Who’s the richest Guns N’ Roses member? Net worths, ranked: singer Axl Rose bought the band name, but guitarist Slash enjoys an epic solo career and bassist Duff McKagan studied finance for a reason
- More than 20 musicians have joined GNR, but only Axl Rose lasted the band’s messy 37-year history – how do the fortunes of OG members Slash, Duff and Steven Adler stack up against newer recruits?
- The record-breaking Not in This Lifetime reunion tour banked US$580 million, but founding member Izzy Stradlin declined to take part when his bandmates refused ‘to split the dough equally’
The Guns N’ Roses brand is synonymous with excess. The riffs. The rifts. The drugs. The girls. The private jets and never-ending tours. And the mounds of money its members have racked up – and burnt through – in the past 35 years.
Among the most decadent and debauched of rock groups, GNR oozed swagger, danger and machismo from the get-go, launched from the icky asphalt of LA’s Sunset Strip to the world. Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, genre-defining debut Appetite for Destruction shifted 30 million records – the second-best-selling debut album ever – and spawned five singles, including “Sweet Child o’ Mine”, an earworm so enduring it ensured none of the five founding members would ever have to work again. Well, if they saved, anyway.
But work they did, maintaining a hectic half-decade heyday schedule that was only matched by the band’s notorious alcohol and substance intake. By 1991, they had shed two members. The same year they simultaneously released two double albums – Use Your Illusion I and II – and embarked on a gruelling two-and-a-half-year tour that would prove the end of the band, in a sense.
So where are they today?
After years of infighting and inactivity, erratic lead singer Axl Rose claimed the blockbuster GNR brand as his own, leading a band of hired hands throughout the early 2000s while top hat-totin’ guitarist Slash and the rest of the OG gang went off to pursue solo careers of varying critical and commercial success.
Until, suddenly in 2016, three of the founding members formed an apparently uneasy, but incredibly lucrative, truce. The subsequent three-year-and-a-half-year Not in This Lifetime … Tour banked an eye-watering US$580 million after playing 158 shows to some 5.3 million people (including this writer, twice) – the equivalent of a cool US$3.7 million per night, making it the third highest-grossing tour in music history. And the juggernaut rolls on, with the post-pandemic We’re F’N Back! Tour trundling on into 2023 – all despite the fact just two new songs have emerged from the band in … 14 years.
At this point, around 80 musicians can claim to have played a role in the muddy GNR story, with 20-plus “official” members on the payroll – but to fans, only those that played on the classic records are truly deserving. So amid this patchwork of feuds, back-stabbing and disputed million-dollar contracts, who banked smart, who got cut out of the picture, and who made off with all the dough?
12. Tracii Guns (1985-1985) – US$500,000
