Johnny Knoxville Net Worth

Every published figure for Johnny Knoxville’s wealth rests on the same claim: that he co-owns the Jackass franchise.

He does not. The trademark has belonged to Viacom — now Paramount — since 2002, without interruption and without his name appearing once.

The films are the studio’s work-for-hire. And in 2005, his own name and likeness were licensed to a third party by MTV Networks — not by him.

Johnny Knoxville Net Worth: Why We Publish No Figure

• Not one payment in his entire career could be verified from a primary source — not a fee, not a profit share, not a settlement
• The $50m everyone repeats is justified by an ownership that three separate registers contradict
• Our take: no figure — but the ownership question is answered on the record. See our methodology.

The Trademark Register Answers It in Two Lines

Two marks were filed on 30 August 2000, four weeks before the television series began. JACKASS (registration 2580364) was granted on 11 June 2002; MTV JACKASS (registration 2887413) followed on 21 September 2004.

Both stand today in the name of Viacom International Inc.

The complete chain of title contains exactly two entries, both from the corporate split at the end of 2005:

Both were recorded on 5 January 2006. Knoxville appears in neither — not as owner, not as assignor, not as assignee. There is no security interest either, which matters: a pledged mark would at least indicate someone had a stake to pledge.

The register distinguishes these categories itself, and uses both here — a full transfer in one document, a mere renaming in the other. That is the control that makes the reading reliable rather than a guess. The underlying instrument is public: a 69-page assignment document, retrievable in full at the USPTO Assignment Center.

The Films Belong to Paramount — Including the Posters of His Face

The US Copyright Office register separates two roles: the author of a work and the claimant who owns it. When a company is both, the work was made for hire.

Paramount Pictures Corporation is both on every theatrical entry:

• Jackass 3D — 15 October 2010
• Bad Grandpa — 23 October 2013
• Jackass Forever — 4 February 2022
• Jackass Best and Last — 15 July 2026

Knoxville is not named in any of them.

The first film, registered 14 November 2002, is the most revealing entry of all. Four authors are listed — including Dickhouse, the production company he co-founded. But the claimants are only Paramount, MTV Networks and Viacom International.

His own company helped create the film and owned none of it.

Even the artwork follows the pattern. Two poster designs registered on 19 July 2021 — one described as him upended by a bull, one as him shot from a cannon — carry Paramount as author and claimant. The images are of him; the property is theirs.

A Contract Filed by a Small Games Publisher Makes It Explicit

The clearest document in this file was not filed by Knoxville, by Paramount, or by MTV. It was filed by a small video game company that had to disclose its material contracts to investors.

The MTVN Merchandise License Agreement of 28 March 2005 appears in full as an exhibit to that company’s filing of 10 May 2006. It lists what MTV Networks was licensing out. Three things:

• The MTV JACKASS name, mark and logo
• The names, images and likenesses of the cast — Knoxville named among them — “solely as provided to you by MTVN”
• Broadcast footage from the series

Royalties were payable quarterly to MTVN, with audit rights held by MTVN. His personal likeness was an asset in someone else’s licensing portfolio.

The same company’s annual report of 29 June 2007 states it plainly in prose: “MTVN, owner of the Jackass property.” The licence ran to 2010 with options through 2012.

What the document does not give is a number. The royalty rate is redacted — the text reads “xxxxxx percent of Net Sales … up to and including xxxxxx units”. Confidential treatment was granted, so the percentage is legally withheld rather than missing. We can prove the structure and not the price.

What He Actually Signed: Four Documents, No Prices

He does appear in the copyright register — as a party to transfers. All four are short-form instruments, and short-form assignments never state consideration. The direction of travel is the finding:

The 2014 document is the only place in any register where his birth name and stage name are formally joined. The treatment became a 2018 film.

The 2019 pair mark a genuine shift: for the first time his company is the buyer, not the seller. He has been developing material rather than performing in it — but what he paid is not in the register, because options never record a price.

The One Thing He Owns Is a Foreword

Across the entire US copyright register, exactly one work lists “Knoxville, Johnny” as both author and claimant: registration TX0009309748, granted 22 June 2023.

