Disney offered young Simba's singer $2 million — his mum turned it down for something else

Disney had a cheque for $2 million ready for a 13-year-old from Chicago. His mum sent it back, asked for $100,000 and a cut, and three decades later the internet is still auditing her.

Jason Weaver sang young Simba's "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" in The Lion King. The story of his pay deal is seven years old: he told it on VladTV in 2019. On 9 October 2026 Fortune retold it, and within a day a thread on r/entertainment had passed 43,000 upvotes and a thousand-odd comments. Nothing new happened. Everyone just did the maths at once.

The facts, as Weaver tells them. Disney offered about $2 million for the singing. His biggest pay packet until then was roughly $80,000, for playing young Michael Jackson in The Jacksons: An American Dream. His mother and manager, Marilyn "Kitty" Haywood, turned the lump sum down and negotiated around $100,000 upfront plus royalties.

"When they offered that deal, it was really just to take this money and go… I think they knew and forecasted that they were gonna make a s–t ton of money."

— Jason Weaver, on VladTV, 2019

They did. The Lion King has taken more than $960 million worldwide across its cinema runs, and the soundtrack spent ten weeks at No. 1 in America. Weaver, now 47, says the cheques never stopped and he has long since earned more than the $2 million he was offered. His verdict on his mum: had she not done it, it "would have been one of the biggest mistakes of my career".

Mum vs the index fund

Reddit split down the middle. One camp got the calculator out: $2 million in an S&P 500 tracker in 1993, never touched, would dwarf most royalty cheques today. "Had they taken the 2 and saved half invested in the s&p500 it would have grown a lot more," went one comment.

The other camp asked which 18-year-old with a fresh seven-figure cheque leaves it alone for three decades. Their case:

• Nobody invests perfectly. "For most people it's not going to be the case that all of that money gets invested and never touched."
• Tax. The most upvoted reply in the thread suspected spreading the income out was the smarter move anyway.
• Bobby Bonilla Day. The Mets have paid the retired slugger about $1.19 million every 1 July since 2011, and will until 2035, because he deferred $5.9 million in 2000. Deferred money is not a loser's game.

Nobody outside the family knows what the cheques add up to, which is why the argument can run forever. For all anyone knows, as one commenter noted, he is on $2 million a year.

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The other mum in the comments

The comparison that kept coming up was Deloris Jordan, credited with pushing Michael Jordan towards Nike and a cut of every Air Jordan sold, a story Hollywood already turned into Air with Viola Davis. "Marilyn Kitty Haywood and Deloris Jordan really doing their big ones," as one Redditor put it. Another reply was shorter: "Kitty had claws."

Disney wanted to pay a child once. A mum made it pay him for life.

"The deal was so good Disney doesn't make deals like that anymore," one commenter wrote. Weaver went on to Smart Guy and Chingy's "One Call Away", and is still being paid to be a lion.

Fair enough. He did say he just couldn't wait to be king. His mum made sure the throne came with a pension.

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