Celebrities can come across as pretty out-of-touch when they talk about money. Sometimes, though, they’re aware of their own privilege and aren’t shy to call out their peers for excess and greed.
Here are 18 times celebs held nothing back:
1.
When Tina Fey appeared on Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang in 2025, Amy told her, “I feel like you should have a hair campaign, and also, I’m always pushing you to have a glasses line. Why do you not have a glasses line? You hate money?” Tina replied, “I…do kind of hate money. As we know, I’m terrible with money. I’m not terrible with money only in that I don’t waste money, but I don’t get excited about money if I’m safe and if I have enough money to live. I have a problem with rich people having a side hustle.”
Amy asked, “Yeah. You mean like a podcast or something?” Tina said, “No, because you’re doing work. I’m saying if you sold, like…If you already have, like $200 million, and you’re like, ‘Also, I need you to…'” Amy replied, “But Tina, this is where you have to learn from Gen Z. I’m sorry, we have to.” Tina said, “They don’t care. They don’t judge it. I judge it.”
2.
In 2024, Billie Eilish told Billboard, “We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money and gets them more…I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is. It is right in front of our faces, and people are just getting away with it left and right.”
“And I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable — and then it’s some of the biggest artists in the world making fucking 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more. It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers, and you care that much about making money — and it’s all your favorite artists doing that shit,” she said.
After some fans accused her of “shading” Taylor Swift — who’s been criticized for selling many vinyl versions per album — Billie responded on her Instagram story. She wrote, “okay so it would be so awesome if people would stop putting words into my mouth and actually read what i said in that billboard article. i wasn’t singling anyone out, these are industry-wide systemic issues . & when it comes to variants, so many artists release them – including ME ! which i clearly state in the article. the climate crisis is now and its about all of us being part of the problem and trying to do better sheesh.”
3.
In 2024, Mindy Cohn told Sirius XM that the planned The Facts of Life reboot was dead in the water because of a “greedy” costar. She said, “We had all never really talked about it, but we all started to consider it a little bit. And we got into talks, and we hired a writer. And the four of us got together on Zooms. This was during COVID, and we had meetings with Norman [Lear] about it…What happened was not cute. There was drama…from one of them. It wasn’t me, I’ll put it that way. One of the girls…went behind our backs and tried to make a separate deal for a spinoff just for herself and devastated the rest of us who we all, you know, I had booked Palm Royale, another girl is working. I’m just saying it was, for a 40-year friendship and sisterhood, there was a tidal wave of emotion around it…Greedy bitch.”
She continued, “We didn’t [talk to her] for a while, and now we do ish. But then, there’s definitely…it was an ouch…[There’s] no desire to ever work together. It’s dead. It’s very dead. A couple of people can’t move past it, don’t want to move past it. We are not as united. Let me put it that way. We were united for 40 years over not talking about each other, not doing dirty, not, you know, all for one, one for all, and this kind of wrecked that, which is sad. Really sad.”
4.
Early in her modeling career, Tyra Banks was more careful with her money than her peers. In 2018, she told Money, “Even before my career, I was a saver. My brother was a spender; I was a saver. I would hold onto it forever and dole it out slowly. My mom explained to me the importance of real estate and that, typically, in Los Angeles, it’s going to appreciate. While a lot of models were partying it up and going shopping and buying a closet of designer clothes or staying at the top hotels during fashion week, I was at the Doubletree or Embassy Suites, saving my money, and bought a house at 20 years old. She explained to me investing is super important.”
She was so careful with her money that her accountants told her she needed to spend more. She said, “I was always conservative. I was always more interested in experiences over things. Things didn’t make me happy. I saved saved saved. But I saved to a fault. About 15 years ago, my accountants pulled me aside, and they were like, ‘Tyra. You’re not spending money. Nothing. You’re just giving it away to the government. You need to spend some damn money!’ So we created something called the ‘F Account.’ Which was the ‘frivolous account.’ And I had a budget to spend frivolously for the year, every year. I needed that to feel safe.”
5.
Ed Begley Jr. grew up with a factory worker-turned-actor father who “was not a star, he was a working actor like [Ed is].” In 2015, Ed told Ask NASA Climate, “We would visit some of these people with fat houses, and they didn’t seem one bit happier to me; in fact, they had all this stress and all these problems. I met all these movie stars and saw the anxiety that came with more stuff.”
6.
