Alex Honnold hit paydirt when he climbed to the top of the 101-story, 1,667-foot Taipei 101 skyscraper. What he apparently didn’t hit was a huge payday.
Honnold, 40, thrilled onlookers and audiences who watched the event on Netflix’s “Skyscraper Live” on Jan. 24, but he says he didn’t get paid a lot of money to do it.
“I’m not gonna say. It’s an embarrassing amount,” he told The New York Times in an interview published two days before he scaled the skyscraper, when asked how much he would be paid.
“Actually, if you put it in the context of mainstream sports, it’s an embarrassingly small amount,” he continued. “You know, Major League Baseball players get like $170 million contracts. Like, someone you haven’t even heard of and that nobody cares about.”
TODAY.com reached out to both Honnold and Netflix for comment, but has not gotten a response.
Honnold, who appeared in the Academy Award-winning documentary “Free Solo,” played it coy when asked if this was his biggest payday.
“Maybe. It’s less than my agent aspired to,” he said.
Honnold said he would “do it for free,” however.
“If there was no TV program and the building gave me permission to go do the thing, I would do the thing because I know I can, and it’d be amazing,” he said.
“I’m not getting paid to climb the building. I’m getting paid for the spectacle. I’m climbing the building for free.”
While the adventure had his wife on the edge of her seat, Honnold was ecstatic to say he completed the challenge.
“It’s kind of like a happy tired. I know I’m going to cross the finish line. I feel great,” he said in an interview that aired on TODAY on Jan. 26.
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