Trey Parker, born Randolph Severn Parker III, is an American writer, producer, director, animator, actor, screenwriter, composer, musician, and voice artist. He co-created South Park with Matt Stone, and the animated series has aired on Comedy Central since 1997. Parker also co-created the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. His net worth stands at $1.2 billion, making him a billionaire after a major 2025 streaming agreement.
That fortune has turned him into one of Hollywood’s true entertainment moguls. Parker built his wealth through South Park’s ownership structure, Broadway royalties, film work, and real estate. This profile breaks down exactly how he got there, with verified numbers instead of guesses.
Who Is Trey Parker? (Bio, Birth, Early Life)
Trey Parker was born Randolph Severn Parker III on October 19, 1969, in Conifer, Colorado, a small town outside Denver. His father, Randy, worked as a geologist, and his mother, Sharon, worked as an insurance saleswoman. He grew up with an older sister named Shelley. Parker later borrowed all three family names for the Marsh family on South Park, and he even gave his father a small acting role as Judge Jerry in Cannibal! The Musical.
Parker took honors classes in school but spent most of his energy on creative projects. He loved Monty Python growing up, and that influence still shows in his humor today. As a sixth grader, he wrote and performed a sketch called The Dentist for his school talent show. He used so much fake blood that the school called his parents afterward.
By age 14, Parker was already making his own short films. He also chased a music career for a while, recording a comedy album called Immature: A Collection of Love Ballads For The ’80’s Man with David Goodman. Goodman later wrote for South Park and worked as the show’s informal fart coach, timing the flatulence gags on the 1998 episode Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus.
Parker acted in community theatre productions during his teenage years, including Flower Drum Song and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. He also built sets for Little Shop of Horrors. At Evergreen High School, he landed lead roles in the school plays, ran the choir, and was voted prom king during his senior year.
Parker graduated high school in 1988 and enrolled at Berklee College of Music. He transferred after one semester to the University of Colorado Boulder, where he majored in film and Japanese. He met Matt Stone in a film class there. Parker never officially finished his degree, though the university later offered him an honorary one anyway.
Today Parker stands 6 feet 1 inch tall (1.85 m), holds American nationality, and is 56 years old.
Early Films and Student Work
Parker’s first film, Giant Beavers of Southern Sri Lanka, came out in 1989 while he was still a student. He followed it with short films like Man on Mars and First Date, made alongside Stone. In 1993, his short American History won him a Student Academy Award.
Around the same time, Parker and his college friends made another short called Your Studio and You. It featured cameo-style appearances from Sylvester Stallone and Steven Spielberg, which helped the project get noticed beyond campus.
How Trey Parker and Matt Stone Created South Park
In 1992, Parker teamed up with Matt Stone, Jason McHugh, and Ian Hardin to start a production company called Avenging Conscience. The name came from a D.W. Griffith film neither of them liked. Their first real project was Jesus vs. Frosty, a short made using a cutout paper animation technique that would later define South Park’s look.
They followed it in 1995 with The Spirit of Christmas, also known as Jesus vs. Santa. Before that, the group had made a trailer for a fake film called Alferd Packer: The Musical. Students loved it so much that the film department chairman convinced them to actually make the movie.
Parker had just gone through a breakup with his fiancée, Liane Adamo, and poured that energy into the project. The film sold to Troma Entertainment in 1996 and got renamed Cannibal! The Musical. It told the real story of Alferd Packer, known as the Colorado Cannibal, who got stranded during a mining expedition in Colorado Territory, and it became a cult classic among dark comedy fans.
Parker and Stone then moved to Hollywood, picked up an agent and a lawyer, and signed a script deal. Progress was slow. Parker wrote, directed, and starred in Orgazmo, a superhero sex comedy that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1997. October Films bought the rights for $1 million.
Around this same period, producer Brian Graden saw Jesus vs. Frosty and asked Parker and Stone to make him a video greeting card. The result, Jesus vs. Santa, caught the attention of Comedy Central executive Doug Herzog, who would go on to hold CEO-level roles later in his network career. He asked the pair to turn the short into a full series.
