Charlamagne Tha God ranked No. 10 on Forbes’ Highest Paid Podcasters of 2026 with an estimated $27 million, and Joe Budden closed out the top 15 at No. 15 with $20 million. The list published Wednesday, July 30, and it covers earnings over a twelve-month window running from June 2025 to June 2026.
Here is the full top 15. Joe Rogan sits at No. 1 with $82 million for “The Joe Rogan Experience.” John Coogan and Jordi Hays of TBPN are second at $70 million. Steven Bartlett of “The Diary of a CEO” is third at $45 million. Ashley Flowers of “Crime Junkie” is fourth at $42 million. Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes of “SmartLess” are fifth at $37 million. Mel Robbins and the Kelce brothers tie at $35 million for sixth and seventh. Alex Cooper of “Call Her Daddy” is eighth at $32 million. The Pod Save America” four, Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor, take ninth at $28 million. Charlamagne is tenth. Dax Shepard follows at $25 million, Amy Poehler at $24 million, Bill Simmons at $22 million, Jay Shetty at $21 million, and Budden at $20 million.
Bartlett’s third-place finish makes him the highest-paid Black podcaster on the list, $18 million ahead of Charlamagne.
The $27 million next to Charlamagne’s name is a fraction of what he is actually working with, because of how Forbes counts. In December, he renewed a wide-ranging agreement with iHeart worth up to $200 million over five years. That deal covers his radio work, his podcast work, and funding for The Black Effect Podcast Network, which he owns 51% of in a joint venture with iHeart. He has launched more than 60 shows under it and told Forbes he wants to build it into “the BET for podcasting.” Separate from the iHeart renewal, he co-hosts The Brilliant Idiots with comedian Andrew Schulz, and he scored a significant payday from Netflix for the flagship morning drive show. Insiders told Forbes that show is the most viewed podcast on Netflix so far this year.
The reason all of that adds up to $27 million on this particular list comes down to methodology. Forbes counts minimum guarantees, revenue sharing, platform fees, and live event income paid to the talent over the twelve-month window, before taxes and before agents and managers take their cut. Anything broadcast live and syndicated into radio markets gets classified as radio income and does not count. So Charlamagne’s radio work sits outside the ranking even though his podcast work sits inside it. Shows that live only on YouTube get filed as internet creator income and drop out too. The list is measuring a slice, not a career.
Budden got to $20 million a completely different way, and Forbes made a point of it. Nearly every name in the top 15 has a broad distribution and ad sales deal with a major media company, private equity backing, or both. The Joe Budden Network has neither. He and business partner Ian Schwartzman bootstrapped it. Asked about staying independent, Budden told Forbes, “Honestly, I don’t like being told what to do.”
The engine underneath that number is direct payment from listeners. Budden has more than 70,000 paid subscribers on Patreon, which makes his the biggest podcast on the platform. People are handing him money every month to hear him talk hip hop with his panel, with no advertiser sitting in between. That is a different kind of revenue than a guarantee from a network, because nobody can decline to renew it.
He is spending it on expansion. Budden and Schwartzman are building a technology platform with community tools they hope to license out to other creators, which would put them in the business of selling infrastructure rather than just content. The network is also adding two shows in August. Schwartzman will host an executive interview show with Yahoo Finance. Budden is launching a true crime podcast in partnership with Dick Wolf, the creator of Law and Order.
The gap between the two approaches is worth sitting with. Charlamagne took the guarantee, took the equity stake, and now has a $200 million ceiling and a network with his name on the ownership documents. Budden took nothing from anybody and landed five spots and $7 million behind him. Forbes notes that the elite guarantees, the ones above $30 million a year, are driven by competition between networks rather than by what the ad sales can realistically earn back. One talent lawyer put the math bluntly to the magazine, saying that in theory, if the client earns out, the network made a bad deal. Networks justify the spending on other grounds, including subscriber acquisition and using the talent as brand ambassadors, which is how the Kelces ended up on an Amazon panel at Cannes Lions in June.
Forbes also flags a problem for the talent led network model that both men are working inside. These umbrella operations let the host require sponsors to buy across the whole slate to get placement on the flagship, which generates additional revenue. But they have struggled to produce new hits, and because the talent covers production and overhead out of pocket, several have seen layoffs and turnover. Crooked Media cut staff. Alex Cooper’s “Unwell” has had high turnover. Forbes’ read is that these companies exist less for the cash they throw off than for the asset they might become. Independent builds like Budden’s and Steven Bartlett’s Flight Story have had more success growing incrementally.
