David Eric Grohl, or Dave, is one of the richest musicians in the world by net worth, thanks to his decades-long work as a drummer, guitarist, singer and songwriter for iconic acts, especially Nirvana and Foo Fighters. But in mid 2024, he hit the headlines of tabloids for the tumult he caused in his marital life.
Having started his career in his teens, Grohl gained fame with legendary rock band Nirvana in his early 20s before forming Foo Fighters some years later. The rocker has sold millions of records worldwide and established his legacy in music with numerous hits under his belt, both with the two bands he is most closely associated with as well as with other bands and individual performers.
His live performances, especially with Foo Fighters, have drawn generations of rock music fans for over two decades. He has been twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first in 2014 as a member of Nirvana and again in 2021 as a member of Foo Fighters.
Of course, all of this has generated an impressive amount of money for Grohl. But his infidelity confession in September 2024 has led to speculations that he may be plunging headlong into a costly divorce.
All about Dave Grohl and his net worth
What is the net worth of Dave Grohl?
The figure is a far cry from what the drummer’s net worth was around two decades ago. In a 2011 interview with Howard Stern, he said he had a net worth of around USD 15 million when Nirvana disbanded in 1994.
According to the wealth tracker, Grohl has sold 75 million records worldwide, including 30 million in the US. And while Foo Fighters may have sold less than 30 million records worldwide in the last two decades, they have headlined jam-packed arenas touring. In fact, multiple reports indicate that they may have earned quite a fortune through consistent touring since their formation.
More importantly, Celebrity Net Worth notes that Grohl owns the masters to all Foo Fighters albums. While the band maintains full ownership of their music catalogue, Grohl licences them to Sony/BMG. This means that Grohl earns several millions in royalties or licensing fees from the works.
The biggest hits of Dave Grohl
Dave Grohl has had a long and distinguished career with multiple bands starting early in his teenage years. As he taught himself to play both the drums and guitar, Grohl started performing for the local band Freak Baby, which later became Mission Impossible and subsequently Dain Bramage by 1985 as members kept changing.
At the age of 17 in 1986, Grohl joined the hardcore band Scream. Apart from touring with the band and a live album, Grohl also recorded two studio albums with Scream before its dissolution in 1990.
Grohl’s career took its epic turn following the end of Scream. During his time with the band, he struck a friendship with another band, Melvins. Buzz Osborne, the guitarist of Melvins, was friends with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. They had seen Grohl perform with Scream. Thus, when Grohl was looking for his next step after Scream was dissolved, Osborne shared the phone numbers of Cobain and Novoselic with him. The rest, as they say, is history.
Grohl started touring with Nirvana and worked on their second studio album, Nevermind (1991), which was recorded at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles. It attained phenomenal success, which not only established Nirvana as one of the greatest bands of the 20th century but also Grohl as one of the finest musicians of his generation.
With Nirvana, Grohl delivered four No.1s on the Billboard 200 chart. They are:
- Nevermind (1991)
- In Utero (1993)
- MTV Unplugged in New York (1994)
- From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah (1996)
The self-titled compilation album Nirvana (2002) peaked at No.3 on Billboard 200, bringing the total works of Nirvana in the Top 5 to five. Nevermind re-entered the charts and peaked at No.1 in Billboard’s Top Rock Albums category in 2021.
On 8 April 1994, Kurt Cobain died by suicide. That ended the journey of Nirvana as a rock band and Grohl went into a self-imposed exile for months. In 2021, Grohl said on The Graham Norton Show that a chance encounter with a hitchhiker in Ireland brought him back to the world of music.
“When Kurt died and it all ended I didn’t know what to do with my life,” he said. “I couldn’t listen to music anymore because it hurt too much so I tried to escape and went to Ireland to soul search.”
“I was trying to figure out my life when I picked up a hitchhiker who was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt and I thought, ‘Even in this remote place I can’t outrun life’, so I went home and started over with the Foo Fighters. I needed to survive and get on with life,” he added.
