Bono is a humanitarian, right? Well, he creates music as well but is now living largely off licensing and broadcast fees for his bitchin’ role as lead singer of U2. In fact, Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen all received a collective paycheck of over $25 million just last year. That’s not too shabby for a band that hasn’t released a new LP since 2000*, but showbiz is the place where one can conceivably live off their former greatness for all of eternity:

So just what has happened to Saint Bono? His transformation, according to those who know him, is all part of the 46-year-old star’s plan to move away from performing and into the worlds of high finance and politics.

For behind Bono’s working-class, man-of-the people facade lies someone whose love of money is matched only by his obsession with making even more of it.

To that end, the Irish-born singer has quietly established a private equity fund to invest more than £1billion in a series of money-making ventures. He set up Elevation Partners, named after a U2 song, last year with five former senior figures from the world of business, including the former chief financial officer of Apple Computers.

Bono may have alapped his name on a Product RED charity iPod that donates $10 (from a projected $120 margin per unit) to fight AIDS in Africa, but you gotta wonder about the source of his true motivations. After all, property portfolio includes an Italian-style palazzo near Dublin, a villa in the South of France, and a £15 million luxury penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper West side that contains “12ft nickel and bronze doors and floor-to-ceiling windows costing £40,000 each.” Damn!

Previously: Sir Bono Losing Foothold For Future Popedom

* Thanx to commenter JohnO, who rightly pointed out that U2 released 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which I never noticed amidst their several greatest-hits styled releases.