Stephen Hillenburg Net Worth

Read more about Stephen Hillenburg Biography

Stephen Hillenburg spent his childhood in Anaheim, California. His father Kelly worked for aerospace companies – including on the Apollo project – and his mother, Nancy was a teacher of the visually impaired. In 1984, Stephen graduated from Humboldt State University with a degree in marine resource planning and interpretation, and subsequently became a teacher of marine biology at the Ocean Institute in California. Stephen Hillenburg also graduated in animation from California Institute of the Arts, after which Stephen’s  net worth started increasing because of his work in the film industry. Stephen started working as a co-writer and co-producer of the famous television series “Rocko`s Modern Life” along with its creator Joel Murray.

His successful beginning with “Rocko`s Modern Life” led Stephen Hillenburg to his own project, creating the animated television series “SpongeBob SquarePants”. It started running in 1999 and continues to be aired until today on the Nickelodeon Channel. This children`s comedy series is voiced by Tom Kenny, Rodger Bumpass, Bill Fagerbakke, Carolyn Lawrence and many others, and has been acknowledged as the highest rated show ever aired on Nickelodeon, and has also been widely distributed on MTV Networks International. The “SpongeBob SquarePants” series has earned Stephen six Annie Awards, as well as one Emmy Award.

“SpongeBob SquarePants” was produced by United Plankton Pictures, a production company founded in 1998 by Stephen Hillenburg. Stephen also voiced the character of Potty the Parrot. Hillenburg was a writer, an executive producer, a showrunner and a storyboard director of “SpongeBob SquarePants”. Following the cultural and financial success of this series, Hillenburg decided to create a movie, a film adaptation of “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie”, which considerably enlarged Stephen Hillenburg’s net worth and rewarded him with an Annie Award for Directing in a Feature Position.

There are no doubts “SpongeBob SquarePants” series and movie has been the greatest source of the revenues that came to Stephen Hillenburg’s net worth. However, the famous film producer has contributed to the production and distribution of other movies, too. Stephen directed and composed the animated short film “The Green Beret” released in 1991, and added further incomes to his net worth when he wrote “Mother Goose and Grimm” (1991) and directed “Wormholes” (1992), which gained Stephen an award for Best Concept at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Hillenburg is also a story writer and executive producer of “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water”, an animated movie based on the television series, which is going to be released in 2015.

As regards Stephen Hillenburg`s personal life, the celebrity has been married to Karen Hillenburg, who is a chef and also teaches at a cooking school, since 1994. In 1998, the Hillenburgs welcomed a son and named him Clay. Currently, the family lives in San Marino, Southern California. Stephen has many hobbies, including scuba diving, snorkeling and surfing. The famous film director loves painting surreal seascapes, and he even claims these paintings are kind of personal.

Structural info

• Full Name: Stephen Hillenburg
• Net Worth: $90 Million
• Salary: $90 million dollars
• Date Of Birth: August 21, 1961
• Place Of Birth: Lawton, Oklahoma, United States
• Profession: Animator, Television producer, Television Director, Screenwriter, Voice Actor, Marine biologist, Film director, Film Score Composer, Storyboard Artist, Soundtrack Composer
• Education: Humboldt State University
• Nationality: United States of America
• Spouse: Karen Hillenburg
• Children: Clay Hillenburg
• Parents: Kelly N. Hillenburg, Jr, Nancy Hillenburg
• Nicknames: Stephen McDannell Hillenburg , Stephen Hillenberg , Stephen Hilleburg , Steve Hillenburg , Steven Hillenburg , Hillenburg, Stephen , Stephen McDannell “Steve” Hillenburg
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/gaugeandgoldie
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/3l1VFkNxZl/
• IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0384864
• Awards: Annie Award for Directing in a Feature Position, Emmy Award
• Music Groups: Loser
• Nominations: Annie Awards, Emmy Award
• Movies: “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water”, “The Green Beret” (1991)
• TV Shows: “Rocko`s Modern Life”, “SpongeBob SquarePants”,

Quotes

• Working as a marine science educator, I had the chance to see how enamored kids are with undersea life, especially tide pool creatures. By combining this knowledge with my love for animation, I came up with SpongeBob SquarePants.
• Even the villainous Plankton, he’s still flawed and you still root for him in a way, and the style of humor is simple and it’s about human behavior, and everybody can identify with that.
• At first I drew a few natural sponges — amorphous shapes, blobs — which was the correct thing to do biologically as a marine science teacher. Then I drew a square sponge and it looked so funny. I think as far as cartoon language goes he was easier to recognize. He seemed to fit the character type I was looking for. [Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2001]
• When you set out to do a show about a sponge, you don’t expect the kind of appeal that he’s had. [Detroit News, August 8, 2002]
• I think the connection to SpongeBob is that sponges are the most elastic, changing, plastic creatures . . . and I wanted him to be able to do things that were really magical. So [SpongeBob] has these really creative moments when he can re-form himself. But most sponges in the ocean are sedentary: They attach themselves to a rock and sit and filter-feed the rest of their lives, and reproduce, and that’s about it. Not that they are not interesting, but they are not . . . mobile. They don’t cook Krabbie Patties! [Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2001]
• [when asked why the octopus has six tentacles instead of eight:] “Technically I just thought he’d be a little too cumbersome as a character to have too many legs visible. Maybe that’s why he’s so angry!”
• Our characters act silly, even totally ridiculous at times, and most of our jokes don’t come out of pop cultural references. It seems like we’re aiming at a child audience, everyone can laugh at the basic human traits that are funny. It’s playful, the humor is playful, the world is playful.
• We want the show to be really funny. But I think in the end the message is: Treat people the way you expect to be treated. And another connection to any sort of message is that a lot of the stories come out of the personal experience I and the other writers had as kids–the harsh lessons in life which are usually very funny in retrospect, like maybe what happens when you learn your first curse word and you don’t know what it means. [Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2001]
• “There is something kind of unique about [SpongeBob]. It seems to be a refreshing breath from the pre-irony era. There’s no sense of the elbow-in-rib, tongue-in-cheek aesthetic that so permeates the rest of American culture — including kids’ shows like the Rugrats. I think what’s subversive about it is it’s so incredibly naive — deliberately. Because there’s nothing in it that’s trying to be hip or cool or anything else, hipness can be grafted onto it.” — Robert Thompson, professor at the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, in the New York Times, July 21, 2002.

Facts

• As a child he loved the films of Jacques Cousteau, so Stephen Hillenburg earned a degree in natural-resource planning and interpretation, with an emphasis in marine resources from Humboldt State University (Arcata, Calif.) in 1984. For three years he taught marine biology at the Orange County Marine Institute (now known as the Orange County Ocean Institute), in Dana Point, California. He had always enjoyed drawing and painting, so he pursued a master’s-degree program in experimental animation at the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia. All these experiences came together to create SpongeBob SquarePants.

Filmography

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