Sir Paul McCartney

Most people associate Paul McCartney with the Beatles or Wings, recognizing him to be an outstanding songwriter and musician. In fact, Paul McCartney is listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as being the most successful popular music composer in history. Knighted by the queen, Sir Paul McCartney has 60 gold discs and record sales of more than 100 million singles to his credit, including 32 American #1 singles. His "Yesterday" has been covered by other artists more times than any other song, including at least 3,500 other artists and up to 7 million plays on American television and radio alone. His popular success continued with the music group Wings in which Sir McCartney released the first single to sell more than 2 million issue. This song, "Mull of Kintyre" remains as the best selling single in British music history outside of charity release.

The post-Beatles/post-Wings success of Sir Paul McCartney is also flabbergasting. He owns a company, MPL Communications, that has an impressive library of 3000 song copyrights, including the full publishing rights of several popular musicals, such as Grease and A Chorus Line, and the full body of work of Mr. Buddy Holly. Given all this commercial and artistic success, it is perhaps not surprising that Sir Paul McCartney is estimated to be a billionaire, with a personal net worth of approximately $1.2 billion (American).

Sir Paul McCartney's superlatives do not end there. He is associated with the fastest-releasing single in the history of music, involving his and U2's performance of the Beatles standard "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." That performance at Live 8 was available within 45 minutes of the last note being played, even before the bands had left the stage. Sir Paul McCartney also played before the largest stadium audience in history when he performed as a solo artist before 184,000 fans in Brazil at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro during 1990. I had the pleasure of getting his autograph at this performance which I treasure to this date. In sum, Sir Paul McCartney is the musical man.