Tom DeLonge filed for divorce last year, and although his marriage ended, he is grateful that he got to be a father. To the musician, being a father beats every other accomplishment he has, including his music career, filmmaking, and writing children’s books. Still, his music is what has put him in the limelight and made him a wealthy man. Tom DeLonge’s net worth of $80 million is thanks to his times at Blink-182, and you can tell his frustration that his new band is not as successful as his former one. He even said streaming should be illegal, maybe blaming streaming platforms for the decline in revenue. However, Tom cannot complain about what he has managed to accumulate, and here is how he did it.
His start in music
Tom was determined to be a firefighter as a young boy, but one gift changed his career path. His parents gifted him a trumpet and encouraged him to practice until he got better so that his soothing tunes could wake them up every morning. Of course, “good” is subjective, and what Tom understood by being “good enough” was quite different from what his parents had in mind. Therefore despite being so bad that his music was compared to scratching nails on a chalkboard, Tom woke his parents up; it pissed his father off, but entertained his mother. Still, that was not enough to get him hooked to music, so he continued with mischief that resulted in him being expelled from high school.
His free time was spent skateboarding and drinking with his friends while listening to punk music by Descendants, which would later influence the kind of music he played. When he attended camp, fate ensured that Tom met the right people to connect him to his destiny. One of them was his bunkmate, who had brought along a guitar that piqued Tom’s interest, so he started playing music, not caring that he did not have any skills. He got so hooked to playing the guitar that he decided to get his own once he returned home. Consequently, he worked at Gary’s Chicken and Ribs and loaded concrete pipes onto trucks to earn enough money to buy his first guitar.
Before long, one of his friends who happened to be dating Mark Hoppus’ sister, Anne, introduced him to Mark. The two men became close friends, often visiting each other and, according to Kerrang, one day when Mark visited Tom in his bedroom, he carried his bass guitar. Tom had just written a riff, and when Mark plugged in his guitar, he strummed to the riff, and Tom thought the music was good. As a result, the riff became the first song Tom ever wrote for Blink-182, although he confessed it sounded like nursery rhymes on crystal meth.
Selling rights to his music
Matt decided to quit college to pursue his passion for music through the band he had formed with Tom DeLonge. They had also got themselves a drummer, Scott, but he left for college, so they had Travis Barker join the band later. By 1995, they had released their debut album. Their third album, “Enema of The State,” released in 1999, thrust them into stardom, and Blink-182 became the most renowned punk music band at the time. The fact is “Enema of The State” is the group’s highest-selling album, with over 15 million copies sold worldwide, and over 4.5 million in the United States. The band’s albums have sold over 13 million copies in the US and 50 million worldwide.
Pop Buzz listed them # 3 among pop-punk highest-selling bands, while Mark and Tom were #2 in the pop-punk rich list. Unfortunately, success has not come without a few strains within the group members. Tom has quit the band a few times and always was welcomed back, but Mark and Travis have had enough of him, saying they can no longer deal with an ungrateful and disrespectful person. Although they said Tom quit the band indefinitely, as late as May 2019, he was still quoted saying he would return in future.
However, that would only prove that Travis and Mark were right, especially since he quit because he did not want to spend his own money on music production. Tom has moved on with a new band, Angels & Airwaves, and sold the copyrights to the songs he wrote for the Blink-182 to Hipgnosis Songs. Although it is not clear how much the songwriter/guitarist received, it must have been quite a substantial sum for the 157-song catalog. All the same, the money he would receive owning the rights is not the same as when they are owned by someone else. Paul McCartney learned this fact the hard way after selling his rights and then buying other artists’ catalogs.
His net worth might decrease in future
Tom has always been interested in UFOs, and he said that trying to change the path on which humanity is and change the world for his kids played a huge role in his decision to quit Blink-182 in 2015. He established an organization, To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which he is determined to use in proving that indeed there is life out there, something that even President Donald Trump is questioning. However, the same way he refused to spend his own money on producing music for his former band, could be how he sank into debt to ensure his company remained a going concern.
In 2017, NME published that Tom DeLonge was seeking investors to contribute towards his first project: a vehicle that can instantaneously travel through the air, water, and space. Only 676 investors believed in his cause and contributed $320,000, perhaps being encouraged by Tom winning the UFO Researcher of The Year Award. Unfortunately, that amount was barely enough to run the academy, and by June 2018, the financial statements showed the company had accumulated a deficit of $37.432 million. Considering how committed he is towards proving aliens’ existence, Tom might be forced to sink his money in the company, unless of course, the government funds his dream since it has been rumored to support a program that studies UFOs.
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