Go Ahead and Put Sharon Osbourne in Prison
- Fred
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
Last year, Sharon Osbourne set up a benefit concert for her husband's last performance, the Back to the Beginning Show. She claimed all profits were going to local Birmingham, England Charites.
I really wanted to watch Ozzy's last show, so I went to YouTube, couldn't find it.
Went to Hulu, couldn't find it.
Went to Prime Video, couldn't find it.
Quickly shifted gears and googled it: On sale at a Private Streaming Service for $30.
I wasn't paying $30 to Sharon Osbourne for an unknown product, so I resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to watch the show at a later date on YouTube. Almost everything ends up there sooner or later anyhow.
After the show, it was reported that 5.8 million people purchased the show. There were no "free preview" options, you either purchased the show, or you didn't. It didn't matter if you watched the whole thing or not. Again, this is 4th grade math.
5,800,000 times $30 = $174,000,000
Days after the show, Sharon Osbourne took to the press and said she had no idea where all those outlandish figures were coming from. I was flabbergasted and smelled Manager Sharon's wonky math skills about to kick into high gear. We wrote about this in 2025: Sharon Osbourne's Last Untenable Cash Grab.
Let's do a quick recap (and again, we used round, broad numbers).
Income:
$175,000,000 - Streaming
$15,000,000 - Ticket Sales and Merchandising on site.
So the one day concert made between $190-$200 million.
Now, before we move on to expenses, we have to note, is it POSSIBLE that Sharon lied about the streaming numbers? It is. But why would she do that? We will return to that question after expenses.
Expenses: (And again, we are giving GREAT leeway to the Osbournes and using overinflated numbers.)
$10,000,000 - Hosting. The concert was at Villa Park in Birmingham and anyone can rent the place when the soccer team isn't playing. I tried to get some round numbers from the Aston Villa website, but the team really wanted you to contact them for quotes. Giving the Osbournes the benefit of the doubt, let's just go with 10 million. If Aston Villa screwed the Osbournes, Sharon would have been all over the press bitching about it.
$10,000,000 - Streaming. Not sure if it was a front end, or back end, payment, but a flat fee of around 10 million seams feasible for a one day stream. Say it was 5%, that's about $8.75 million. Either way, streamer has to be paid.
$10,000,000 - Travel Costs. The bands made no money performing, but all parties confirmed Osbourne picked up travel costs.
$10,000,000 - Insurance. I forgot this expense the first time around. To insure a one day festival would, for sure, cost 7 figures. For argument's sake, let's go to 8 figures.
$10,000,000 - Production Costs. Now this is some grey area. Supposedly the stadium was loaded with camera crews and there's going to be a Back to the Beginning movie coming out in a few months. Should Sharon count production costs as part of expenses when she's going to make money on the movie? If she has to pay rights fees to musicians to use their music in a movie, that should come out of the Sharon Bucket, not the Production Bucket, right?
$10,000,000 - Miscellaneous. Vendors had to get paid, ticket takers had to get paid, people worked the one day concert. Again, being very generous, let's go with 10.
$10,000,000 - Just Because. You're yelling at me that I've never put on a one day music festival in my life and I'm an idiot? Okay, I will add 10, just because I could have missed something.
Total Expenses: AT THE VERY MOST, $70,000,000.
Why am I beating this dead horse here? About once a month, I would check to see how much Sharon wrote that charity check for and, about once a month, I kept getting quotes from last year. Well, until I checked last week.
Over at Vice 3 weeks ago: Ozzy Osbourne’s Son Jack Clarifies the Total Charity Donations of Black Sabbath’s Final Concert: Jack Osbourne says that Black Sabbath’s “Back to the Beginning” concert raised around $10 million in donations for charity, not $200 million.
Uh, what?
According to Jack Osbourne himself: "Clarifying the data, (he) explained that news outlets saw the high figures and confused the event’s gross revenue with its net charitable donations. “This is how you know the news is probably 90% bullshit,” he said. “CNN and the New York Times were saying, ‘Ozzy raised $150 million.’ And it wasn’t that....”
Jack mentioned some costs that we have already outlined above, but here's the money shot.
"....By the time the smoke had cleared, the fest had brought in a solid amount of money for charity, albeit nowhere near what was reported. “I think when all was said and done, each charity got, like, one and a half or two million pounds each,” Jack explained. “So it was six or seven million pounds—about $9.4 million.”
Somehow this is the press' fault for not understanding how basic business economics work?
I am not using hyperbole here. There is legitimately a $100,000,000, minimum, gap between expenses and what ended up going to charity. Is that money in Sharon Osbourne's Ginza Tanaka handbag?
Either she lied about the 5.8 million viewers, or she lied about giving all the money to charity. There is no in between. If she took a $100,000,000 manager's fee, she's a straight up shyster.
According to Google's AI program, the Osbourne Parents are currently worth about $250 million. There is no way they spent nearly $200 million in expenses for a one day concert, hoping to get all that money back in profit participation. Seeing that Sharon Osbourne was the guiding force behind Ozzfest, it is unfathomable that she was blowing a wad of money on a concert that her husband may or may not be able to participate in due to tenuous health. She had over 30 years experience setting up concerts. As a matter of fact, rumors persisted that she was skimming money off the top at Ozzfest, but she claimed her family barely made money off of the yearly metal festival, that the festival ended because "the (other bands') managers were greedy and for some reason they thought that we were making billions on it and we weren’t."
Your defense of Sharon is that what she did was simply bad optics, she never promised to give ALL of that money to charity, in writing. Plastic surgery is expensive.
Listen, the Burden of Proof isn't on Fred at Beacon of Speech for reporting the numbers, the spotlight should be on Sharon, which appears to have pocketed $100,000,000 off of her beloved husband's friends and at the expense of charity.
If she kept the money, she should be investigated by both the IRS in America and the HMRC in Great Britain. That's unreported profits.
The Math ain't Mathing.