The Office co-creator Stephen Merchant has been named as the UK’s richest comedian, beating fellow co-creator Ricky Gervais and stand-up legend Peter Kay to the top spot.
According to new reports, Merchant boasts a net worth of £26.6million. The 48-year-old, who is best known for co-writing The Office and Extras with Gervais, has enjoyed huge financial success from his subsequent TV shows The Outlaws and Life’s Too Short.
Merchant is now believed to be richer than Gervais, who has a reported net worth of £24.4million. Peter Kay, meanwhile, comes in at third with an estimated £22million to his name.
It’s understood that the vast majority of Merchant’s fortune comes from his numerous TV production businesses, with his main company, SJJM LTD, being worth over £25million alone. Its value only increased in the past year, jumping by £3million between 2021 and 2022.
In 2017, Merchant shut down rumours that he was worth £40million, dismissing the reports as “FAKE NEWS!” He also claimed he was worth much less than the speculated figure, but did not specify the amount.
Stephen Merchant’s production company publishes results and made profits for the year of £2.5m, taking total profits to £25m and nearly £8m in the bank. Also has £15m of investments managed by Coutts. pic.twitter.com/5WB6npJelJ
— Kieran Maguire (@KieranMaguire) September 21, 2023
Merchant has not worked with Gervais since 2013, with the Bristolian comic previously admitting that the pair had gone in two different creative directions.
In 2018, Merchant had said he would be happy to work with Ricky Gervais again. “If the right idea was there, it’d be good to do something. But at the moment, there’s nothing on the horizon,” he said.
A couple of years later, Merchant made a playful jibe at Gervais‘s Netflix series After Life, which led some fans to wrongly speculate that there were issues between the two of them.
When asked by film critic James King “What is your least favourite bit of movie shorthand?”, Merchant responded: “Watching old home movies of dead child/wife = inability to move on.”
While he did not explicitly name After Life, the series focuses on Gervais’ character Tony as he mourns the loss of his wife, who died of breast cancer.
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