They built the pilot for just $300,000. Comedy Central’s marketing team pushed hard before launch, and the show pulled in $30 million in t-shirt sales before a single episode aired. South Park premiered in August 1997 and quickly drew more than 3 million viewers per episode on cable. After the first six episodes, Comedy Central ordered seven more almost immediately.
The rights to the show now run through a joint venture called South Park Digital Studios, co-owned by Parker, Stone, and Paramount. This entity controls the streaming rights and licensing deals that drive most of the franchise’s current value.
South Park’s Success and Career Milestones
South Park has now aired more than 300 episodes across 23 seasons. Its success turned Parker and Stone into overnight celebrities and two of the most influential comedy creators working today.
The show spun off into a theatrical film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, in 1999. Parker and Stone fought to keep it R-rated despite pressure to soften the crass humor, and it went on to earn $83.1 million at the box office. The franchise also produced albums like Chef Aid: The South Park Album in 1998 and Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics, along with several video games.
That same year, Parker co-wrote and starred in BASEketball, playing a character named Joe Cooper. Comedy Central gave the duo another outlet in 2001 with That’s My Bush!, a short-lived political sitcom. Then in 2002, Parker and Stone began work on Team America: World Police, an R-rated puppet film released in 2004. Parker directed it and wrote most of the songs himself.
South Park has won multiple Primetime Emmy Awards over the years. Its 26th season aired in February 2023, and the show has kept going strong since. Seasons 27 and 28 leaned hard into political satire, including direct depictions of Donald Trump and storylines touching on Christian nationalism. Officials like Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth, along with Vice President JD Vance, became recurring targets, drawing visible backlash from the White House.
Parker and Stone confirmed new episodes on Jimmy Kimmel Live, announcing a September 2026 return date after Season 28 wrapped early with only five episodes.
Broadway and The Book of Mormon
Parker and Stone teamed up with writer-composer Robert Lopez, known for Avenue Q, to create The Book of Mormon: The Musical of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It opened on Broadway on March 24, 2011, starring Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad in the lead roles.
The show won nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score. Its cast recording became the highest-charting Broadway cast album in four decades. Between ticket sales and licensing, the musical has generated somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion in revenue.
Riding that success, Parker and Stone launched their own production studio, Important Studios, in 2013.
Voice Acting and Other Film Roles
On South Park itself, Parker voices a large share of the characters, including Stan Marsh and Eric Cartman. In 2016, he stepped outside his own universe to voice the villain Balthazar Bratt in Despicable Me 3, released in 2017 alongside Steve Carell. It marked his first major voice role in a script he didn’t write himself.
Parker also played Joe Young in Orgazmo and appeared in smaller films like Run Ronnie Run! in 2002 and Tales from the Crapper in 2004.
More recently, Parker and Stone became real-world restaurant owners after buying Casa Bonita, a Denver landmark. Their turnaround effort became the subject of a 2024 documentary, ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!.
The Kendrick Lamar Film
Parker and Stone are also producing an untitled live-action comedy with rapper Kendrick Lamar, through their company Park County and Lamar’s pgLang, run with Dave Free. Vernon Chatman wrote the script, which follows a Black man working as a slave reenactor at a living history museum.
Paramount Pictures set the film for March 20, 2026, announcing the date at CinemaCon. Lamar brings serious star power to the project, coming off a Super Bowl halftime performance, a Pulitzer Prize, and 22 Grammy wins.
Trey Parker’s Net Worth (Current Figures)
For years, most outlets pegged Trey Parker’s net worth somewhere between $600 million and $1 billion. That changed in July 2025. Forbes confirmed that Parker, along with Matt Stone, had officially joined the Tres Comma Club, each worth an estimated $1.2 billion.
Parker’s fortune rests on a 50% share of South Park’s digital revenue, plus income from merchandise and foreign syndication that alone brings in $10 to 20 million per year. The show’s overall IP assets are valued in the billions, and Parker, born Randolph Severn Parker III, now sits among a small group of self-made entertainment billionaires.
The 1997 Contract Clause That Made Parker a Billionaire
Back in 1997, when Parker and Stone signed their first Comedy Central contract, digital media barely existed. Their lawyer still added one clause covering non-broadcast revenue, splitting anything earned outside regular TV broadcasts 50/50 with the network. Nobody thought much of that overlooked sentence at the time.
