Steven Bartlett currently ranks third on Forbes’ list of highest-paid podcasters. His podcast, The Diary of a CEO, brings him approximately $45 million in earnings.
The 33-year-old British entrepreneur still owns every piece of the machine he built in 2017.
What makes the ranking interesting is the origin story behind the man with these huge earnings. 
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Steven Bartlett was born in Botswana in 1992 to Esther, a Nigerian mother, and an English father. At just two years old, he moved with his family to Plymouth, England. He grew up in Plymouth as one of the few Black kids in a mostly white, middle-class area.
In a 2022 post reflecting on a family photo from that time, Bartlett wrote:
“I’ve never had any family beyond the people in this picture.
My mum is the hardest-working person I’ve ever encountered – Nigerian, strong, and courageous. She taught me what it means to show up every day, regardless of circumstance, and give everything you have.”
The Immigrant Hustle That Shaped Him
His mother left school in Nigeria at a young age and never properly learned to read or write. However, she hustled through by working long nights in restaurant kitchens before opening corner shops and other small businesses.
Bartlett describes the reality in his own words:
“My Nigerian mother and my English father modelled hard work in a way that I never understood growing up… When my mum left the restaurant, she opened a corner shop called KJS and would work all day and all night.”
He says his mother sometimes slept on a bag of rice in the back of her shop because local kids kept breaking in; she was pretty much the only black woman in the area, he adds.
His father, a structural engineer from Coventry, made inputs in shaping his mindset about hard work and consistency.
He would finish his own full-time job and go straight to help his mother.
“They never ever described or viewed what they did as hard work. I never heard them complain even once about working hard. They seemed to view work as the ultimate privilege, honour and opportunity.”
The immigrant energy of showing up every single day, became the foundation of everything he built as an entrepreneur.
Bartlett has said repeatedly that his mother remains the hardest-working person he has ever met, “Nigerian, strong, and courageous.”
From University Dropout to Entrepreneur
At 18, in 2010, Bartlett enrolled in a Business Management Course at Manchester Metropolitan University.
He dropped out after one lecture to work on his first business idea instead. In 2013, he started Wallpark, an online messaging board for students. There were other small businesses, some failed.
Then in 2014, he co-founded Social Chain, a social media marketing company that made him a millionaire in his early twenties. Social Chain scaled and merged with publicly listed company to form Social Chain AG.
The Diary of a CEO Podcast That Started as an Experiment
In 2017, while Bartlett was running companies, he started The Diary of a CEO as a personal experiment.
“That first episode, episode one, was a total one-off experiment in my mind. I never actually thought it would become multiple episodes or a season,” he said.
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Bartlett only wanted to sit down with successful people and ask the questions he was curious about. He was not planning big productions. However, with curiosity and consistency it grew slowly and blew up quickly. His guests got bigger and the conversations on the compound got deeper, which made the audience multiply.
What began as a side project became one of the most listened-to podcasts in the world.
In 2026, Forbes ranked Steven Bartlett the third-highest paid podcaster on the planet, with The Diary of a CEO generating an estimated $45 million.
He has chosen to remain independent for the past nine years, with the same ownership mindset his mother modelled when she slept on rice bags to keep her shop open.
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