Who is the richest Survivor player to ever win?

During the last two voicemail shows on Rob Has A Podcast, Rob Cesternino and his co-host have discussed the question, “What winner of Survivor had the largest net worth prior to their win?“

In this blog post, I explain how I came up with the answer of Yul Kwon, winner of Survivor Cook Islands.

Before I dive too deeply into my research, I want to setup why this question is interesting. In the current season of Survivor, former professional basketball player Scot Pollard is competing. Currently, he has made it past the merge and allegedly he has a net worth of $8.5M, so if he makes it to the end, will people still vote for him to win? Does the fact that he has made millions of dollars in his career effect people’s decision?

In the early seasons of Survivor, former NFL player Gary Hogeboom played, and he told everyone his name was Gary Hawkins and that he worked as a landscaper. He was worried that people might target him because they would believe he was already wealthy. Similarly, former baseball player Jeff Kent played in season 25 and also lied about his profession.

Jimmy Johnson played in Survivor Nicaragua, and since everyone knew who he was, he couldn’t lie about his profession, but he told everyone to take him to the end anyway because no one would vote for him. He ended up being voted off early due to his age as a liability in the challenges rather than anything to do with his wealth.

As you can see, there’s been a number of wealthy or at least, formerly wealthy people to play, but who out of the winners, was the richest? And if someone very wealthy won, why was that not a factor?

Calculating Wealth

It is very difficult to actually calculate a contestant’s net worth. A person’s net worth is calculated by factoring in all of that person’s assets, e.g house, car, investments, against their debt. Generally, this information for a regular person is pretty hard to come by unless you have access to that person’s bank account.

However, we can investigate a few different things like salary, who their spouse is, and what they did prior to Survivor to come up with a reasonable guess about who had the most money at the time they were competing.

Please note, I am not interested in their current net worth, only what they had prior to winning.

Salary Calculations

To start, I took all the winners and calculated their approximate salaries based on their declared profession prior to the season they won.

I excluded Boston Rob and I am ignoring Sandra’s second win. The reasons I excluded Boston Rob is because at the time of his win, he was already married to previous winner Amber Brkich and had finished second on Amazing Race and had his own special with Amber, so it just kind of messes things up :-). I ignored Sandra’s net worth at the time of her second win for similar reasons. The reality is, as you’ll see after I present the data, these two likely had more money prior to their wins than anyone else.

I used both PayScale’s Salary Calculator and Glassdoor’s to calculate the present day salary for each winner also factoring in the city they were living in at the time they played. I ended up excluding Jenna Morasca, Fabio, Sophie Clarke, John Cochran, and Natalie Anderson. The reason for Fabio, Sophie, Cochran and Natalie is because they were all students at the time, so it’s hard to say what their actual income was. Also, since they were students, it’s unlikely they are in the top tier for income amongst contestants anyway.

As for Jenna, her listed profession was “swimsuit model”, which has a huge range in terms of income. I’m assuming she wasn’t killing it since she chose to compete on Survivor, similar to the excluded others, she’s not likely in the top tier of wealth for winners.

The graph below shows most of the winners with their approximate salary for the position they held prior to playing.

Our three highest salaries are Yul Kwon, Mike Holloway and Earl Cole. Both Yul and Mike are more than two standard deviations away from the mean salary of $58,000, while Earl is 1.4 times away.

At the time Yul won Survivor Cook Islands, he was working as a management consultant at McKinsey, which is a very well-known consulting company. The range on management consultant salaries is quite large, although even the starting salary is on the higher end of the spectrum. Some consultants make over $150,000 a year, but it depends a lot on whether you are at associate level or not. I assumed Yul was not quite at the upper tie since he was only 31 at the time and had worked in law for a while prior to joining McKinsey. This type of position is also eligible for bonuses, which I did not factor in to this graph.

Mike Holloway is listed as an oil driller. Oil workers can make really good money. It’s not clear to me what exactly Mike’s position is, so I had to do some guess work. It’s possible his salary is over-stated if he has more of an entry-level position.

Finally, Earl was working as an ad executive in Santa Monica at the time he was cast. According to my salary calculators, ad execs make between $70,000 and $94,000 a year. There’s also opportunities for bonuses.

A couple things to note. Kim Spradlin is listed as a bridal shop owner. It’s difficult to know for sure what her income was at the time she played. A small business owner has a huge range in potential salary.

Also, Ethan Zohn was a professional soccer player, some of which make a lot of money, but he did not play in the top-tier pro leagues, so his actual income as a professional athlete is likely quite modest.

Other Wealth Factors