Grohl founded Foo Fighters officially in 1994 in Seattle, Washington, as a one-man band. Its name referred to the term used to describe unidentified flying objects during World War II. Grohl had recorded a demo tape at the time, playing the instruments on his own. The demo tape quickly drew attention from major music labels, and Grohl decided to form a full band instead of going solo. Thus, Pat Smear, William Goldsmith and Nate Mendel joined him as the first members of Foo Fighters in 1995. Today, the band is composed of Chris Shiflett, Rami Jaffee and Josh Freese alongside original members Smear, Mendel and Grohl.
The band has released 11 studio albums to date and several other types of albums. All 11 studio albums, three compilation albums and one live album have charted on Billboard 200. Ten of the studio albums are in the Top 10. Of the songs composed by Foo Fighters, 10 have charted on the Billboard Hot 100.
Foo Fighters have two No.1 albums on Billboard 200. Both are studio albums. They are:
- Wasting Light (2011)
- Concrete and Gold (2017)
Grohl has attained tremendous success with Foo Fighters, both commercially and critically. The band has won 15 Grammy awards. They hold the current Grammy record for most wins in the Best Rock Album category with four, picking up the honours for There Is Nothing Left to Lose in 2000, One By One in 2003, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace in 2007 and Wasting Light in 2011. They made their Grammy performance debut at the 45th Grammy Awards in 2003 with the song “All My Life.”
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Besides his 15 Grammys with Foo Fighters, Grohl also won a Grammy with Nirvana in 1995 in the Best Alternative Music Performance category for Unplugged In New York. He was also inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 2017. In total, Grohl has 19 Grammy wins in his career.
Other works of Dave Grohl
Though he is best known for Nirvana and Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl has also collaborated with prominent artists throughout his career since the early 1990s. He has worked with Mike Watt, David Bowie, Killing Joke, Tenacious D, Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails, Paul McCartney and Swedish metal band Ghost across multiple musical formats, including as a guest in studio albums and co-act in live performances.
One of his most recent collaborations was with Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher on the latter’s third solo studio album, C’mon You Know (2022). Grohl co-wrote and played the drums on the lead single “Everything’s Electric” from the album.
While with Foo Fighters, Grohl formed a heavy metal band side act named Probot, which released one eponymous album in 2004. In 2009, he joined Josh Homme and John Paul Jones to form the supergroup, Them Crooked Vultures. Their eponymous studio album was released the same year. In 2018, Grohl released his solo instrumental composition titled Play.
Grohl is also known as an accomplished director, especially of music videos and documentaries. He is credited as the director of several music videos of Foo Fighters, including “Monkey Wrench” (1997), “All My Life” (2002), “White Limo” (2011), “Something from Nothing” (2014), “Run” (2017) and “The Sky is a Neighborhood” (2017) among others. He has also directed the music videos for the song “By Crooked Steps” (2014) by Soundgarden.
In 2013, Grohl produced and directed the acclaimed documentary film Sound City. Through interviews with prominent musicians, engineers and record producers, the documentary traces the history of the recording studio from its early days in the late 1960s to its eventual closure in the early 2010s.
Sound City: Real to Reel, the soundtrack of the musical documentary, was recorded by a supergroup formed by Grohl with Paul McCartney of The Beatles, former Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic and several other artists from multiple bands. The soundtrack won Grammy awards for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media and for Best Rock Song for “Cut Me Some Slack”.
Apart from Sound City, Grohl has directed the eight-part documentary Sonic Highways (2014), which is about Foo Fighters’ album of the same name, and the feature-length documentary What Drives Us (2021), which follows two young bands on their tours.
Grohl has also written the story and acted in the horror movie Studio 666 (2022). Directed by B. J. McDonnell, the film features Grohl and his Foo Fighters bandmates as fictionalised versions of themselves alongside an ensemble cast including Jenna Ortega, Whitney Cummings, Leslie Grossman, Will Forte, and Jeff Garlin.
The Foo Fighters founder has also made multiple television appearances, mostly as himself in everything from sitcoms to talk shows, including The West Wing (2006), The Muppets (2015), and Jimmy Kimmel Live! (2017).
