What Is Kato Kaelin's Net Worth?

You may have heard the expression "famous for being famous," and the phrase refers to a person who has attained celebrity status despite any real talent or accomplishment. We won't name names here, but you can very easily think of several people who fall into the category of having become "celebrities" for no real reason other than they got caught up in the celebrity-making machine.

One such person who is perhaps famous solely for being famous got there because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (or the right place at the right time, depending on your point of view). Back in the middle 1990s, Kato Kaelin was an out-of-work, couch-surfing wannabe actor who was crashing in the guest house of an actual celebrity, as the Chicago Tribune reported. However, that celebrity was O.J. Simpson, who was accused of murdering two people, and Kaelin, who was a minor witness to some aspects of the alleged crime, suddenly became a household name. That was nearly 30 years ago, and Kaelin is still using his 15 minutes to make money, although he's far from rich.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Kato Kaelin is estimated to be worth $2 million. While that may seem like a lot of money, it bears noting that he lives in Los Angeles, a city with one of the highest costs of living in the entire country. Though that kind of wealth may be a king's ransom in, say, a poor county in rural Arkansas, in L.A. that barely counts as a middle-class income. Indeed, based on a Twitter post, supposedly shot from inside his house, it looked like he upgraded from a guest house a bit.

The 62-year-old appears to have accumulated his nest egg here-and-there over the course of 30 years, doing a slew of low-visibility projects, including bit parts in B-movies, appearances on celebrity-based reality TV, some radio work, and the like, according to Bustle. While it's difficult to pin down what exactly he's doing at any given moment, he apparently keeps busy, having told KTVI-TV in 2018 that he was so busy he didn't know how he had time to talk to a reporter from the St. Louis station. He also sued the National Examiner for falsely claiming that he was the actual murderer in the O.J. Simpson case. Though he sued for $15 million, the case was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.