Bill Nye turns finance guy, says Disney owes him $9.3 million

Bill Nye claims that Disney’s accounting error clued him in and now they may owe him more than $9 million. 

Bill Nye the Science Guy aired more than 100 episodes during its five seasons on air between 1993 and 1998. The educational programming has remained relevant and popular decades later. Due to the massive success, Nye was still drawing residuals from his involvement in it.

It was those residual payments and the report of an overpayment to Nye by Disney that got the scientist to switch gears and start crunching numbers. According to Variety, Bill Nye received a letter from Disney claiming that they had overpaid him in 2008.

They paid him out $585,123 but then said that due to an error, he owed them $496,111. That’s a huge error and would have put Nye’s total income from Disney under $100,000 for the year. That’s less than one-fifth of what he was supposed to be paid.

Bill Nye became suspicious of the supposed accounting problem. He decided to do some research of his own. As we all know, Nye is a professional researcher.

Bill Nye the finance guy

Bill Nye did notice that something was wrong when looking into the statements. He saw that a large sum of money had been claimed as a cost to make the show.

That tipped Nye off to some possibly numerical trickery, considering that a large portion of the Bill Nye the Science Guy proudction budget was funded by grants from the federal government. How could the PBS hit cost so much to make when much of the bill was footed by the National Science Foundation as seen in the credits below?

In order to prove that he was right, Bill Nye hired a lawyer, intent on auditing Disney’s records. Disney, it seems, launched a campaign to drag their feet and not investigate. Notice that this all started in 2008 and Nye is still trying to get his money?

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Due mostly to his fame on the PBS show, Bill Nye’s net worth was listed at $6.5 million according to Celebrity Net Worth. If he can prove that Disney does, in fact, owe him more money, Nye’s net worth could more than double.