In 2024, the Cure’s Robert Smith called out Ticketmaster for adding fees to the band’s set ticket prices, which he made them refund. He told The Times, “I was shocked by how much profit is made. I thought, ‘We don’t need to make all this money.’ My fights with the label have all been about how we can price things lower. The only reason you’d charge more for a gig is if you were worried that it was the last time you would be able to sell a T-shirt. But if you had the self-belief that you’re still going to be here in a year’s time, you’d want the show to be great so people come back. You don’t want to charge as much as the market will let you. If people save on the tickets, they buy beer or merch. There is goodwill; they will come back next time.”
He continued, “It is a self-fulfilling good vibe, and I don’t understand why more people don’t do it. It was easy to set ticket prices, but you need to be pig-headed. We didn’t allow dynamic pricing because it’s a scam that would disappear if every artist said, ‘I don’t want that!’ But most artists hide behind management. ‘Oh, we didn’t know,’ they say. They all know. If they say they do not, they’re either fucking stupid or lying. It’s just driven by greed.”
7.
Robert’s comments inspired Neil Young to get rid of platinum tickets for his shows. In a 2025 post on Neil Young Archives, he said, “It’s the story of the bad thing that has happened to concerts worldwide. It’s this story that really helped me to realize that I have a choice to make and can make a difference for my music-loving friends. My management and agent have always tried to cover my back on the road, getting me the best deals they could. They have tried to protect me and my fans from the scalpers who buy the best tickets and resell them at huge increases for their own profits. Ticketmaster’s high-priced Platinum tickets were introduced to the areas where scalpers were buying the most tickets for resale. The money went to me. That did not feel right…I have decided to let the people work this out. Buy aggressively when the tickets come out, or tickets will cost a lot more in a secondary market.”
8.
In 2021, Daniel Craig told Candis Magazine, “Isn’t there an old adage that if you die a rich person, you’ve failed? I think Andrew Carnegie gave away what in today’s money would be about $11 billion, which shows how rich he was, because I’ll bet he kept some of it, too.”
He also said he thinks leaving a large inheritance to your heirs is “distasteful.” He said, “My philosophy is get rid of it or give it away before you go.”
9.
In 2023, Julia Fox gave a tour of her “very underwhelming” apartment on TikTok. She said, “I believe in maximum transparency, so I’m going to give you an apartment tour! I know I’m going to get roasted. Maybe someone can watch this and be like, ‘Okay, I’m not doing so bad.’ …For me personally, I just — I don’t like excessive displays of wealth. They make me feel icky. Especially people that have really big houses. It’s just really wasteful when there’s so many homeless people in this country. I’m just not really like that.”
In a follow-up TikTok, she responded to criticism (and speculation she had a net worth of $30 million). She said, “I just want you guys to know that like, first of all, I’m not worth $30 million, not even close. And second of all, I don’t give a fuck. I don’t need $30 million. What does one person need $30 million for? I’ve survived on a lot less, and I’m doing just fine. This just happens to be the apartment where I took my son home from the hospital to, so it’s his home. It really is [her son] Valentino’s apartment. It’s like a sentimental thing. That’s kind of why I’m like, even though I could probably afford a bigger place — probably, because I am in New York, after all — it’s about having that sense of normalcy for Valentino.”
10.
When Nick Cannon was set to host a reboot of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (which has since been canceled), he told E! Online, “You know what? I think rich and famous people take themselves too seriously. I’m gonna be just like I am on this show [America’s Got Talent]. I’ll be like, ‘What the hell? Gold toilet seats?!’ Let’s pop bottles.”
11.
In 2022, Abigail Disney told CBS News, “I really believe that money ruins people. There’s this bug called the Japanese beetle, and it eats the tree out from the inside, and the tree looks completely fine until it falls over. I think money is like that. You develop a pattern of thinking and feeling that is corrosive.”
Reacting to news of Jeff Bezos telling his Amazon customers and employees, “You guys paid for all of this” upon his return from his first space flight, Abigail said, “I threw up in my mouth a little bit. I mean, the idea that he didn’t understand the insult that he was making there when he said, ‘Thank you for paying for my trip to outer space for – ‘ what was it, 20 minutes? He didn’t hear what he was saying. And there wasn’t a single employee there at the ground level who didn’t take that as an insult, and I certainly – a lot of customers – took it as an insult.”
12.
