How Much Was Grumpy Cat Really Worth When She Died?

As a young woman once told Mel Gibson before succumbing to tuberculosis, one can neither sing with all the voices of the mountains, nor paint with all the colors of the wind. To assign a tangible value to an experience, a feeling, or a force of the universe, is the work of a fool. Some things transcend measure. Some moments are precious beyond the scope of quantification.

With that in mind, we turn our gaze to an inalienable feline fraction of the public consciousness. Born April 4th, 2012 and affixed with the moniker Tardar Sauce, the mixed-breed dwarf kitten with a perpetually perturbed outer appearance became known to the world at large as Grumpy Cat, an internet celebrity of such ubiquity as to command her own personal brand. In her life, she boasted lines of clothing, accessories, and a veritable army of popular internet memes. All of this means that, regardless of Ms. Sauce's forever home in the annals of American folklore, she was also a four-legged license to print money.

The exact details of Grumpy Cat's financials are a difficult thing to nail down. One British tabloid stated in 2014 that the feline had a net worth just shy of $100 million, though her owner, Tabatha Bundesen, stated that this was false. The closest peek we might get into the Scrooge McDuck diving pool of money that was Tardar Sauce comes thanks to a lawsuit from 2018, when the Bundesens sued Grenade Coffee for utilizing their pet's likeness on more than the single product agreed upon beforehand, the Grumpachino. According to the BBC, that sliver of the celebrity feline's value netted her owners $710,000. She also appeared on talk shows, American Idol, and Disney Channel's Bizaardvark, which we are told was the name of an actual program and not just the result of someone trying to read the dictionary during a seizure. It has also been stated that within mere days of going viral, according to Newsweek, she had snagged enough buckets of dough for her owner to quit her job at Red Lobster and pursue full-time-funny-looking-cat-ownership as a profession.

On May 14th, 2019, a day which will live in infamy, Grumpy Cat passed away due to complications stemming from a urinary tract infection, according to CNN. Whatever her net worth, she will remain, to those with both a childlike sense of wonder or a deeply-embedded disappointment in their afternoon, priceless.