Matthew Abram Groening was born in Portland, Oregon on 15 February 1954, of Norwegian-American(mother) and German-American(father) descent, and is an animator, cartoonist, writer and comedian, almost certainly best known as the creator of the long-running animated TV show “The Simpsons”, which began life in 1989, although Matt began his career more than 10 years earlier.
So just how rich is Matt Groening, as of mid-2016? Authoritative sources estimate that Matt’s net worth is over $500 million, an astounding amount for a cartoonist, and built largely on his incredibly successful cartoon, “The Simpsons”, which has brought Groening worldwide recognition, and no less than ten Primetime Emmy Awards.
Matt Groening Net Worth $500 Million
Matt Groening’s father was also a cartoonist and writer but Matt would not enter the television industry until his early twenties. He was educated at Ainsworth Elementary School and Lincoln High School, then he attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, from 1972 to 1977. Whilst studying there, Groening befriended cartoonist Lynda Barry upon learning they both shared an appreciation for Groening’s favourite author, Joseph Heller, and he has been quoted saying that Barry was “probably [his] biggest inspiration.” In 1977, aged 23, Groening relocated from Oregon to Los Angeles to pursue a career in writing, although for a long time he was forced to work various odd jobs to make ends meet. Groening’s experiences and frustrations there found an outlet in his self-published comic “Life in Hell”, which would go on to some success, attracting the attention of one of Hollywood’s biggest names at the time – director, producer and screenwriter James L. Brooks. Brooks contacted Groening with an offer to adapt “Life in Hell” for a series of quick animated episodes for the variety TV program “The Tracey Ullman Show”.
Matt Groening chose to accept Brooks’s offer – and this would be the birth of “The Simpsons”. Groening was waiting in Brooks’s lobby, as the story goes, when he decided that he did not want to give up rights to his “Life in Hell” by turning it over for a television production. Instead, Groening quickly sketched a few pictures of the Simpsons family, developing the idea for a series about a dysfunctional lower-middle class family. Brooks loved the idea, and the sketches were turned over to the animators, which actually lead to the original and continuing rough aesthetic of “The Simpsons”, as Groening had presumed the animators would clean his sketches up, while they simply transferred them to the screen as they were. Groening’s short “The Simpsons” skits were met with enough success to make it as a separate show, and worldwide fame and success followed. To date, 26 seasons and well over 500 episodes of “The Simpsons” have been broadcast to a multi-million audience.
Apart from the televised “The Simpsons” series, Groening worked with the screenplay and production of the 2007 animated comedy “The Simpsons Movie”, directed by David Silverman and featuring the voices of show regulars like Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner, as well as a cameo appearance by world-famous actor Tom Hanks. Groening’s amazing track record has made him one of the world’s most famous animators and television writers, and it certainly contributed to his impressive net worth.
However, Groening’s other show, “Futurama”, debuted in 1999, and was renewed for several seasons past its original run of four years, with the last episode airing on 4 September, 2013, plus four films—”Bender’s Big Score” (2007), “The Beast with a Billion Backs” (2008), “Bender’s Game (2008) and “Into the Wild Green Yonder” (2009)—were produced straight-to-DVD – it seemed that Groening could do no wrong.
In fact, as an adjunct to the TV series’, Groening formed Bongo Comics (after Bongo from “Life in Hell”) In 1994,with Steve Vance, Cindy Vance and Bill Morrison, to publish comic books based on The Simpsons and Futurama (including Futurama Simpsons Infinitely Secret Crossover Crisis, a crossover between the two), plus some original titles. He then formed Zongo Comics in 1995, to publish comics for more mature readers, which eventually produced three issues of Mary Fleener’s Fleener and seven of his close friend Gary Panter’s Jimbo comics.
In his personal life, Matt Groening was married to Deborah Caplan(1986-99) and they have two sons. Today, Matt lives married with Argentinian artist Augustina Picasso(m. 2011), and they also have two sons, and Groening’s step-daughter Camille.
