The countdown to Taylor Swift’s album release ends at midnight on the East Coast. In the meantime, Devon Pendleton on the Bloomberg News wealth team has been calculating the pop superstar’s riches and has a new figure to report. Plus: A quest for better screening and treatment for prostate cancer.

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Taylor Swift is in the news again. I’m joking, of course. Has she ever left? More so than anyone save perhaps the US president, Swift has consistently dominated the national discourse for years. Her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, will be coming out on Friday, along with a limited-run “release party” in movie theaters this weekend.

Swift’s endurance is remarkable given our collective tendency to build up and eviscerate our idols, a cycle that happens even faster now thanks to social media. But she’s more than a famous person. She’s essentially a corporation, with Taylor as the savvy CEO at the top, surrounded by expert counsel on marketing, strategy and risk control.

To wit, Swift is now worth $2.1 billion, up $1 billion from two years ago, when the Bloomberg Billionaires Index first outed her as a member of the three-commas club. Some of that increase can be attributed to money from her record-busting Eras Tour and concert movie that’s still trickling in. Some (though less than you’d think) is royalties from streaming—she was Spotify’s top global artist for the second year running in 2024. A teeny-tiny bit of that bump is from her ravishing engagement ring from fiancé Travis Kelce. Her all-important catalog now makes up an even bigger chunk of her net worth since she announced in May that she’d bought back rights to her early albums from Shamrock Capital, consolidating control of all her music.

The cover of The Life of a Showgirl: It’s Rapturous edition. Photographer: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott

And some of it is, boringly, the markets. Swift’s fortune is largely based on cash, which we assume she’s mostly invested, probably well, with help from her dad, a Merrill Lynch financial adviser.

When Swift debuted as a billionaire two years ago, it seemed like the cherry on top of a career peak. Where could she possibly go from there?

Amid the Eras Tour, Swift released one album that got relatively mixed reviews. But her lock on our consciousness has never strictly been about music; it’s also about living out her relatable angst and her highs and lows through her songwriting and Instagram. Swift’s consumers needed a propulsive narrative to stay engaged and, on that front, boy, has she delivered. Her relationship with a hammy superstar for a solid team in America’s most popular professional sport is the stuff of romantic movies—while expanding her exposure to NFL fans as well.

One of the most compelling things about Swift as an entertainer billionaire is that she’s one of the rare few whose wealth derives from her art and not from side hustles, like makeup or a perfume line or even endorsements. While she hasn’t diversified in blatantly commercial ways, Swift’s life story is a captivating, unfolding epic. That itself is worth real money, though I’m not bold enough to put a dollar figure on it.

Whether Swift can keep up this pace of wealth accumulation is debatable. Much of her songwriting to date has centered around resonant themes like longing, heartbreak and betrayal. Wedded bliss is trickier terrain for art, but if anyone can make those numbers work, it’s Swift and her clever advisers at 13 Management.

In Brief

• The US government shutdown has entered its second day, with the Trump administration raising the stakes by halting $18 billion in infrastructure funding and signaling a willingness to fire thousands of federal workers.
• The European Union plans to hike tariffs on its steel imports to 50% to align the bloc’s rate with the US.
• McDonald’s is aiming is to get to 50,000 locations, a multibillion-dollar effort that’s focused on fast-growing areas in its backyard.

An Innovator in Cancer Care

Hashim Ahmed. Photographer: Gabriella Demczuk for Bloomberg Businessweek

The man on the operating table is 50, fit and otherwise healthy. Under the care of a different doctor, he might be waking up without a prostate. But today, inside a brightly lit English operating room at Parkside Hospital in Wimbledon, surgeon Hashim Ahmed has other plans.

The patient, under general anesthesia, lies still, legs suspended in stirrups—an undignified posture, but necessary for what comes next. Ahmed, chair of urology at Imperial College London, consults an ultrasound screen to guide a probe into place alongside the patient’s walnut-size prostate. The tumor is small, just 10 millimeters (0.4 inches) across, but it’s the kind that usually requires aggressive radiation, surgery or hormone treatment, which attack the whole gland. Ahmed is using a different technique: Bursts of high-intensity sound from the probe will cook the cancer with pinpoint precision, sparing the surrounding tissue.

Focal therapy—an investigational approach to prostate cancer offered in only a minority of practices—aims to spare men the incontinence, impotence and even penile shortening that have made treating the disease one of the most controversial and polarizing fields in medicine. Today’s patient is the perfect candidate for it. “He’s exactly the sort of guy we want to find,” Ahmed says. “Young, keen on maintaining as much function as possible, intermediate-risk disease, good life expectancy—so he’s got a lot of years to live with the treatment he gets.”

Prostate cancer is the most common nonskin cancer among American men. Jason Gale and Ashleigh Furlong write about hope for a better treatment: The Fight to Fix Prostate Cancer Care

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