The scope of the claim is recorded as “Introduction by Johnny Knoxville” — an introduction he wrote for a 2022 reissue of a Hunter S. Thompson book.

That is the complete inventory of intellectual property he personally owns on the public record. The 2003 screenplay he wrote himself, he signed away.

$599 Million at the Box Office — For Someone Else

Six theatrical films, per The Numbers:

Nearly nine times the money back. But box office is a studio’s revenue, and the studio owns the property — the registers above establish that much. How much of it reached him is not public, in any filing, anywhere.

The $50 Million, and Its Factor of Ten

Unusually, the estimates do not disagree. Almost every site publishes exactly $50 million. One of them cites eight other sites as its sources — all of which trace back to a single origin.

Unanimity across a copying chain is not corroboration. And here it has three specific problems.

First, the reasoning is wrong. The stated basis is that he co-owned the franchise “which got him a much bigger share of profits”. The trademark register, the copyright register and a filed licence agreement each contradict that independently. The figure may or may not be right — but the argument for it has collapsed.

Second, the arithmetic on the page contradicts itself. The most-cited source lists exactly one earnings item — $5 million for a 2004 film — and gives total career earnings as $5 million. On the same page it asserts a net worth of $50 million. A factor of ten, unexplained.

Third, even that single item is unsupported. No independent confirmation of the $5 million fee exists. The film’s total budget was $46 million; a supporting fee of $5 million would be roughly 11 per cent of the entire production cost, alongside a higher-billed lead.

The Property Claims Cannot Be Checked

Four transactions circulate: a 2002 purchase at $750,000 sold in 2011 for $1.7m; a 2008 sale at $1.8m; a 2011 purchase at $520,000. Taken at face value they net around $2.2 million — nowhere near enough to explain the gap.

More to the point, they are not verifiable. The free national land-records portal covers 15 states, and its underlying page source shows the rest as disabled entries. California and Tennessee are both among the disabled ones — and every one of these transactions is Californian. California additionally does not require sale prices to be disclosed.

So we report them as unverified rather than repeating them as fact. Blocked is not the same as absent, and a number we cannot check does not become true by being widely quoted.

Where We Looked and Found Nothing

Negative results are only worth reporting when the search demonstrably works. Each of these was control-tested:

• His birth name in the copyright register: 0 results. Control: his stage name returns 42. He does not register under it.
• No trademark in his name or his companies’ names. Controls returned 42 and 73 rows. Caveat: the assignment register only captures marks that have been transferred.
• Corporate filings: 23 mentions, all checked — cast lists, marketing copy, the licence above. No shareholding, no private placement, no disclosed endorsement fee. Talent pay is never a disclosable item, so this proves nothing about his wealth.
• Federal courts: he is not a party in a single case. The 21 dockets naming him are mentions in other people’s exhibits.
• No charitable foundation. Control on the surname returned 3,611 organisations.

One genuine gap, stated plainly: a 2021 civil action naming the studio and several individuals including him ran in a California state trial court, which no free federal database indexes. It ended in a confidential settlement, dismissed with prejudice on 13 April 2022. A $5 million figure attached to it in coverage was a claimed lost fee, not a sum anyone paid.

One further endorsement is on the record without a price: a footwear company’s 2012 annual report notes it “brought in international celebrity Johnny Knoxville” in 2010 for a brand campaign. Endorsement fees carry no disclosure duty.

What This Profile Can and Cannot Tell You

We could not verify a single payment. Not a fee, not a profit participation, not a royalty rate, not a settlement. The one contract we can read is redacted where the money is; the one lawsuit is sealed by agreement; all four of his recorded transfers are short-form instruments that never state a price.

From zero verified amounts, no total can honestly be built — high or low. Nor can we treat him as poor: he plainly earned well across two decades, and the absence of evidence here reflects that American entertainment contracts are private by default.

What the record does establish is the thing everyone else asserts and nobody checked. He is a contractor and producer on a franchise he does not own. Three independent registers say so, and one of them says it in the studio’s own words.

Money Timeline

Key financial events, aggregated from the sources cited above. See our methodology.

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