to essentially hide the money from being taxed as income by their nations of residence. 

Starr or one of his employees had created two companies in the Bahamas, which were used to purchase a Los Angeles home that belongs to the drummer. Starr also created five trusts in Panama — three own the life insurance policies of the musician, while others directly receive the money from Starr's recording royalties and live performances.

The world of physical art is a monied one, with buyers and sellers exchanging large sums of money for the right to own a unique portrait or painting made by a well-known individual. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which enjoyed a fad-like run of popularity that was connected to the rise and mainstreaming of cryptocurrency, are also artworks, but they revolve almost entirely around the concepts of investment possibility and profit generation. 

Ringo Starr has dipped into both different but similarly money-fueled aspects of the art industry. The musician began painting in the 1960s, but got so waylaid by his career that he didn't much pick up a brush again for 40 years. However, he resumed painting and graphic design in earnest in 2005, and he's publicly displayed and sold many of his works. He favors a crude or outsider style that meets pop art, and he explores subjects like peace and celebrity when not generating self-portraits. The artist sells his own works through his website for thousands of dollars a pop, even for prints and re-creations.

Starr took the same artistic approach to NFTs in 2022, creating a line of ephemeral artwork to promote a concert tour. Julien's Auctions sold off pieces created just by Starr for the digital space, but which came with a signed, physical version, too.

One major moment in the history of Elton John came in 1974, when the British pop-rock musician plunked down £400,000 to buy Woodside, an 18th-century country manor in England, as well as the expansive grounds upon which it sits. The property remains the home of a gift sent over and plopped down on the lawn shortly after John moved in. The gesture once erroneously attributed to George Harrison was actually an act of costly generosity by a different Beatle, Ringo Starr. The drummer gifted John a near-life-size dinosaur, a rough approximation of a Tyrannosaurus rex made of fiberglass, named Daisy.

John's landscape architects had to use a helicopter to move Daisy the dinosaur away from the lawn and into a more forested area of the estate, not so much to hide it (or her, as she is referred to by staff), but to make the best of a special advanced feature that Starr had made sure to include in the gift. When guests unknowingly wander by the partially plant-shrouded Daisy, her eyes turn red, triggered by infrared sensors.

In addition to music, Ringo Starr enjoyed a moderately successful film acting career in the 1970s and 1980s. His best-known work in this vein is likely the 1981 comedy "Caveman," in which Starr portrayed a prehistoric ur-man named Atouk who falls for a cavewoman named Lana, played by Barbara Bach. Starr and Bach fell in love on the set of the movie and married in April 1981. The wedding itself was a low-key and very low-cost affair, as the ceremony was performed by a civil servant at the Marylebone Register Office in London. The other surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, and their wives witnessed the event, where Bach wore a dress custom made by designers Elizabeth and David Emanuel, who that same year made Princess Diana's historic wedding gown.

After the short ceremony, the newlyweds took their wedding photos with hired high-priced New York celebrity photographer Terry O'Neill, then met their 70 invited guests at the lavish reception at Rags, a classy nightclub rented out for the occasion. Few details were witnessed by or revealed to the public, other than that Mr. and Mrs. Starr ate a star-shaped cake and gave each of their guests a souvenir: a star made completely out of silver.

When he tours with Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band, Ringo Starr issues a rider to promoters and venue staff. A list of production demands as well as the needs and wants of the talent, Starr's wouldn't fall under the category of the weirdest backstage riders, but it's definitely one of the most expensive to execute. 

In 2023, Starr asked for some top-shelf health foods to await him in his dressing room, including raisin-free organic oatmeal cookies, a basket of mixed organic fruit, a locally sourced jar of organic honey, and a chocolate bar with at least a 90% cacao content. Starr's quarters also need to be outfitted with a cable-connected TV, a sofa, a mirror, and a table set for four people.

Because Ringo Starr had a lot of health issues as a child, he's very germ-aware, and he asks that venue staff treat him as an immunocompromised person, which includes being up to date on COVID-19 vaccinations, wearing masks, and having an emergency doctor, dentist, and chiropractor on call. Starr also needs a police dog investigation of the backstage area before he arrives, a police escort to the concert hall, and guards in uniform positioned in front of the stage. (The tragic real-life story of Starr involved the drummer once receiving death threats.) And if Starr must stay overnight for a show, his hotel accommodations must be at the level of presidential suite or above.

Money affords one the possibility of traveling as comfortably as possible. And for Ringo Starr, that means heading from gig to gig with his Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band via a small, private aircraft. "At this point, we only do it in luxury — private plane and the nicest hotels," he told Rolling Stone in 2011 of his touring habits, acknowledging ownership of a Gulfstream GIV, a plane that costs around $3 million with annual operational costs in the area of $2.8 million. Starr isn't flashy or brash with the use of his plane, and he loans it out to associates in need. Bluegrass star Billy Strings arrived at his Renewal Music Festival in Buena Vista, Colorado, in 2024, but was then quickly asked to return to his home in Michigan when his wife went into labor earlier than planned. Starr heard about it and immediately gave Strings the full use of his private airplane.

The former Beatle also travels in class and comfort on water. In 2011, a massive yacht called the Lady M, quietly associated with being owned or at least rented by Starr, was spotted all over the rivers and coast of northern Oregon. Even if Starr didn't own the craft, it still cost him plenty: The Lady M reportedly has a weekly rental fee of $180,000.