E STREET TO EASY STREET Bruce’s worth $1B
Bruce Springsteen is the billionaire next door.
New Jersey’s resident workingclass 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?
Springsteen has certainly come a long way from the same guy who used to tend bar at the Stone Pony bar in Asbury Park, NJ, that he would make famous.
But even after the cash started to flow, Springsteen (inset) 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 his 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 enshrinement 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, Fla., and a residence in Beverly Hills, Calif., he bought in 2010, which is now estimated at $15 million.
In 2017, he sold his 6,000square-foot Rumson, NJ, home for $3.2 million. The Georgian-style house, which he bought in 1983, included an outdoor pool and a separate guest house. He purchased his current 368acre 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, though, Springsteen is still very much a man of the people. In 2019, he was spotted on the treadmill at the Marlboro, NJ, 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, NJ — 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, NJ. 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, though, 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.”