Everything changed in 2007. YouTube had exploded, and Netflix was rolling out its new streaming platform. When the contract came up for renewal, Parker and Stone’s legal team pointed straight back to that decade-old clause. Comedy Central agreed to formalize it, giving the pair their own digital hub and full 50% ownership of digital revenue going forward, whether it came from ad-supported streams or subscription-based licensing.
Streaming Deals Timeline (Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount+)
In 2014, Hulu paid $80 million for exclusive streaming rights to every existing season of South Park, which was in its seventeenth season at the time. Under the 50/50 split with Viacom, that put roughly $40 million, or $20 million each, in Parker and Stone’s pockets.
Hulu extended the agreement in 2019, adding another $192 million to the deal. That extension worked out to $96 million total, or $48 million each, pushing Parker’s individual take from Hulu to about $68 million over six years, or roughly $11.33 million per year. That same year, HBO Max stepped in with a separate deal worth between $500 million and $550 million for the franchise’s streaming rights.
| Deal | Year | Total Value | Parker’s Estimated Share |
| Hulu (original) | 2014 | $80 million | $20 million |
| Hulu (extension) | 2019 | $192 million | $48 million |
| HBO Max | 2019 | $500M–$550M | Undisclosed |
The 2021 ViacomCBS Deal
On August 5, 2021, Parker and Stone signed a six-year contract worth $900 million with ViacomCBS/MTV Entertainment Studios. The deal covered six new seasons plus 14 original feature-length films exclusive to Paramount+.
That $900 million figure wasn’t pure profit. Production costs and overhead came out of it first. Episode budgets ranged from $250,000 to $1 million each, which still left an average value of roughly $150 million per year once expenses were covered.
The 2025 Skydance-Paramount Dispute and $1.5 Billion Deal
The 2021 deal wasn’t the end of the story. Paramount Global was moving toward a merger with Skydance Media, backed by RedBird Capital and led by David Ellison. Paramount Global co-CEO Chris McCarthy had reportedly reached a handshake deal with Parker and Stone worth $3 billion over a decade, but Skydance balked at the terms and the offer got scrapped.
Things escalated fast. Parker and Stone’s company, Park County, sent a letter on June 21, 2025, accusing incoming Paramount executive Jeff Shell of interfering in their negotiations with Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery. The letter claimed Shell pushed WBD to cut its offer and shorten the licensing term. Parker and Stone responded by hiring Bryan Freedman, a well-known Hollywood litigator, to prepare for a possible lawsuit.
The dispute delayed the Season 27 premiere by two weeks. Parker and Stone didn’t hold back publicly, calling the merger a “shit show” in a statement posted to South Park’s official account.
The standoff resolved in July 2025. Paramount and Park County agreed to a five-year deal worth $1.5 billion, or about $300 million per year, covering 50 new episodes and global streaming rights exclusive to Paramount+. The FCC approved the Skydance-Paramount merger that same week, closing out one of the more public fights in recent Hollywood history.
Real Estate Portfolio
Parker’s real estate portfolio is worth at least $50 million, spread across roughly 10 properties in the United States.
In April 2019, he bought a mansion in Brentwood, Los Angeles, for $6.2 million. A year earlier, he picked up a condo in Manhattan for $3.1 million, adding to a seven-bedroom unit next door he’d already owned since 2011, purchased for $4 million.
Parker sold a home in Venice, California, in 2016 for $4.3 million. His other holdings include a riverfront mansion in Kauai, Hawaii, a condo in Seattle, several homes in the Hollywood Hills, a 10,000 square-foot mansion elsewhere in Los Angeles bought for $14 million, and a large compound in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Together, these properties support a luxurious lifestyle few television creators ever reach.
| Property | Location | Year | Price |
| Mansion | Brentwood, Los Angeles | 2019 | $6.2 million |
| Condo | Manhattan | 2018 | $3.1 million |
| Seven-bedroom unit | Manhattan | 2011 | $4 million |
| Home (sold) | Venice, California | 2016 | $4.3 million |
| Mansion | Los Angeles | 2011 | $14 million |
Awards and Recognition
Parker’s trophy case reflects nearly three decades of work across television, film, and theater. He picked up an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song for “Blame Canada,” plus a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album tied to The Book of Mormon. Theater critics recognized him too, with honors from the Outer Critics Circle Awards and Drama Desk Awards.
