Yesterday, reports surfaced that Grumpy Cat—the Internet meme-famous cat whose frowning face hilariously captures an age where we are forced to consider “Internet meme-famous cats”—had earned nearly $100 million since going viral in 2012. It was an incredible figure, noted in the British tabloid that originally reported it as more than that earned by Hollywood stars like Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman, and Matt Damon, who typically have to make frowny faces in several major movies to net anywhere close to that.
But much to the relief of those people, and all others measuring their worth against that of a pissy-looking feline, Grumpy Cat’s owner now says that figure is “completely inaccurate.” Instead, Grumpy Cat has earned some other, unspecified astronomical amount of money that you will never acquire, sitting there at your job reading about cats.
Speaking to The Huffington Post, 28-year-old Tabatha Bundesen—the Arizona woman who owns Grumpy Cat, whom she used to call “Tardar Sauce,” before she figured out a more profitable way to humiliate it—“declined to comment on her cat’s specific earnings,” knowing full well that we, as normal-faced humans, simply don’t have the clout. But while Bundesen remains mum on the details, we already know that the past two years of Grumpy Cat’s life have definitely been more lucrative than all you suckers who went to college instead of being funny-looking animals.
In that time alone, there’s been a New York Times bestseller, a sponsorship deal with Friskies, a Cheerios commercial, a Lifetime movie, her own coffee, Grumpy Cat stuffed animals, and appearances at the MTV Movie Awards, WWE Raw, Sesame Street, SXSW—and anywhere else her owners can drag her out in front of throngs of people, because she’s a cat and what’s she going to do about it? Continue working for them, that’s what, in much the same way that Grumpy Cat was woken from her peaceful cat life and prodded into viral stardom in the first place.
Lending some credence to the original report, earlier this summer, Grumpy Cat’s manager, Ben Lashes, did estimate that Grumpy Cat had generated about $100 million in revenue so far, but similarly declined to discuss how much she had taken home to her owners. Meanwhile, Bundesen suggested that she is considering disclosing the dollar amount in some future interview, so that you might be able to affix an exact number to your overwhelming sense of futility. Make sure to take a picture of your face when you find out; you might become famous.