Swifties, this one’s for you. It seems like Taylor Swift's Eras Tour has lasted eons. Yet somehow, there’s always something to talk about. Just thinking about how much she’s accomplished while on tour makes me want to buckle down, lock in, and channel my inner girlboss. But while I can’t even be bothered to cook dinner at home after a long day of work, Taylor is accomplishing milestones most musicians can only dream of. Let’s recap.
The Era’s Tour began in March 2023 with its North American leg. It’s set to go until December 2024, with dates in Europe, Australia, Asia, and South America— spanning 152 shows across five continents.
As the queen of multitasking, Swift hasn’t stopped at just selling out stadiums. Since the Eras tour began, she’s released multiple albums — both new and old — and shaken up the tour setlist with each new release. Her list of new releases started on the first day of her tour with “All Of The Girls You Loved Before,” which was quickly followed up by “The Alcott,” a feature on The National’s album — reciprocity for their work on her pandemic era albums, Folklore and Evermore.
She also released Midnights: Late Night Edition (including the iconic collab with Ice Spice), as well as not one but two album re-releases — Speak Now Taylor's Version and 1989 Taylor's Version. As if that wasn’t enough, she announced her latest album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, in a GRAMMY’s acceptance speech. Talk about legendary. Since its release, she’s also been churning out deluxe versions and remixes to keep us on our toes. The Eras Tour was even made into a Blockbuster film that brought Beyonce to its premiere. Star power: confirmed.
But that’s just her work life. Her personal life is just as eventful. She ended her 7-year relationship with Joe Alwyn in April 2023. Then entered into a brief but controversial fling with 1975 frontman Matty Healy. Though it didn’t last long, the relationship was enough to inspire a whole album and catapult her into her current romance with Travis Kelce, aka Amerca’s first nepo boyfriend. Now they’re the American Royal couple — and she somehow had time to fly from tour to his Super Bowl performance.
We all have the same hours in the day as Taylor Swift, but how she uses them will always be a mystery to me. I work eight hours a day and can barely manage a social life. Meanwhile, Taylor has it all — though conservatives are turning on her for daring to be a woman in her 30s who’s not married with kids. If that’s not proof that women can’t do anything right, I don’t know what is.
Clearly, she’s working late because she’s a singer. No wonder Taylor Swift became a billionaire months into her tour in October 2023. Her net worth is currently around 1.3 billion dollars, making her the only female musician to become a billionaire from her music.
Other entertainment billionaires like Rihanna, Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Jay-Z, and Kanye West have joined the three-comma club thanks to ventures like clothing brands, beauty products, and other entrepreneurial pursuits. Rihanna has her FENTY Empire. Kim has her award-winning SKIMS. Ye had Yeezy. But Taylor has an unbeatable catalog of publishing.
But Taylor isn’t just different from other Billionaires because of how she earned her money. She’s the Taylor we know and love because of how she spends it. Her rollercoaster Eras Tour is how she’s made much of her fortune. And she’s using it to give back in monumental degrees. From individual donations to investing in local infrastructure, Taylor is changing lives on a macro and micro scale. And teaching us what to expect from all billionaires in the process.
The Era’s Tour Bonuses — Talk About Workplace Benefits
First to make headlines were the Eras Tour crew bonuses. While some of us get rewarded with a pizza party or a $10 gift card to Starbucks, Taylor casually dropped $55 million in bonuses for her tour crew. The massive sum was paid out to everyone who makes the Eras Tour go around, from truck drivers to dancers and sound technicians.
In fairness, these bonuses are so well-deserved. Taylor’s shows are over three hours long. Imagine dancing for that long — because Swift certainly isn’t the one with the impressive moves — for hundreds of tour dates. Or remembering countless combinations of light cues to go with a setlist that changes daily. Yeah, they’re clocking in. And if my boss had millions to blow, I’d be expecting a comfortable bonus too. But $55 Million? That’s a testament to Swift’s generosity. It's like she's Oprah, but instead of cars, she's giving out life-changing amounts of cash. "You get a bonus! You get a bonus! Everybody gets a bonus!"
