Highest annual earnings for a magician (current year)

The highest earning magician is currently David Copperfield (USA), with a pretax income from June 2019 to May 2020 of $46 million (£37.2 million), according to the latest Forbes Celebrity 100 list. Copperfield appears at position #60, on account of his earnings from his many hundreds of magic shows at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the income from his luxury resorts located on the 11 islands he owns in The Bahamas.

Copperfield was born David Seth Kotkin in New Jersey, USA, and first performed to friends and neighbours as "Davino the Boy Magician". He took his current stage name from the Charles Dickens character, and has gone on to become the world's most commercially successful illusionist, with record-breaking residencies in Las Vegas and on Broadway. Among his most famous illusions are vanishing a jet plane and the Statue of Liberty, walking through the Great Wall of China, and "accidentally" slicing himself in half during a "botched" trick involving a giant circular saw.