Annual earnings according to FORBES: 2012: $160 million, 2010: $120 million

Salary according to IMDB:

Pearl Harbor (2001) $25,000,000 (Director's Gross Earnings)

Bad Boys (1995) $100,000 (directing fee)

American film director and producer, Michael Benjamin Bay, has an estimated net worth of $200 million. With his knack for staging visually flashy blockbuster mayhem, Michael Bay became the commercial leader among a new, 1990s generation of advertising-and-MTV-bred directors. Hollywood to the core, Bay has claimed that he was the illegitimate child of a popular director of the 1970s -- although he won't reveal who -- and was given up for adoption at birth. Raised in Los Angeles, he spent his childhood staging Super-8 action movies. He studied film at Wesleyan University and the Pasadena Arts Center, where a Coke commercial he shot as a student project attracted offers to make the real thing. His Coke, Nike, Budweiser, and award-winning "Got Milk?" ads resulted in a 1994 Director's Guild nomination for Best Commercial Director. He was then tapped by producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer to make the kind of slick escapism that defined their 1980s heyday; Bay's directorial debut, Bad Boys (1995), became a star-maker for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Bay made his movie name with his second feature, The Rock (1996).

Best Known for directing summer blockbusters, he credits include Bad Boys I & II, The ROck, Armageddon, The Island, Pearl Harbor, and the new Transformers trilogy. He has producer credits for most of the movies he directed as well as a string of classic horror movie remakes, such as Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. He is also the producer of television series No Way Out and Cocaine Cowboys. Not only has Michael Bay directed and produced films and television shows, but has also had acting roles in some of them. He was one of the goons on the hit tv series Miami Vice, and also had acting parts in Bad Boys II, Armegeddon, Coyote Ugly and Mystery men. Michael Bay started in the film industry when he was only 15 years old, as a storyboard filer for the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. From then on he knew this was what he wanted, to be a film director. Michael Bay was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1946.

Earnings & Financial Data