In 2021, Michael Sheen told the Big Issue, “I’ve realized in the last few years that I want to be one of those people who help other people the way so many people helped me. I don’t want to just be someone who enjoys the fruits of what other people have done and then pull the drawbridge up and go, ‘Well, I’m alright, Jack. I’ve had a nice time.’ I’m at the stage of my life and career where I have a window of opportunity that will probably never be this good again. I’m able to get people in a room; I can open doors. I don’t want to look back and think, ‘I could have done something with that platform. I could have done something with that money.'”
He continued, “Doing The Passion in 2011 [a 72- hour National Theatre Wales production through the streets of Port Talbot] was a turning point in my life. That project involved the entire town, and it was a big awakening for me. I got to know people and organizations within my hometown that I didn’t know existed. Little groups who were trying to help young carers, who had just enough funding to make a tiny difference to a kid’s life by putting on one night a week where they could get out and go bowling or watch a film and just be a kid. I would come back to visit three or four months later and find out that funding had gone and that the organization didn’t exist anymore. That stuff doesn’t make the news, but it makes a massive difference to kids’ lives. I realized the difference between that child’s life being a little bit better or not was ultimately a small amount of funding. And I wanted to help those people.”
“I didn’t just want to be a patron or a supportive voice; I wanted to actually do more than that. That’s when I thought, ‘I need to go back and live in Wales again.’ The other big thing that changed my thinking was the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff in 2019. I had committed to helping to organize that, and then suddenly, with not long to go, there was no money. I had to make a decision – I could walk away from it, and it wouldn’t happen. And all those people from all around the world who were banking on coming to have this extraordinary experience, maybe a life-changing experience, wouldn’t have it. I thought, ‘I’m not going to let that happen.’ So I put all my money into keeping it going. I had a house in America and a house here, and I put those up and just did whatever it took. It was scary and incredibly stressful. And I’ll be paying for it for a long time,” he said.
“But when I came out the other side, I realized I could do this kind of thing, and, if I can keep earning money, it’s not going to ruin me. There was something quite liberating about going, ‘Alright, I’ll put large amounts of money into this or that, because I’ll be able to earn it back again.’ I’ve essentially turned myself into a social enterprise, a not-for-profit actor,” he concluded.
13.
During a masterclass at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, Ethan Hawke said, “Greed runs our universe. If you say you just want to make money, everybody understands what you are going for, and they are fine with it. ‘Great, yeah, good. Oh, yeah, he sold ten billion Big Macs. Good for him.’ No, you just poisoned the whole world. I love it when people keep the great dream alive of making something magnificent, and it’s very hard because the whole industry that runs movie making is designed to make money — and most of all our favorite movies, that’s not what was motivating the project. I would never want to not be a person that wouldn’t sell their house to make a movie. I love that. I think it’s cool. I admire the hell out of it.”
14.
In a speech announcing the 2023 actors’ strike, Fran Drescher, the then-president of SAG-AFTRA, said, “What happens here is important because what’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor, when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run. We are the victims here. We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history.”
15.
Sharing a video of Fran’s speech on Twitter, John Cusack said, “The greed is almost a legendary comic trope – one fun fact – when I was a youngin- I did a film (with a boom box ) and somehow I got points – net not gross. Never expected to see any money – but the film became quite famous – so about 10 years ago – I looked again at the financial statements they were obligated to report – and to my shock – they claimed they had LOST 44 million dollars on the film – I thought wow , I almost bankrupted Fox! ( not really ) The film cost about 13 million to make – and money spent to release was minimal at the time – 30 years in – that film lost millions every year ! A neat accounting trick don’t ya think ?”
16.
And finally, in 2018, several of Kendall Jenner’s modeling peers called her out after she told Love Magazine that she was “never one of those girls who would do like 30 shows a season or whatever the fuck those girls do.” For example, on her Instagram story, Daria Strokous said, “‘Whatever the fuck those girls do’ is do their very best to make their way up AND try to make some money so that they can provide for themselves and their families. Oh, and it’s 70 shows a season by the way and we are all fucking proud of every single one of the girls that did it.”
17.
According to People, Vita Sidorkina said, “Maybe ‘those girls’ need to pay their bills that’s why they are doing 30 shows? No words…”
18.
And Jac Jagaciak reportedly said, “This makes me so angry… So disrespectful to literally 99% of people in the industry – yes they had to work their way up. Please get in touch with the real world!”
Kendall’s rep told People that the quote was taken “out of context,” adding, “Mid-thought she realized the number of shows some models walk a season is closer to 80. The point was that it’s their path and ‘the more power to them.’ She admires their hard work and dedication. It’s an accomplishment.”
