Andy Richter's net worth says he was right to walk away from Conan in 2000
In May 2000, Andy Richter got up from the couch next to Conan O'Brien after seven years, and the math on that decision took a couple of decades to come in.
Richter, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1966, was O'Brien's sidekick from the first episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 1993. He stayed for more than 1,200 episodes and left on May 26, 2000, to act. His explanation was short.
"After seven years of being on the show, I got itchy," Richter said.
Leaving the second chair on a hit show to start over at 33 is the kind of move people call brave when it works.
Andy Richter's net worth in 2026
Celebrity Net Worth puts Richter's net worth at $4 million.
The interesting part is what that number is made of: the decade he spent away from the job, and the fact that the job was still there when he came back.
What leaving got him
The obvious plan was his own sitcom, and it didn't go well three times in a row:
- Andy Richter Controls the Universe — Fox, 2002–03, canceled after 19 episodes
- Quintuplets — Fox, 2004–05, one season
- Andy Barker, P.I. — NBC, 2007, canceled over ratings
The movies went much better. In 2003, he played Morris in Elf, a Will Ferrell comedy built from a screenplay no studio wanted at first. It grossed more than $220 million worldwide and now runs on TV every December. Two years later, he voiced Mort, the tiny, big-eyed mouse lemur, in Madagascar, and kept the part through Escape 2 Africa, Europe's Most Wanted and a cameo in Penguins of Madagascar. Those four movies grossed more than $2 billion between them.
None of that happens if he's still at a desk at 30 Rock five nights a week.
Coming back to a bigger show
In February 2009, O'Brien named Richter the announcer for The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. So the sidekick who left came back to a bigger stage than the one he walked off. It lasted seven months on air before NBC pushed O'Brien out to return the show to Jay Leno.
"We weren't really given a chance," Richter said of the Tonight Show run.
Sixteen years later, he's made his peace with how that ended. "I think it all worked out for the best," he said of O'Brien's ouster on Obsessed: The Podcast. "But he owns his life now. He owns what he does."
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Richter followed O'Brien to TBS and spent another 11 years as announcer, writer and sidekick on Conan, until the show ended in 2021.
What he's doing now
Since 2019 he has hosted The Three Questions with Andy Richter, a podcast on Earwolf. He was the Dust Bunny on The Masked Singer in 2024, and he finished seventh on Season 34 of Dancing with the Stars in 2025, partnered with Emma Slater.
Some of the money also changed hands. In 2013, Richter and his then-wife, Sarah Thyre, bought a house in Burbank for $1.225 million. It went to Thyre when they divorced in 2019, and she listed it in 2023 for $2 million.
This month, the movie he made because he left Conan has become his book. Elf Unwrapped is Richter's oral history of the film, built from interviews with Ferrell, Zooey Deschanel and director Jon Favreau, among others. He's also firmly against a sequel.
"Just let Elf be Elf. You don't have to use every part of the animal," Richter said on Obsessed.
His explanation for why there was never an Elf 2 comes down to money: neither Ferrell nor Favreau got a share of the profits, because when New Line made the deal, "they had an untested director and they had an untested star." Elf Unwrapped came out November 3, 2026, with a foreword by Will Ferrell.
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