What is Dua Lipa’s net worth?
▲ £90 million
£75 million in 2023
When she released her debut album in 2017 the Anglo-Albanian megastar Dua Lipa told a Time magazine interviewer: “I’d like to take over the world… If I could.” Seven years later, her quest for global domination is succeeding.
Named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2024, Lipa, 28, picked up her seventh Brit award in March to add to the three Grammys already in her trophy cabinet. And after a four-year wait, this month she released her hotly anticipated third studio album, Radical Optimism, whose lead single, Houdini, peaked at No 2 in the UK singles chart. Lipa said the album was inspired by “the idea of going through chaos gracefully and feeling like you can weather any storm”. It’s a mantra she may need to repeat when braving the notoriously unpredictable weather at Glastonbury Festival next month, performing as a headliner on the Pyramid Stage — a moment she has dreamt of “all my life”.
But the New Rules and Levitating singer is not content with being merely an international pop star and one of the most listened-to female artists on Spotify. Last summer she made her acting debut with a cameo in Barbie, the highest-grossing film of the year, and contributed a song to the soundtrack, Dance the Night, which became her fourth No 1 single. She landed a bigger role in Matthew Vaughn’s latest spy caper, Argylle, this year, in which she plays a villain named LaGrange.
Lipa plans her schedule “down to the minute”, she told the American talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, which means she has had time to make a podcast: Dua Lipa: At Your Service. She’s been joined for a chat by all manner of famous faces, fromher pop contemporary Billie Eilish to Monica Lewinsky; the Apple chief executive Tim Cook to the Nobel Peace prizewinner Nadia Murad, who talked about sexual slavery under Islamic State. “I choose people who my listeners could learn something from,” Lipa told The Sunday Times last June. “I’m not trying to shove activism down your throat and I also don’t like things for clickbait.”
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She also runs a book club, a lifestyle newsletter (Service95) and is co-executive producing the documentary Camden with Disney+, about the history of her home borough in London and the influence it has had on some of the UK’s biggest music acts, including Chris Martin and Boy George.
Lipa was born in the capital in 1995, the eldest of three children. She credits her strong work ethic to her father, Dukagjin, who once sang and played guitar in a rock band called Oda, and mother, Anesa, who studied law. The couple lived in Pristina, Kosovo, but left in 1992 because of political instability. They returned with their children in 2006, two years before the country declared independence from Serbia.
When Lipa was 15, and had already been uploading song covers to YouTube for a year, she persuaded her parents to allow her to return to London alone to take her GCSEs and pursue a career in music. She moved into a flat in Camden with a family friend from Albania who was attending university.
After studying at the Sylvia Young Theatre School, whose alumni include Keeley Hawes and Amy Winehouse, Lipa landed a publishing deal with TaP Music, then a record deal with Warner. She released her debut single, New Love, in 2015 and her first studio album, Dua Lipa, two years later. The follow-up, Future Nostalgia, in 2020 was a critically acclaimed homage to 1970s disco that bagged her two Brit awards and a Grammy. In 2022 Lipa ended her partnership with TaP Music, hired her father as her manager, and eventually bought the rights and masters for her entire catalogue.
• Dua Lipa: the pop star turned tycoon on immigration, books — and men
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The same year Lipa was granted Albanian citizenship and she is passionate about her dual heritage. With her father she set up the Sunny Hill Foundation, which supports young people in Kosovo through arts and culture and runs an annual music festival. “When you have that direct communication with people who have been through [war], it opens up a completely new world, and it did for me,” Lipa has said. “I feel very close to [those suffering] injustices in the world, or inequality.”
The singer owns a house in West Hampstead that she bought in 2017 for a reported £6.75 million. Last year she won permission to extend the basement and rear of the property, adding a pool, steam room, cinema and relaxation zone. She should have plenty of cash for the renovations: wealth in her two largest companies has levitated by £15 million over the past year, thanks to her diverse business empire, which has included modelling and advertising partnerships with Yves Saint Laurent and Porsche, as well as co-designing a collection for Versace. And the release of Radical Optimism will surely be followed by another lucrative tour — the Future Nostalgia concerts in 2022 raked in more than $100 million at the box office. So Lipa has plenty to be optimistic about.
View the full list to see where money was made and lost in the last year