It’s similar to how Zendaya gave film equity to every member of the crew that worked on her controversial black-and-white drama, Malcolm & Marie. Filmed in a few days with a bare-bones crew during the peak of the pandemic, the film was Zendaya’s passion project with Sam Levinson, in which she starred alongside John David Washington. Though the film got mixed reviews, it captured the audience’s attention all the same. After all, it was Zendaya — and we’ll watch her in anything. So since the film sold to Netflix for a hefty sum, all the crew members got payouts from the deal on top of their salaries to reward their hard work.
Bonuses and equity payouts are common in many industries, but not entertainment. Even though it’s one of the most lucrative and recognizable American industries, most entertainers don’t make enough to survive. The SAG and WGA strikes last year were proof that there needs to be systemic change in the industry. LA County has even identified show businesses as risk factors for being unhoused — after all, how many stories do we hear of actors who were living in their cars before their big break? And for many, their big break never comes. For even more, they get hired on amazing gigs with giant performers … then go right back to the grind afterward. While individual actions from our favorite stars won’t fix everything, Zendaya and Taylor are providing models for how Hollywood should treat the people who make this town go round.
And in this economy, even a little bit could go a long way. Inflation and the cost of living are not a joke. Especially when, like with many creative careers, you often have to invest in lessons or equipment for your craft. With all this considered, the impact of Swirt’s donations can’t be overstated. Imagine getting a lump sum of cash for dancing to your favorite Taylor Swift tracks? Talk about a dream job.
The Economic Impact of Swift - Swiftonomics, if you will
Like Barbie and Beyonce last year, Swift is still on a tear to boost the economy of the cities she’s in just by traveling there — ad inspiring others to make the trek, too.
The Barbie movie proved that by marketing to women (instead of just making Marvel flops like Madame Web that aren’t really targeted to women at all), the entertainment industry can make giant profits. Barbie fever went beyond the theater. Thanks to a plethora of product collabs, the phenomenon rippled through retail.
Similarly, Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour tour generated an estimated $4.5 billion for the American economy. According to NPR, that’s almost as much as the entire 2008 Olympics earned for Beijing. People were taking money out of their 401ks to pay for Beyonce tickets and the glittery, silver-hues outfits to rock at her shows. Cities even started calling her effect the “Beyonce Bump.”
Swift has the same effect. She’s not just proving her generosity on a micro-scale for the people close to her, she’s having actual, tangible effects on the economy. It's like she's leaving a trail of dollar bills in her wake, and cities are scrambling to catch them like it's a country-pop, capitalist version of musical chairs.
The US Travel Association called it the Taylor Swift Impact after she generated over $5 Billion in just the first 5 months of the Eras Tour. But how does this work? It’s not like Taylor is printing more money at those shows, but it almost is. Her tour dates are pretty much economic steroid shots for local businesses. Hotels are booked solid, restaurants are packed, and let's not even get started on the surge in friendship bracelet supplies.
“Swifties averaged $1,300 of spending in local economies on travel, hotel stays, food, as well as merchandise and costumes,” say the US Travel Association. “That amount of spending is on par with the Super Bowl, but this time it happened on 53 different nights in 20 different locations over the course of five months.” That’s not to say one word about her effect on the actual Super Bowl and the entire NFL season thanks to her ball-throwing boyfriend.
It's like she's created her own micro-economy, and everyone's invited to the party. And unlike some economic theories that rely on wealth trickling down (spoiler alert: it doesn't), Taylor's wealth is more like a t-shirt cannon or the confetti at her shows — showering everyone around.
Donations that truly do good
Taylor isn’t just stepping into cities and calling it a night. She’s also not just throwing pennies at problems - she's making significant contributions that are changing lives. And more importantly, she's using her platform to encourage her fans to do the same.