In 2021, he published his autobiography, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music. It debuted at No.1 in the hardcover non-fiction section on the New York Times Bestseller list. It was also included in the editors’ Best Nonfiction Books of October by Amazon Books.
Tour earnings
Apart from the massive royalties and other revenue he earns from his works with Nirvana, Foo Fighters and others, a significant part of the net worth of Dave Grohl comes from his music concerts, as noted by multiple media houses.
In 2018, Forbes placed Foo Fighters at the 53rd spot in their Celebrity 100 list of the world’s highest-paid entertainers with total earnings of USD 47 million. The figure was as high as that of Canadian rapper and singer Drake, who was at the time the most-streamed artist in the world.
Forbes noted that Foo Fighters did not earn much from sales of their then album Concrete and Gold but that was compensated by the tours, earning more than USD 1 million per show on average across 71 shows in the 12-month range considered for the list.
Citing information from Touring Data, a 2024 report by The Mirror revealed that Foo Fighters’ Everything or Nothing at All Tour from May to August “saw the band pull in their biggest profits yet.” According to the report, the resource said that the band earned USD 5.347 million at Fenway Park in Boston as part of their tour.
Since he has been involved with a very large number of acts including Nirvana and Foo Fighters for a long time, Grohl has reportedly earned millions of dollars from touring alone.
Personal life of Dave Grohl and the assets he owns
Dave Grohl was married to Jennifer Leigh Youngblood from 1994 to 1997. They divorced after Grohl admitted to adultery.
In 2003, Grohl married model and TV producer Jordyn Blum. They have three daughters — Violet Maye, Harper Willow, and Ophelia Saint. Violet has appeared in some of Foo Fighters’ live performances and featured on the song “Show Me How” from the band’s 11th studio album, But Here We Are.
In September 2024, Grohl revealed that he had fathered a child outside of his marriage to Blum.
“I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her. I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness. We’re grateful for your consideration toward all the children involved, as we move forward together. Dave,” he wrote in a statement on Instagram.
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Speculations are rife about a rift in his family life following the revelation. Reports say that fans have noticed that Violet and Harper deleted their social media accounts. Within days of his confession, Page Six reported that Blum was seen without her wedding ring when she stepped out for workout.
Whatever the situation in his personal life, Grohl is known to have always maintained a modest lifestyle for a celebrity who has a net worth of USD 330 million.
Commenting on his wealth, Grohl told The Red Bulletin in 2017 that the money “goes straight into my bank account, where it turns all moldy and smelly.”
“I’ve got a house that is just big enough, too. I don’t waste my time thinking about how I could make more when I already got enough. I’m not a banker, I’m a musician,” he added.
According to Daily Mail, he currently resides in a seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom mansion in Encino, Los Angeles. He also used to own a home in Sherman Oaks, California, which he had bought in 2001 for USD 569,000. He sold it in July 2024 for USD 1.6 million.
He also owned a three-storey beach home in Oxnard, California, which he sold in 2015 for USD 2.9 million.
As for his cars, he is believed to own a RAM truck, whose 2025 model may cost somewhere between USD 42,000 and USD 89,000, depending on the features.
(Hero and Featured images: Raphael Pour-Hashemi – FoosDublin210819-2/CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Yes, Dave Grohl reportedly does earn royalties from the music he was part of during his time with Nirvana. The exact details, however, are unclear.
There is no information on how much money does Dave Grohl earn in a year. However, Forbes had revealed in 2018 that his band, Foo Fighters, earned USD 47 million in a 12-month period considered for the publication's 'Celebrity 100' list.
There is no information on how much Dave Grohl's current property is worth.
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Written by
Manas Sen Gupta writes at the intersection of tech, entertainment and history. His works have appeared in publications such as The Statesman, Myanmar Matters, Hindustan Times and News18/ETV. In his spare time, Manas loves studying interactive charts and topographic maps. When not doing either, he prefers reading detective fiction. Spring is his favourite season and he can happily eat a bowl of noodles any time of the day.
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