3. David Miscavige (Net Worth $50 Million)
David Miscavige, for those unaware, is the head of the Church of Scientology. Many argue that Scientology is not a church at all, or at least not a religion, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is considered a powerful religious leader.
One of the scariest parts of how Scientology came to be recognized is in how they worked with the IRS. In 1991, after speaking with then Commissioner Fred T. Goldberg, Jr. about religious recognition for obvious tax breaks, he was turned down. Countless lawsuits were filed against the IRS, but the most disturbing part comes from a report by The New York Times. In the report, they said that the church’s lawyers hired private investigators to look for anything that could be used against individuals in the IRS through investigating their personal lives and conducting surveillance operations to find vulnerabilities. To make matters worse, they hired whistle-blowers to attack the agency publicly.
Miscavige then offered a cease to the constant lawsuits if Goldberg would give them tax exemptions as a religious organization. After two years of negotiating the church finally won and in an announcement to 10,000 members in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, he declared “The war is over!” The statement was followed by a ten-minute ovation.
While he is not a preacher in the traditional sense, Miscavige is more of a head of the company as it were. He is the public face, alongside Tom Cruise, of Scientology and uses his charisma to increase membership to the organization. He is married to Michele Diane Miscavige, a fellow Sea Org member, but she has not been seen in public since 2007 shortly after she filled multiple vacant positions without David’s permission. While the LAPD stated that they had met with her in 2013, that was later debunked and questions remain as to her whereabouts. The church assures any who ask that she is being guarded, for her own protection presumably, within the main headquarters of the church, but no further information is available as of the time of this writing.
David Miscavige is a charismatic leader to say the least. He uses his power to rub elbows with the rich and famous, but he is under constant scrutiny and often the center of another scandal as people try to understand what is going on in his secretive society.