She kicked off her tour with quiet donations to food banks in Glendale, Ariz., and Las Vegas ahead of the Eras Tour. Once the tour was in full swing, she continued this practice. In Seattle, she donated to Food Lifeline, a local hunger relief organization. In Santa Clara, she showed some love to Second Harvest of Silicon Valley. And let's not forget about her $100,000 donation to the Hawkins County School Nutrition Program in Tennessee.
She’s been making similar donations overseas. Taylor Swift donated enough money to cover the food bills for an entire year across 11 food banks and & community pantries in Liverpool. Swift also covered 10,800 meals for Cardiff Foodbank and many more banks across the UK and EU. Her impact is so profound that her numbers are doing more to combat issues like hunger than the government.
Can billionaires actually be good?
One thing about me, I’m always ready and willing — knife and fork in hand — to eat the rich. Because fundamentally, can any billionaire really be good? In our late-stage capitalist horror story, the answer is usually no. Look how many of them are supporting the Trump campaign just to get some tax breaks.
But here's the thing - Taylor Swift might just be the exception that proves the rule. She's not perfect, sure. She still flies private jets and probably has a carbon footprint bigger than Bigfoot. But unlike most of the others in her tax bracket, she's not flaunting her wealth like it's a personality trait.
Take a look around. We've got billionaires trying to colonize Mars instead of, I don't know, helping people on Earth. In this context, Taylor's approach is more like Mackenzie Scott’s — Bezos’s ex-wife. She's not trying to escape to another planet - she's trying to make this one better.
And look, I'm not saying we should stop critiquing billionaires or the system that creates them. But she's just setting the bar for what we should expect from all billionaires. She's showing us that our collective power as fans can translate into real-world change. That our love for catchy choruses and bridge drops can somehow, improbably, lead to food banks getting funded and crew members getting life-changing bonuses.
So sorry to my neighbors who hear me belting “Cruel Summer” and “right where you left me” at the top of my lungs (and range). Just know it’s for the greater good.
Dear Fossil Fuel Executives: How Can You Live With Yourselves?
Horrific heat waves across the nation, leaving hundreds dead. Wildfires tearing apart the American West. Billions of shellfish died in the Pacific in a mass die-off. All of this within the past week. Another destructive hurricane season is incoming.
Welcome to the era of the climate crisis. For a long time, activists and journalists have been yelling about it; but decades of inaction, doubt, and misinformation have stalled progress, leaving us on track to blow past worse-case scenarios predicted years ago.
A new bombshell report from the IPCC, recently leaked in France, warned that global warming was happening faster than expected, and several "tipping points" — significant climate changes that cannot be reversed — have already happened. "Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems," it warned. "Humans cannot."
Of course, we can still mitigate the worst consequences of the climate crisis by decarbonizing and switching to renewable energy. Every single degree that we can reduce warming by is incredibly significant; every fraction of a degree means another nation not flooded, another war caused by drought or starvation avoided.
This is common knowledge, understood by the majority of our world's leaders. So what is stopping progress? Why have we moved so unfathomably slowly towards change?
At the heart of the issue is the fossil fuel industry, which is currently fighting tooth and nail to block climate legislation and maintain the oil and gas industries. This is not a new phenomenon. Since the 1980s, when the first reports of climate change's potentially dire consequences emerged, the oil and gas industries have been launching disinformation campaigns to convince the public that climate change is a myth, while spending billions to block climate legislation on federal and global levels.
Fossil fuel companies knew as far back as the 1960s that their products could potentially be dangerous. A 1968 paper produced for the American Petroleum Institute found that carbon dioxide levels were rising in the atmosphere, potentially causing rising sea levels and significant changes in the global ecosystem.
By the early 1980s, fossil fuel companies including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio, and Standard Oil of California, and Gulf Oil were meeting together in a task force to discuss climate change, showing that they were always aware of the problem long ago. The evidence is stark, and stunning, particularly because these same fossil fuel companies would later deny that climate change was even real.
