| For five weeks a year for the next three years, the 2,000-seat Coliseum at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, will be home to John, 57, whose 75 performances will earn him, as he admits, "£400,000 a show, plus extras" under a £35m contract. That, in a nutshell, is why the man is still high in this list despite his prodigious spending in the 1990s. Although he admits to spending up to £200,000 a time on clothes for his boyfriend David Furnish, his addiction demons are behind him. Now he appears just as often on the tennis court as in the gossip columns. He is a huge fan of the game. Last September his annual Smash Hits tennis tournament, co-hosted with Billie-Jean King in Boston raised more than £200,000 for his Aids foundation - last year he donated more than £10m to the cause. He must also derive great satisfaction from the fact that the pendulum of popular taste has once again swung his way. The Las Vegas deal confirms his stature as one of the world's top live performers. An American tour with Billy Joel last year grossed about £32m and 15 solo shows grossed an additional £5m. Equally gratifying is a renewed appreciation of his talents as a songwriter, which has resulted in a surge in record sales. His Greatest Hits 1970-2002 album stayed in the US top 100 for months last year. In Britain he scored a top 10 hit in August with Are You Ready For Love, a remix of a song originally recorded in 1979. In the 11 years to March 2002, two of his companies, J Bondi and Happenstance, paid him £162.9m in salary, while a third company, William A Bong, paid out the lion's share of £21m in wages to John in 2002-03. Our rock expert reckons that - even with his extravagance - the singer's extensive back catalogue, his Las Vegas work and his accumulated fortune make him £5m wealthier than last year. Had he been as frugal as fellow rock knight Sir Paul McCartney (qv), he would rival the former Beatle's worth. Still, the signs are encouraging: in October, John raised £1.4m from a clearance sale at his west London home.
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2003: £170m
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