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 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 literally 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 literally 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 definitely 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 anothing of 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 actually 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.
SPEAKERS CORNER - Tech Founders Talking
A series by tech entrepreneurs, anonymous… or not
When The Bottom Line Is Human Dignity
I am not a tech entrepreneur, as such, but the use of tech has been central to the foundation and growth of my business ventures. Without the revolution in technology and communications that began in the 1990s, our then garage start-up could not have come into existence and competed effectively on an international basis with the then entrenched behemoths in our industry. We’ve managed to anticipate and ride various waves along the way to industry leadership such that the effective leveraging of technology (almost entirely developed by others) lies at the heart of our competitive proposition. However, I would argue that all sizable companies are tech companies, so I accepted an invite from the Liberty Project to contribute a piece to the Speakers Corner series.
I would also suggest that this summary represents nothing new, in that technology only matters when people apply it to practical purposes. Simply as one example, take steam power. Ancient Greek philosophers (see Hero of Alexandria) developed a steam engine. But it took Watt and Fulton to bring the concept to commercialization and to change the practical facts for people on the ground by providing cheaper access to power. That power made transportation by rail and water accessible, opening an age of mobility that changed millions of lives. Indeed, that power drove the industrial revolution, as businesses integrated steam and its implications into their models, creating tremendous investment capital, and raising standards of living on a mass scale.
At the same time, the Romantic poets decried industrialization as the passing of a simpler time. Of course, many of those poets were quite rich and enjoyed vestigial privileges conferred by feudalism (Byron and Shelley lived lives of relative ease). From that vantage point they lamented the loss of the natural soul of humanity, as if such humanity should have been bound to the soil and been happy about it. On the other hand, the mass migration of people from the country to the city, which continues to this day in industrializing economies such as India and China, reveals that people will gladly trade the vicissitudes of the land for the prospect of a more remunerative job created by technological advancement.
But the Romantics had a point: such advancement always comes at the cost of change and at the goring of the previous order’s proverbial ox. The saboteurs threw their wooden shoes into the cogs of industrial machinery. The British Luddites fought a five-year battle in opposition to the industrialization of weaving that rendered their personal skills obsolete. Indeed, their name still echoes as the term for those opposed to industrialization and new technology. Technological disruption has real effects on real people and elicits strong responses accordingly, regardless of whether the change brings long-term prosperity and better standards of living in the larger picture.
This dynamic tension between the human condition and technology remains a pressing topic, particularly as the pace of technological change accelerates. A previous contributor to this series pointed out thatgreed is good, in the sense that it provides motivation and a spur to creativity. One cannot argue the objective results, as the profit motive lies behind the applied technology that has increased human flourishing (at least as a function of things like life expectancies and standards of living) since the industrial age. On the other hand, there’s the dehumanizing element of technology in the tendency to reduce individuals to more specialized roles within a vast economic machine. Technologists openly speculate about the mass replacement of human activity on the basis of AI and machine learning, even to the point of requiring a universal basic income in place of the dignity of work. Huxley’s Brave New World, in which humans become mere outcomes of a breeding and conditioning process with preordained roles in a structured society, seems less and less like fiction.
Bringing this back to the scale of entrepreneurship, I would argue that we can find a guide for our behavior in the bigger picture if we consider the fundamental purpose of a business. For sure, a business must make money, else it will not exist. So, profit represents a sine qua non for business existence just as food, clothing, and shelter does for the existence of any person. But no one would argue that those basic necessities are themselves the purpose, or end, of human existence. And nor should anyone argue the same regarding business profits. On the contrary, a good business sits at the confluence of enlightened self-interest and the common good. When we run our businesses well, we solve problems for our customers and improve their lives (else, why would they transact with us in the first place?). When we run our businesses well, we provide growth opportunities for our employees as well as economic stability for them. And, when we run our businesses well, we provide the same opportunities for our own vendors and for their employees. In other words, a business ought to exist to increase human thriving through all aspects of its activity.
Human dignity lies at the heart of this understanding: the recognition that each person our businesses touch exists as an end in and of themselves. Customers are not some notional group of disembodied people to be segmented and marketed to in order to elicit Pavlovian responses, but rather actual people whom we touch with our business activity. Employees cannot be mere cogs in a machine to be optimized and discarded, but rather are individuals seeking both their daily bread and personal fulfillment through the work they do. Vendors cannot be viewed as opponents in a zero-sum game of profit, but rather are to be treated as partners in the co-creation of something meaningful. There’s a reason that Jim Collins’ research into the most successful business leaders (he calls them Level 5 Leaders) reveals the common trait of humility: great leaders (and great businesses) prioritize the dignity of others.
So, I would encourage us to remember this as businesspeople as we go about our daily affairs and as we engage in the public square. The intersection of technology and disruption is nothing new and, indeed, leads to great goods for great numbers of people. But we should remember that technology (just like our own businesses) should serve people and lead to human flourishing. When we prioritize the dignity of the individual, we will make decisions that lead to that outcome.