Spencer Pratt ‘Promoted’ To Rich Celebrity After Losing His Home To The LA Wildfires Despite Previously Being Called Broke
Pratt posted a tearful 'thank you' for fans sending Heidi Montag's 2010 album to #1 in the wake of the fires.
s_bukley | Shutterstock If you're of a certain age, the phrase "Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag" will inspire an instant reaction of nostalgia, revulsion, or maybe both. But recently the couple became one of the unlikely faces of something more impactful than 2000s-eras reality TV — the wildfires in Los Angeles.
Spencer Pratt joked about being 'promoted' to rich celebrity after losing his home in the Palisades fire.
"You know one of my favorite things about my house burning down?" Pratt sarcastically questioned in a recent TikTok. "Ever since 2010 when "The Hills" was canceled, [everything] — social media and Google — I've ever read about myself is, I'm a broke nobody."
"But then it takes all of our possessions in our house burning down, and now in all my comment sections, everyone's just like, 'What are you crying about? You're a rich celebrity!'," Pratt went on to say. "My gosh, my gosh, what a rebrand!"
It is quite a reversal. This seems quaint nowadays, but back in the 2000s we had a derisive pop culture nickname for people like Pratt and Montag — "fameballs," people who took their 15 seconds of low-grade fame from a viral blog or reality show and tried to "snowball" it into legitimate celebrity power.
In the 2000s, "Speidi," as they were then known after becoming famous for MTV's "The Hills," were considered by many to be obnoxious exemplars of everything wrong with reality TV and the ways it had changed the entertainment industry and celebrity culture.
Of course, the "fameball" model has now become a default career path in Hollywood that few people even bat an eye at. Several "The Hills" costars have successfully parlayed reality fame into full-on business empires.
Pratt and Montag; however, never seemed to quite find the same footing, and the failure of Montag's 2010 pop album, "Superficial," helped cement their reputations as 2000s anachronisms to be pointed and laughed at online.
Yet that seems to have shifted since the Palisades fire erupted on Los Angeles' west side and obliterated the Pacific Palisades home where Pratt and Montag have raised their two children, Gunnar, 7, and Ryker, 2. It shed light on one of the central truths of the disaster — that celebrity status doesn't necessarily shield a person from the whims of our economy, and certainly not the aftermath of a calamity.
Pratt's situation is not unique and highlights fundamental misunderstandings about LA and the entertainment industry.
"I'm enjoying now being called a rich celebrity," Pratt said, noting that the popular website "Celebrity Net Worth" has listed him as being worth just $1000 for years. "So thank you to everyone in the comment section that says, 'Who cares you lost everything, you're a rich celebrity."
In a pretty glaring sign of the times, Pratt then revealed that he was stalling so that he could hit the one-minute mark in his video, the point at which a TikTok video becomes eligible for monetization. "I have to sit here 'cause I'm a rich celebrity, I need to get 50 cents from TikToks from the Creator Fund," he said.
We already went over this ad nauseam during the strikes by the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America in 2023, but being a celebrity no longer pays like it used to. The same changes that have happened to basically every other career have happened in Hollywood too — as technology has upended the industry, it has also upended the work available as well as the amount they get paid to do it.
When even Nicole Kidman is doing limited series on Amazon Prime, you know times have changed. For people like Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, these effects are magnified, and it's not like they can just go get a different job — nobody's going to hire a household name to work in a cubicle, after all.
Much like the strikes, this has been a key and fundamental misunderstanding about the impacts of the LA wildfires. Scores of people have taken to social media to cheer on the utter devastation celebrities have faced in the fires — devastation that even many well-known names do not have sufficient wealth to weather in today's economy. The industry they work in, too, is unlikely to recover any time soon, if ever.
That's not to say that celebrities face the same stakes that the vast majority of affected people are up against. But the predominant narrative that seems to have taken hold online that no one should be feeling bad for the plight of the fire-ravaged megamillionaire is reductive to the point of fantasy. Megamillionaires are a tiny fraction of those impacted, and even for the lucky few, Hollywood doesn't pay like it used to.
Fans have rallied around Pratt and Montag, sending Montag's album to #1 on iTunes.
For his part, Pratt has certainly gotten through to a lot of people online. After posting several viral videos sharing how he and Montag have been affected by the fires, scores of people decided to help in the one simple way they can: Buying Montag's 2010 album.
In another video, Pratt burst into tears sharing the news that Montag's album hit number one on the iTunes charts 15 years after its release — even beating out albums by heavyweights like Bruno Mars and Morgan Wallen.
Pratt tearfully explained what it meant to the couple, especially since he and Montag threw all of their "The Hills" money into the project back in 2010, a decision he says they have regretted ever since.
"Do you know how many times we've cried?" he asked. Now, the album has brought them a much-needed ray of hope. "It feels so good," Pratt tearfully said. "Thank you."
Without a doubt, the likes of Pratt and Montag are far from the worst off in the aftermath of this disaster, much of the damage of which is likely irreparable. (You can, and should, donate to non-profit and mutual aid relief organizations if you're able, a list of which can be found here.)
But their story drives home an essential but often overlooked truth: Hollywood chews up and spits out far more people than it rockets to glory, and our punishing economy is right there waiting to swallow up the scraps, even when they have a "household name."
The bottom line is that most of us who have to actually work for a living are all in the same boat to one degree or another, and cheering on each other's demise is exactly what those holding all the cards want. Don't give it to them.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.