Somehow, by the 1990s, the American Petroleum Institute was organizing million-dollar plans to challenge the science of climate change; Exxon and Chevron were revealed to be participants in the plan. Exxon-funded think tanks received millions in funding to create research that "disproved" climate change, much of which was later debunked.
Over the next 20 years, fossil fuel companies would launch ever-more advanced disinformation campaigns to convince the public that climate change wasn't real. "The fossil fuel industry's denial and delay tactics come straight out of Big Tobacco's playbook," reads a report on the industry's disinformation efforts.
Fossil-fuel-funded right-wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation — many of which were funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers and Exxon — manufactured research that appeared to "debunk" climate change.
But mysteriously, "90% of skeptical or denialist climate change papers in the United States originate from right-wing think tanks." The Washington Post reports, "In the 1990s, oil companies, fossil fuel industry trade groups, and their respective PR firms began positioning contrarian scientists such as Willie Soon, William Happer, and David Legates as experts whose opinions on climate change should be considered equal and opposite to that of climate scientists."
"Think tanks, foundations, trade associations and other third-party groups that represent fossil fuel companies for promoting 'contrarian' science that misleads the public and disrupts efforts to implement climate policies needed to address the rising threats," Politico wrote last week.
"Rhetoric on climate change and the undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, unduly discounted risk and urgency, dissent, and, most importantly, polarized public support delaying mitigation and adaptation action, particularly in the U.S."
This disinformation spiraled into what we have today: A world that has barely lifted a finger to respond to climate change, leaving us with disaster after disaster. Why? What was all this misinformation for?
It was to preserve the profits of fossil fuel industries. It was mostly to continue to line the pockets of wealthy fossil fuel executives.
If there is a hell, Exxon's various CEOs — like Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson — who denied their own companies' climate research while raking in profits — will one day burn in it for what they did. Their actions, along with the leaders of various disinformation campaigns and politicians, will condemn millions — if not billions — of people to death. They should be viewed alongside the greatest villains of our history as orchestrators of mass genocide.
Fewer than 100 companies are responsible for two-thirds of climate change. The leaders of these companies should be recognized as genocidal criminals, and they should burn in hell. "What is unfolding could be, in a sense, a series of individual 'slow genocides' that, taken together, amount to a collective extermination," writes James Robbins in The New Republic.
Yet their efforts continue, even as the world grows hotter. The great irony is that even if these people burn in hell, innocent people on Earth will also burn in the fire-torn, heat-soaked world they created.
It's not too late. It will never be too late. There will always be more that we can save. There is so much to do. Emily Atkin's Heated has an excellent primer on how to take action, which can look like lobbying the government or joining a campaign or teaching or educating; the important thing is that everyone does something. However, contrary to the popular narrative that defined environmentalism for the past few decades, simply conserving water and recycling is not enough.
Ironically, the fossil fuel companies were also largely responsible for spreading the myth that individual action could stop climate change. BP, for example, was responsible for creating the myth of the "carbon footprint."
Today, fossil fuel companies are trying to pull similar tricks by greenwashing themselves, launching PR campaigns that make it seem like they are "going green" when actually, they are contributing to the problems more than ever.
The fossil fuel industry has to die. It has to stop pouring poison into our atmosphere and condemning billions to agonizing suffering. It needs to be replaced by renewable energy — which could create millions of jobs and supercharge the economy — and fast.
There is hope. There's always hope. The European Union recently unveiled an ambitious plan to achieve a carbon-neutral future within the next nine years, which includes a plan to tax jet fuel and effectively ban petrol and diesel-powered cars over the next 20 years. "We're going to ask a lot of our citizens," EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans said. "We're also going to ask a lot of our industries, but we do it for a good cause. We do it to give humanity a fighting chance."
But the plan is expected to suffer through years of negotiations before implementation — years that we don't have.
And the fossil fuel executives and politicians who continue to push back against these efforts — even as the world burns — should have a place next to the worst genocidal madmen in our history.