“Shark Tank” fans are bracing for change — season 16 marks veteran shark Mark Cuban’s last with the show as well as Daniel Lubetzky’s first season as a permanent panelist. One thing that isn’t changing, however, is Barbara Corcoran’s presence on the set as a powerful voice of positivity.
Corcoran, who rose to prominence as a New York real estate player before joining the “Shark Tank” cast, has been with the show since its first season, investing in over 80 entrepreneurial startups during her tenure.
When the show first debuted, Corcoran was its only female panelist, and over the course of her career as one of NBC’s lovable but sharp-toothed sharks, she’s used her voice and her dollars to uplift other women who are dedicated to carving out niches of their own in the largely male-dominated startup space.
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And while Corcoran may not be the richest shark in the bunch — that title currently belongs to Mark Cuban but will soon default to Daniel Lubetzky with Cuban’s exit from the program — she has still managed to build an impressive amount of wealth over the course of her career in business and entertainment.
Here’s what she’s worth in 2025, how she made her money, and how her net worth compares to that of the show’s other sharks.
What is Barbara Corcoran’s net worth in 2025?
Most sources cite Barbara Corcoran’s current net worth at either $100 million or over $100 million, which makes her part of the rarified nine-digit club in terms of total wealth.
That’s quite the sum considering she got her start in the real estate business by borrowing a paltry $1000 from her then-boyfriend when she was in her early twenties. Her company, The Corcoran Group (which she sold in 2001), is now a multi-billion dollar business known far and wide in the Big Apple and beyond as one of the world’s top real estate firms.
Related: Daniel Lubetzky’s net worth: The ‘Shark Tank’ billionaire’s wealth in 2025
The Shark Tank cast by net worth
Despite her considerable wealth, however, Corcoran ranks last among the “Shark Tank” cast in terms of net worth. Here’s how the sharks stack up as of 2025:
- Mark Cuban: $5.7–8.04 billion
- Daniel Lubetzky: $2.3 billion
- Kevin O’Leary: $400 million
- Daymond John: $350 million
- Robert Herjavec: $300 million
- Lori Greiner: $150 million
- Barbara Corcoran: $100 million
Who is Barbara Corcoran?
While Barbara is best known these days for her longstanding role as one of “Shark Tank’s” startup investors and business mentors, she’s also a former real estate mogul, a public speaker, and an author. Corcoran has penned multiple books, including Shark Tales, an autobiography in which she explores her early life, the odd jobs she worked, and how she built a real estate empire from the ground up with only $1,000 in startup funding.
Born in 1949 to a working-class New Jersey family, Corcoran struggled through her early schooling, due in part to then-undiagnosed dyslexia. She made it through high school but graduated with poor grades. She detailed these struggles in a LinkedIn post, saying, “I spent 6 hours a day daydreaming in class, and by 3rd grade I just gave up.”
Despite her earlier struggles, however, Corcoran attended and graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas College in 1971 with significantly higher grades than she had earned previously.
Like many recent college graduates, she explored numerous jobs over the course of the next few years before finding her calling. According to Corcoran, she had worked 20 different jobs by the time she was 23, including stints as a teacher and a waitress, the latter being her last job before entering the world of real estate.
Related: Kevin O’Leary’s net worth as he eyes TikTok purchase
How did Barbara Corcoran get rich? Her real estate career explained
Corcoran had always had an interest in real estate, and in the early 70s, she began work as a receptionist for the Giffuni Brothers’ real estate company. Her boyfriend at the time encouraged her to take the next step into the industry, lending her $1,000 so that the two could start their own firm together.
Corcoran got permission from her boss, Mr. Giffuni, to attempt to rent out one of the apartments in his building — a small, dungeon-like one-room unit. He obliged, and Corcoran took her first foray into sales. Countless similar rooms were advertised in the New York Times for similar prices, so Corcoran differentiated her listing by asking Giffuni to install a half wall in the unit as a partition. He did so, and she listed the space as “one bedroom and den,” a headline that quickly garnered a flurry of phone calls.
The firm Corcoran founded with her then-boyfriend grew quickly and took on employees, but after seven years in business, Ray, the boyfriend in question, told Corcoran he wanted to marry her secretary.
Related: Mark Cuban’s net worth ahead of ‘Shark Tank’ departure
In response, she left the firm — and the man — and founded the Corcoran Group. Over the next several decades, she grew her eponymous real estate firm until it was one of the most notable in the city.
Due to the academic difficulties she encountered in childhood, Barbara felt that her biggest strength was her creativity, which she demonstrated to immediate success when listing that first rental apartment. Corcoran credits much of her firm’s success to fostering this same sort of creativity among her employees — sometimes through nontraditional means, like wild and spontaneous parties.
In a 2017 interview with Business Insider, Corcoran remarked, “We had bizarre … probably today maybe illegal-type parties, I don’t even know the way I had people dress for them at all. But we had parties galore. We had spontaneous events. All I did was think, ‘What can we do that’s fun?’ When you get people laughing their asses off and drinking too much and dressing in things that they’ve never dressed in before, guess what happens? You wind up with a creative company.”
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How much did Corcoran make when she sold her business?
After well over two decades of growth in the New York real estate arena, Barbara finally sold the Corcoran Group to NRT (now known as Anywhere Advisors) in 2001 for $66 million. Less than a decade later, she joined the cast of “Shark Tank” for its inaugural season, and she hasn’t looked back since.
What’s Corcoran’s salary as a ‘Shark Tank’ panelist?
How much Corcoran and her co-sharks take home for their televised investment sessions in 2025 isn’t known, but in 2016, Variety reported that she made $50,000 per episode. The show’s popularity has only grown in the seven years since, so if that figure was accurate, it’s probably safe to assume that Corcoran’s per-episode paycheck is significantly higher now that the show is in its 16th season.
How many ‘Shark Tank’ deals has Corcoran made? Which was the most successful?
According to Corcoran herself, she’s inked over 120 deals with budding entrepreneurs over the course of the show’s 16 seasons, but only 53 of these were televised, according to Sharkalytics, a fan website dedicated to the show.
In terms of financial returns, Corcoran’s most successful on-air investment by far was in a company called Comfy, which sells wearable blankets. During the show’s ninth season in 2017, she invested $50,000 for a third of the business.
Within a few weeks, the company surpassed $1 million in sales, and before a full year had passed, that number grew to $15 million.
A few years later, the company had grown substantially. “They made me $468 million in three years,” she said to Daniel Mac during a podcast interview at her home.
Soon, however, supply-chain issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, along with disagreements at the executive level, resulted in Corcoran’s exit from the business in 2022.
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