On the TV side, South Park has earned Parker 18 Primetime Emmy nominations and five wins for Outstanding Animated Program, in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2013. He’s also picked up an Annie Award for writing, a CableACE Award for animated programming, an Online Film & Television Association Award for Best Voice-Over Performance, and a PGA Award for Most Promising Producer in Television.
The video game South Park: The Stick of Truth brought him NAVGTR Awards. Film critics groups, including the Chicago Film Critics Association, MTV Movie Awards, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, have also honored his work, with the latter group giving him a Best Animation prize as well.
His earliest recognition came at the 1997 Florida Film Festival, where The Spirit of Christmas won an Audience Award for Best Short, followed by a Maverick Filmmakers Award at the 2003 Santa Monica Film Festival.
In total, Parker has collected five Emmys and four Tony Awards. In August 2026, the Television Academy inducted Parker and Stone into its Hall of Fame, an honor presented by longtime collaborator and former South Park writer Bill Hader.
Personal Life
Parker married Emma Sugiyama in January 2006, with producer Norman Lear serving as wedding officiant. The marriage ended in divorce in 2008.
He married again in April 2014, this time to Boogie Tillmon, becoming stepfather to her son, Kobe. The couple welcomed a daughter, Betty, in 2013, who has since voiced characters including Ike Broflovski and the PC Babies on South Park. Parker and Tillmon separated in February 2019, and their divorce included an agreement for joint legal and physical custody of Betty.
Parker splits his time across properties in Los Angeles, Colorado, Hawaii, Washington, and New York City. On religion, he’s said he believes in God but finds organized religions hard to take seriously. Politically, Parker is a registered Libertarian who describes himself as politically middle-ground, criticizing both the far left and far right in interviews, a candid perspective that shows up throughout South Park’s satire.
Trey Parker vs. Matt Stone: Who’s Worth More?
Parker and Stone have split South Park earnings 50/50 since the start, as co-creators and co-owners of the franchise. That structure has kept their net worth close for nearly three decades.
Older estimates put Stone about $100 million ahead of Parker, but the 2025 streaming deal appears to have leveled the gap. Forbes now lists both men at $1.2 billion each, making them tied members of the Tres Comma Club. Among comedians and wealthiest writer-directors working today, few pairs share ownership as evenly as Parker and Stone do.
Conclusion
Trey Parker’s legacy stretches far beyond South Park, even though that show remains the foundation of everything he’s built. Between The Book of Mormon, film work, and smart contract negotiating, his creativity and business acumen have reinforced each other for almost 30 years.
With billionaire status now confirmed and new deals locked through the next decade, Parker’s financial future looks as secure as his place in the entertainment industry. His wealth didn’t come from one lucky break. It came from owning what he made.
FAQ’s
How much is Trey Parker worth in 2026?
As of 2026, Trey Parker’s net worth is estimated at $1.2 billion, according to Forbes, following the $1.5 billion Paramount+ streaming deal signed in 2025.
Is Trey Parker a billionaire?
Yes, Trey Parker is a billionaire. Forbes confirmed his entry into the Tres Comma Club in 2025, alongside co-creator Matt Stone, each worth $1.2 billion.
How old is Trey Parker?
Trey Parker was born on October 19, 1969, making him 56 years old as of 2026, based on his official birthdate.
Where was Trey Parker born?
Trey Parker was born in Conifer, Colorado, a small town near Denver, which remains his official birthplace.
Is Trey Parker married? Who is his wife?
Trey Parker is currently single. He was previously married to Emma Sugiyama and later to Boogie Tillmon, and both marriages ended in divorce.
Does Trey Parker have children?
Yes, Trey Parker has a daughter named Betty with ex-wife Boogie Tillmon, and he also became stepfather to her son, Kobe.
Who has a higher net worth, Matt Stone or Trey Parker?
Matt Stone and Trey Parker share a 50/50 split on South Park earnings, and both now hold a comparable net worth of $1.2 billion.
Do Parker and Stone still work on South Park?
Yes, Parker and Stone remain fully involved in South Park, handling writing, directing, and voice acting through Season 28 and into Season 29 on Paramount+.
