Forget everything you've seen on The Apprentice; you can't get rich by dressing up as a lion and selling sweeties to screaming children at the zoo – but you can get rich by telling fat people they can't sing very well in a smugly camp way.
Just ask Simon Cowell. By sneering at bad singers, sacking inept little Irish pixies and rolling his eyes every time someone mentions a very recent massacre, Simon Cowell has become the biggest mover in this year's Sunday Times Rich List. It's now estimated that X Factor and American Idol have earned Simon Cowell £100 million, something that Simon Cowell plans to celebrate by having his granny teeth whitened to such an extent that the shine will be enough to boil the inside of a normal human eyeball in less than a second.
Simon Cowell is rich. Simon Cowell isn't so rich that he can't throw a tantrum when Bruce Springsteen gets paid more than him, but in the last year Simon Cowell has got richer than anyone else in Britain. Which really is an achievement for someone in charge of a cack-handed bunch of simpering bell-ends like Il Divo.
The Sunday Times Rich List has just been announced and, while Simon Cowell isn't as rich as an Indian who makes steel or that Chelsea bloke, he has been named at the biggest mover from last year's list, as Metro reports:
The X Factor judge is the biggest mover in this year's Sunday Times Rich List, up to 700 from a mere 944th in 2006… Cowell has an estimated £100million fortune, up £60million in a year after his continued TV success on both sides of the Atlantic. He has even overtaken Robbie Williams, who is at No.755. The singer has increased his wealth by only £5million to £95 million over the year.
Poor old Robbie Williams. But, still, we expect that buying and eating 60 cigarettes, 36 double espressos, 20 cans of Red Bull and handfuls of Seroxat every day must hit a man's wallet pretty hard. And congratulations to Simon Cowell, whose success will act as a timely lesson to the British youth of today that they too can achieve their dreams by being vaguely homophobic and directly insulting the mentally ill whenever they get the chance. Oh, and by being dismissive of Britney Spears' suicide attempt, but everyone knew that already.
As rich as Simon Cowell is, he might still has a long way to go before he's among the giants of entertainment – Oprah Winfrey is worth £750 million – but he's certainly lording it over the dead celebrities of the world, making more money than Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Albert Einstein and Johnny Cash combined.
What does that mean exactly? It means that being rude about others in a British accent is the new blowing your head off with a shotgun, dying on the toilet because you shits were too big, having a museum for your replica teeth, solving the mysteries of the universe and burning your house down from beyond the grave because a Bee Gee bought it. Duh.
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